She wondered that hope was so much harder than despair.

 I learned while reading a book that scurvy unknits all your scars and opens all your wounds. You can't heal and you actively unheal, if that's a word. More of a concept, I guess.

And for someone like me, who's mostly made of scar tissue, that's terrifying.

Goddamn I wish I didn't feel like that right now. And I guess this is where I made a home for my crazy so I can put it somewhere, somewhere outside my head.

I'm having nightmares. I'm sad. I'm angry. 

I'm so tired. 

I feel like I'm unraveling. 

I know I always can but my God I hope I remake myself out of sterner stuff this time around. Or maybe it's old poison coming out and things will be fine. 

I'm too tired to know right now.

I deserve peace and hope. Maybe it is here and I'm just letting the reopening wounds scare me away. Maybe I'll heal right this time. Maybe I'll feel so stupid reading this in a year.

But for now I'm unraveling. 

There is a skin on skin feeling that is hard to quantify.

It is electric and liquid, like the air before a storm.


It tells you a path is open and the connection is flashing in your veins and under your flesh. It isn't shedding skin cells. It isn't transformative. It doesn't need to be invited but maybe it's more powerful if it is.

It isn't the snake oil you've bought and been peddling at points you've lived through and survived. It isn't anything but another step in your path, another place to rest your head, another pool in which to cool your tired feet.

It is safe, a thing all too rare. It's a little holy. It's divine, bright, numinous, a little precious.


It can also feel like a step that isn't where you thought it would be, with that catch in your stomach and the drop and adrenaline and a dash of panic and oxytocin. You're a little scared of your infatuation but the thrill seems to linger while you process that you didn't tumble down into immediate pain but the cousin of pain--vulnerability, without your normal handholds and guards. Maybe habit and the normal slings and arrows makes the taste so close in your memory that you aren't sure where to put all you're feeling. Maybe sometimes it's a sign of more to come.

But maybe sometimes it's just a little gift of healing. A little island of peace and comfort. Maybe sometime it's a chance of time and circumstance, an answer to a prayer you sent into the nothingness that's all you've found to believe. Your energy and your life and your web of love and tangles of memory, disappointment, shame, confusion--those feelings of longing blending, mimicking biology, to create, every so often, what is simply a gift.
Maybe lasting, maybe just a little treat, a little taste of what could be. Maybe sometimes, it's just what you need right then, un coup de foudre, here and then gone. And it has to be enough.

I feel like it's been a while since I was this deep in the ocean, but time doesn't have much of a meaning here, so maybe that's an illusion of brain chemistry. Or maybe that's what time is.
Either way. I digress.

I'm deep in the waves and it's horrifying and comforting like it always is. It always feels the same, like giving up and going home at the same time.

The waves taste never taste like salt water. They taste like unresolved fights and loss and every disappointment I was ever made to swallow.

Maybe I am a bird, maybe like Jenny, God or whoever or whatever heard my prayers and gave me wings so I could fly far far away. But it isn't a permanent gift. They wear out, like a metaphor made of wax, and I fall back down and my feathers become scales to weigh out my failures every time.

Maybe it is partially because I suspect that this is the only thing I've ever really loved. Not me. Not a chimera in my dreams that wears a dozen, a hundred different faces reminding me of what I once had or could have had, if only I were better or stronger. The depth and madness and the way the sound echoes in the waves from all the ways I have been transformed into something rich and strange.

I wonder how it feels to be fit for a Hans Christian Anderson fairytale, to have one place in your life where you didn't feel like you were walking on knives. To be able to chose that pain instead of it just being the reality.

I know I'll not live rolling in the undertow forever. I know I'll rise like bubbles to the foam and reflected sunshine again. But for now I'll close my eyes in the deep and dark and pretend the salt water I feel on my face is the spray of the sea.

Candy

I've worked so hard to forgive myself. I promised myself that I would never regret, never say I was sorry.

I'd give almost anything for your happiness to pour down like champagne on a pyramid of glasses--almost anything, I'd gladly pay. But where I draw the line, what I cannot afford, is my own happiness washed away with the bubbles, you see.

It's difficult. The months bled away and every time I'd see you, your eyes would have that look--that wounded look, like there's the feast of the whole world before us but all you can see is me, representing the fallen souffle of our relationship. I couldn't bear it.

I couldn't bear that I was doing everything to keep myself alive and all you saw was me leaving you.

And I did. I did walk away. But not from you. 

I walked away from the spun sugar facade of the life I worked so hard to want with you. The chocolate dipped nothingness I was offered.

The empty cake of promises, iced with time that did nothing to fill the emptiness in me.

The hunger that burned in me while I tried to fight my other demons while feasting on crumbs.

I try to look back at that time and all lessons it taught me. I try to be at peace with how I grew.

But that time is gone for me. I think, I have so much to sort through, so many bad habits, so many things I do that I think I am wrong for, so many things I wish I could unlearn. 

I know in my marrow, in my soul, in my heart that I will never be unloved. 

But what if I am never a mother? What if I never have the life I was building?

Those are the knuckle tattoos I told you wanted after all, that you dismissed. Wife. Mama. I guess I told you too many times that I never liked babies. I guess that's true.

I don't like babies. I don't like people either, but I love them very easily. Even more when they're mine. And you threw it in my face, saying you would have asked me, you would have raised our family. A tiny part of me still says, then why didn't he? It's not like you didn't ask--wait, is that what you did wrong? You asked him?

But if I had to ask, over and over, maybe it was never meant to be. Not us. ....maybe it's never what I am meant to have, for me.

Maybe that's the real lesson. To be content with what I can have.

I worried after I left that I had broken your heart. I worried about the effect it would have on your future. When you ended up with someone else, I could just say, "Oh, I'm glad, I'm glad!" But it seems it's more complicated than that. Even after that, you ask me not to bring my new fella, asking clearly without saying I should not. 

I didn't have the heart to say the truth, the spite to say, which one?

We said goodbye a year ago, but maybe I needed this time, too, to say farewell. Maybe this is the last step.

It's no small thing to feel loved the way I do. I think one of these is even for keeps, even if I'll never be a missus, even if we never share a home since he's made one so long term with someone else, (though that's hardly a detraction. The parts of him that belong to her are no less dear, and neither is she). 

But still. There's no top tier, coated in buttercream in the freezer for this anniversary. I'll savor these words without the benefit of sugar to help the medicine go down. I haven't much of a sweet tooth anyway.

I'll never ever again feel that terrible weight of longing for confirmation that never comes.

I'll never ever ask someone to give up their dreams or compromise their wants or to wait for the life they want to start.

I will never ever let anyone live on maybe.

I'll never ever again ask a question I don't already know the answer to, even if it means it's never my turn. 

Like Sugar Cane says, I'll never settle for the fuzzy end of the lollipop again.

I've written the words so many times. But I am whole. I am a bird and a fish and a beating heart.

I'll never be alone.

I'll never be unloved.

Everything else really is icing.

And that has to be enough.

I am a wild thing.

I always knew, running through the acres on my grandparents' land. I am a thing that cannot be contained.

I am staccato rain and thunder and lightning, the stillness before the bottom drops out, the changing sound of winds.
I wanted for so long to be transformed from chaos into a beautiful song, to get stuck in your head, leisurely; something calm and measured, a waltz maybe. Defined and easy to carry and part of a normal day. But I am a wild thing and measured steps are not for me.

I can adapt, as wild things must learn. I can take the shape of any space--for a little while, until I learn how to escape, until I learn the weaknesses that will let me come and go as I please. Flow like water. But water creeps and destroys as much as it nurtures and is still in pools beneath peaceful trees.

I never feel more safe than when I am let go. I never love someone quite so much as when they can see me run and soar without fear, unless it's when they tell me they'll be waiting for me, even if they don't have wild hearts that need to go, need to run, need to be free. They are those to whom I will always come home.

I am a wild thing. I can be owned. I can be claimed. But my heart will always be free.

My mother plays the lottery. If ever there was a sentence that summed up the beautiful and damning things about my upbringing, there it is.

I want to understand her. I want to know what is behind her religion and her blind optimism, how it came that one is so much a part of me and one is not.

I can see decades frittered away, a couple dollars at a time, without anything to show but a hope that maybe it'll work out better next time. I wonder how many times those thoughts have applied to me.

I guess as it stands right now, my mother plays the lottery and  I pay for the tickets and I wonder if it's rent I feel I have to pay because I'm nothing like her. Our noses and our thumbs and our smiles, a likeness of bone and muscle, our voices sound so much alike on the phone. But my mother plays the lottery and I can't imagine betting and gambling hopes like that.

I guess, tho, people are my lottery. Right now, I'm planning to get a tattoo with a girl with whom I am developing a list of topics we can't discuss. The closest thing I have to a sister loaned me money that I dread her asking me to pay back. My best friend and closest partner is a man who has a decade of saying I love you to a woman who isn't me. And I'm worried I made a suit of pretty clothes for someone I barely know and I'll expect them to wear them to finally live out my little Gone with the Wind fantasy.

So my mother plays the lottery. I bet my heart and soul on people who could leave or not love me back or could tear me apart. We all do things that seem insane from the outside.

These are the kind of days I memorized all that poetry for, the ones where all I can do is repeat the lines to make my brain realign itself, like a diagnostic.

Maybe it keeps the panic at bay, but it makes me make less and less sense as I keep my thoughts in the echoes.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. 

As a coping mechanism, reciting verse about suicides and solipsists is an interesting choice. Maybe it's why when I write about my illness, I call it the crashing of the waves. I want to be covered in words, maybe it makes sense to try to drown out my mind with them. My kind of sense, anyway.

I lift my lids and all is born again.

I always feel like maybe the right combination of words in the right order can make it stop. After all, it was words combined in a certain order that kicked it off in the first place. I have to make the beauty echo louder than the pain, I guess, and I just don't have the volume right now.

I think I made you up inside my head.

That might be my fault, too. Other choices keeping me short of breath. I keep seeing things about cigarettes being passive suicide and I guess you can only claim to thumb your nose at death so much before every gesture becomes flirtation, before you wonder if you're just using the wrong finger to pretend you're not beckoning.

Maybe you're not fooling anyone but yourself. Maybe not even then.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

But dammit, echoes, alone and palely loitering, have nothing to do with the end goal. The end goal isn't the verse or the shortness of breath. It's a tactile, tangible, intangible, contradictory, impossible thing to make the echoes that hurt stop.

I lift my lids and all is born again. 

Maybe if I hadn't spent so long apologising for everything else, I wouldn't feel the need to apologise for whatever tricks I use to stay alive. If chiaroscuro coping mechanisms take me back to the light, if dipping into the dark is what it takes, maybe I am not sorry after all. Maybe I am never sorry.

I think I made you up inside my head.

I guess that's what I have. I am not sorry. I am coping. I don't ever have to feel like I am sorry for staying alive. I don't have to feel bad that I have a mantra of beauty and bad habits that I use as armor. Maybe, some day, I will find a better way. But so far, the answer comes back like the waves to the shore, every time I need to call.
I am not sorry.