Yggdrasil’s Branches

Let it pass: April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sensible Thing

This year passed through my mind like cyanide. At times, I could feel myself breaking apart. Every movement smarted and seared, but the burning part of me was dim. My skin was vivid with bruises: deep, nebulous blues and stretches of diseased yellow. I feared that I would crumble at the touch.

Weary to the point of half-etherized surrender, each joint infected with a soreness like desire, I would try to sleep and find myself unable to escape my own lucidity. I was so awake, so damningly conscious, driven well past the point of endurance. I could feel the incessant, maddening cadence of my heart, racing like a hunted animal, enervated yet brutally alive.

My undertaking was not finished. There was work to be done. My body was a ritual sacrifice, but I was no martyr, not even close. I was something dispensable: somatic and inclined towards agony. Twice-deceived idolatress or Judas’ child, inadequate priestess or false savior: it seemed that though I suffered, no one healed. My immolation was futile, unfinished, but I offered it all the same. My world was a crematorium, flooded with smoke and unheard prayers, not fifteen paces from the stained-glass houses of my childhood, where I used to believe I felt the presence of God.

I took refuge in one who bore steadfast witness to the tides of this truth that might have drowned her. I wrested  some sort of shelter from that faithful, forlorn thing: I was the catastrophe from which she would not avert her eyes. I passed the unwelcome time by teaching myself, gradually, assiduously, to love her, until it became became feasible, and then habitual, and then inescapable. What a feeling, her fragile form, and how she looked at me, dark eyes alight. I knew my name as I never have before when it fell burning from her mouth like a prayer.

At times own memory evades me, trickles away like rainwater on panes of frosted glass, a consequence of choices that still take my breath away. But I will always remember fondly the nights of my near-resuscitation, each promise of renewal, those words that tethered my soul to her body in tides of empathy and admission. The gentle hands, as they moved across the strings—like Camelot, Troy, and Pandæmonium before us, that world of ours was built to music.

There were times when she would sleep and I would write well into the dawn, filling that room with growing things: lotus boughs and reams of ivy, garlands of juniper and night-blooming jasmine. They blossomed in that darkness, and so did I, my body opening and unfolding until the space became a garden of my own design. I watched an ash tree grow through our bed, rooted in the soils of a history we constructed, and knew the joys of some new genesis of the body. I gave life to my self and my longings once more, and when the morning rang with the bells of the city, I stood on the rooftops and saw a possible world take form.Threatened with the specter of inevitable expulsion, I endured. My nights lingered sweetly in charcoal impressions of her skin, until what we created became a kind of folklore: crystallized and bound to its irretrievable past.

I left everything behind me. It is so often said or desired, but I really did it. I put an ocean between myself and the history I despised. I remembered and wrote and reimagined until there was nothing left that I knew except for myself. And what a time it was. If those months did not not break me, I doubt that there is anything that can.

Now, my blood and my conscience are finally clean. I have faced a kind of hell, and though I am changed, I am yet living. How many others can say the same? I am carving a new and better space for it, for me, this writer-user-lover-addict, imprecise and genderless and never meant to survive. Lazarus form, Tiresian mind, Electra heart, Orphean soul—still lost, sometimes living, I shatter on. I am Icarus in flames, my burning body a testament to another’s failures. I am nowhere close to apologizing.

Someday I will write, in full, the history of this form: in gradients of desire and each forgotten cross I have climbed. I will give a language, at last, to the absence that breathes and burns within me, to the specter of my wordless story, and to the child I cannot mourn. I do not know where it is taking me, this body that atones. But I am the center that holds.

I know that I am not entirely well yet. To heal will require time. Survival is the art of accepting nothing more or less than your own continued existence—and so I have always lived like this, because I knew no other way.

 What will I become, once I am no longer content to merely survive?