Can anyone deny that we are haunted? What is it that crouches under the myths we have made?

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

I turn the pages over in my mind, see her name on the folded corner. A riddle in emerald ink. My excitement flickers, then dies. The glint of tenderness slinks away into nonbeing. What remains seems oppressive, arid. It is the sun on my bare shoulders in Southern California, the salt and sweat anointing my neck, Sagittarius gripping the sky.

 

I seek refuge in the shadow of a cypress tree, where shadows intertwine with silver vapor, spiraling upwards from the breathing earth. Clawing down the muddy banks; crouching like an animal astride the shoreline; still seeing, dimly, that face beneath the soporific currents. In the faltering twilight, our strange history dies unrealized. The wound that I was is cauterized and new skin spreads: unrepentant, beguiling.

 

Did she think that, because I loved her, she was safe? She was jasmine and hyacinth, sweet wine and badly rolled cigarettes—heady, rose-damp offerings for false idols and docile gods. But I was the real thing. I required blood. For six months, I suffered and I dreamed. Then I bled her, like ink, from the bedsheets. I burned every letter. I pawned the borrowed clothing. I tore pages from the books. I withdrew into my rage, my words, my solitude. I emerged victorious and alive.

 

Tiresian by nature, Orphean by craft, I coaxed paradise from psychosis, life from longing, blood from stone. Nothing that has known my hands has emerged unscathed. I stand apart from my grief as it burns like something still lost. In a contrapuntal clashing of flesh and fractured light, I witness the fact of my survival. I love it and loathe it for precisely what it is: prodigious, improbable, monstrous, mine.