Month: March 2016

It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars.

E.B. White, The Ring of Time

Currents of ink move in and around me. I lie still. Back arched, shivering, my eyes trace shadows across the mirrored ceiling. Some nights are easier than others. In shades of masochism, I disallow pleasure. I am not in agony, not exactly, but I am nearing it. My mind, like my body, resists its own desires. It is the final refuge of a form that has been wounded time and again.

But then I feel my own self move: the yearning and warmth, the vulnerability and vanity, and some of the trauma bleeds out and away. I awake bearing bruises that span my form like constellations, whispering nebulous patterns across my skin. The pleasure is so simple, so profound: to allow someone to love me, to feel affection on the surface when I cannot respond in full

Enticed by the presence of each new fascination, I have experienced these weeks in subtle variations, like music changing key. I am affected, intrigued, burning softly—but this will not destroy me. And how futile, how tedious that can feel.

Is it possible that this is the better way of feeling and creating? The pain of the last ending was damning, even for me. We were wasting my final cigarette on a poorly lit street when, without warning or provocation, my mind engaged at last with the full ramifications of my wasted time. I watched the dispersion of ash across his fingernails, and desired suddenly to shake him, to scream, Meet my eyes. Say my name. You’re fucking empty—

But how was he meant to have appeased me, being so undone in his right? The answer emerges in its own futility. I never wanted to be appeased. I wanted to thrill him, to hurt him, to make him feel everything I no longer wanted to. I wanted to tear him apart and work my way inside of him, lace my fingers through the notches in his spine, pull the skin away and expose the bone. I wanted to dissemble him, that poor desperate thing, and breathe some sort of life into whatever remained. I wanted to punish and save him. I wanted to play God. I would do better to learn my own value than to love like that again.

But then, maybe that is not the whole truth of it. Maybe it was simpler and less cruel. Maybe I really did recognize something of myself in that gentle and disarrayed mind. Maybe I just wanted to love something—to love anything at all.

But in the margins of my lucidity, his image haunts me still. Not even a week ago, as I lay in the arms of the woman who had shared my bed, I dreamed of him. I was awake while I was dreaming: that was the most frightening part. But it was dreaming all the same, and no less for my sentient state. I was conscious but not present, somehow. He was walking down an empty street, his hands in his pockets, younger and less marred by circumstance. I knew at once that he must have died to have been rendered so complete. There were no secrets to draw back from, no lies left to tell: I felt no pain and his eyes seemed like the morning to me once more.

But fortitude is an exercise in self-denial. So I left the sleeping girl where she lay, her long hair strewn over her shoulders, her raised scars gleaming in the early light. Kneeling beside her cluttered bedroom table, I cast myself again into that cold, clean state to which I have become so partial: the lucid currents that flood my veins like shards of glass, setting my teeth on edge, making me feel as though I could set my past on fire and walk away without a word. But a history like mine does not burn easily. It smolders like flesh and it festers, but it never really fades.

Eight months ago, in late summer, I shared cheap vodka, stale cigarettes, and the sunrise with a person I had met just hours previously. In the haze of not-quite-morning, I felt like I knew him as well as I have ever known another living being. I cannot recall what fear or desire I must have expressed, but a response fell from his mouth with such simple conviction that I have remembered each word ever since.

“You can’t seem to be anything other than what you are—you’re so you—and it’s funny, and it’s admirable, and it’s sad, and people are going to put you on a stage because they won’t know what else to do with you. And you’re going to have to be strong because of that.”

In the time that followed, I hardly knew what to make of that strange, blunt assertion. But now I can admit there was some truth to it.  Childhood was wasted on me: I was always melancholic, always peculiar. People noticed and made me feel different. I never wanted to feel different.

How could I  ever be anything other than what I am? Who would ever let me? I have loved recklessly. I have bled deliberately. Whatever my own mind has done to me, whatever it is doing, it provided solace when nothing else could. Were I anything other than what I am, I would be nothing at all.

In the early months of winter, in the a sunlit room, I found something close to happiness. I loved that time so effortlessly and entirely: it was sweet, and it was clairvoyant, and it should not have ended so soon. I wish I could have stayed just a little while longer in the sanctuary of four walls, where I was wanted and unafraid.

But there is no place for me there anymore. The waking world intervened, turned that sanctuary into another facet of my perverse effort towards self-portraiture. Once again, I am watching something die, something that I cared for, and I am powerless to save it.

I cannot sustain tender, or gentle, or vulnerable things. I am too violent, too defective. I burn with spectacular precision, but I cannot live simply or decently. I feel like I am not getting older, just growing weary as I watch the same cycles take new forms. I know that something left my life, but I do not understand when or why.  So what does it matter anyways, this time around? This is not new to me: it will never be new to anyone who is only desired in their abstraction. Fissures appear, the glamour fades. I have lost beautiful things before, and I will lose this too.

I am everyone and no one, always running, always remembering, always trying so hard to not want to die. I have to keep moving: I cannot stop. Egoism, self-loathing, and profane fascination imbue all of the people that I am and have been—the withdrawn adolescent with open wounds and faraway eyes, retreating always towards an empty doorframe; the reverential lover of those bright and shining forms, wielding elation like a knife’s edge and leaving the image in their skin; the jaded user who medicates each memory, drowning an indifferent soul in chemical tides; the lost little girl who still cannot quite understand where her father has gone, or why.

My desperation ebbs like a pulse. I feel again the yearning of the child I was never allowed to be: to keep so quiet that no one can never find me. But the nostalgia is futile. I mourn for a past that is not mine. I am growing so weary of solitude and self-protection. I am ready to feel some other way.

My mind is tangled in bloodstains and bed sheets: in the refuge of a nameless language and the longings of a body altered long past recognition. Even after all of these years, there are parts of me that are not getting better. This is not a meditation: it is a confessional verse. People like me are not meant to survive. What does it mean for us when we do?