Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself.Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part Way Back
Winter is finally ending. Months passed and I failed to notice. My mind inverted, folded over on itself, inexplicably sought to reopen this history that resists like a cauterized wound. I have spent my days striving in vain to name a need beyond the limits of language: something shrouded in opaque desire and the wordless things my body used to know.
These days, I am not sure where I stand. When I medicate my exhaustion, the elation feels fractured, like splintered glass beneath my skin. Laughter weighs on me: I wear happiness like a vice. I write and I smoke and I read and I wonder, I move from one life to the next without registering the difference. I am a thing apart from itself.
You might think that such a state would, if nothing else, engender art. But if I am being honest, I have seldom felt less inspired. The world is closing in around me, and I am left stationary, without interest or intention. I wonder what sacrifices I am making, without the slightest knowledge of their consequences.
While so much of my recent existence has been a concentrated movement towards apathy, there were moments when I felt everything, and it hurt. I learned something close to love for a person who knew how that felt. Whatever else happened, he tried, and that was something beautiful. It took me months to realize what tenacity and care must have gone into those efforts to know me in a world he could barely survive. I wish that we had found each other in some other place and time, when I could still love, and he could still remember, and the past did not weigh like a nightmare on our minds. I will write our eulogy for years to come.
And I have been so lucky in so many ways. I encountered a woman more passionate and more pure than I believed possible, and at whose hands I knew an ecstasy almost past endurance. I found a man who spoke my name like it mattered. I met living things whose bodies defied simple classification and momentary lovers who knew no gender at all. Those nights were radiant in their own strange ways, the mornings insouciant and sanguine.
So, there have been moments of respite and invaluable connection. Mostly, though, there has been a sense of absence: a chasm of negative space that carved its way through weeks and months of existence. I am so alone that it scares me. I am so reluctant to admit how self-reliant I must become. I want to believe that there is still some person, or some place, or some purpose, that might sustain me indefinitely.
Briefly, and by sheer virtue of coincidence, I found a source of imperfect solace. It never felt beautiful until I knew that I would lose it. On our last night together, I remained awake well into the dawn, not moving, not speaking, just holding his sleeping form.
For an instant, I nearly understood him: the angular profile, the pierced ears, the quick, unconscious movements when he shifted in his sleep. I raised myself on one elbow. One of my hands was in one of his: he always held it when he slept. With the outstretched fingers of the other, I traced the profile of the extraordinary being who had accompanied me in my efforts to revive a ruined body. I wondered if he had already faded beyond my recollection. I wondered how or why that had come to be. I wondered, as I often have lately, how I became so callous and self-contradicting: too withdrawn to remedy my own isolation, and too afraid to care. I never wanted to leave that room—but when I awoke and he was gone, I felt nothing. I smoothed out the imprint of my form from his sheets. I took every trace of myself and walked out the door. And that was it.
The act of losing something is seldom determined by physical presence. We engage with loss, in its purest form, when we can no longer sustain the illusion of vitality: when we accept, without question, that an ending of sorts has begun. I hope I did the right thing. I do not want to believe that this was without meaning. I like to think its roots were deeper, more singular, like the last thing he said on the first night I knew him, and the words we exchanged in the darkness thereafter.
I do not want to be exhausting, unpredictable, volatile, extreme. I want to be something closer to normal. I want to be amiable and easy and at peace. But I also want to burn. I want to consume and linger on forever. I want to live with such spectacular finesse that if the world were to end in fire, you would know by whose hand it fell. It is mad, but not complicated: I want to be more than this body. I want to relinquish its past and its pain. I hate being tethered to a thing that bleeds so easily.
I like to think that I was born with chaos in my soul, a descendent of all of the witches that the world could not find fire to burn. Maybe that is why my body turns feral, why my sanity slips into paradigms of unreality and converses there with itself. I like to think that I am as potent as she was, my fallen companion and second self, who taught me astonishing, terrible ways to feel like a living thing and then left me with nothing at all.
But I am more and less than she is. I could not survive my own inclinations, and so the winter reduced me to madness once more. The world was harsh, the sun was bright, and the people were terrifying and desirable. So, I had to keep moving.
I went to a place where the streets seemed less foreboding, with half a pack of cigarettes and two people I love. I thought that the anonymity of a new city might heal me. I tried, and maybe it helped. At any rate, I started to breathe again. I tried to view that city in all of its vibrancy and motion, tried to understand what one man must have felt when, wandering the fields of Provence, he saw the evening sky in paradigms of ecstasy. I found clairvoyance in quiet canals and the light that fell across their waters. In darkened shops I paid for respite, using burnished foreign coins like the ones my father kept in the shallow dish by his black office desk—my father, who travelled to faraway places, who I loved more than my life, myself.
I have said it before, but I love without direction or purpose. And if it seems careless, or casual, or inane, that is only because I strive too intently for neutrality. I fear the sensation of being loved and left. I am obscenely well versed in impermanence and untruths.
But once again, in spite of my own best efforts, something in my subconscious stirs. It is roused and vaguely searching, enraptured by a desire to which it is too wary to ascribe any semblance of language or form. This vague potentiality is nothing new, nothing peculiar: it is one of the earliest memories that I have. Beneath the surface, like a dream upon waking, like memories images that linger in a sober mind, he is never really present and never fully gone. His was the figure upon which my clandestine desires took their most inexplicable forms.
Some acts of destruction lack a name. These impulses may lead nowhere at all.
This is a violent fucking world—never let anyone tell you otherwise. I have spent too long pretending that there will ever be any sanctuary other than that which I provide for myself. I have wasted years trying to justify my existence with the promise of some better person or place. I no longer wish to know the futility of this feeling. Someone told me once that my writing will always be too abstract for anyone to really read it. So I will speak, for once, as plainly as I can. Maybe it will make the difference. Maybe someone will hear me.
Be honest. Be direct. Is this beautiful yet?
I don’t fucking care anymore. Is this beautiful yet?
I am defiant. I am surviving. Is this beautiful yet?
Don’t breathe too deeply, or you start to feel it hurting. Don’t remember too fondly, or you will forget to live at all. Don’t stay too long, or you’ll remember why you loved her in the first place.
Don’t apologize. Don’t think. Don’t need things that people can’t give you.
Desire shamelessly. Engage recklessly. Love absurdly. It is the only thing worth living for—so let yourself feel this way again, and again, and again.
Is this beautiful yet?
Am I beautiful yet?
Or am I merely something new?
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