back to the beginning
(the following is a blend of fiction and non-fiction)
We romanticize suffering to justify it, to make aching for someone else seem beautiful rather than tragic, but it’s masochism disguised as love and that’s not love at all.
I watch as the water swirling around my feet turns red. I haven’t had a drink in weeks, but the pain burning along my hips is the same fire that pours down my throat with a swig of whiskey and it’s the burn that I crave.
It’s not as if I drank to be drunk.
Nobody has seen me naked in over a month.
Sometimes I wish I could find religion, hand all of my worries and fears to a higher power in exchange for an indestructible faith that everything happens for a reason. It would offer a simplicity that I’ve always sought yet never been allowed, the anxiety humming through my blood only dormant when my exhaustion is bone-deep—akin to a weighted blanket as heavy as Earth itself—and that’s why god could only ever offer temporary salvation. Not that my scars are permanent, but they’re a physical manifestation that can’t be argued with or disproved, relief I can believe in because I’m the one inflicting it.
Everything in my head has a “but” when the sun goes down and I’m left with an emptiness that I can’t shake no matter how many people I surround myself with. I can fill my kitchen with the clatter of dinner plates and booming laughter and I can crowd too many people onto the worn-out couch in my living room to watch a movie, yet it will never compare to the week I would spend having Thanksgiving with my mother’s family as a child, before politics found a place in my mind and all I cared about was how the mac and cheese was being prepared. I will never again sleep in bunk beds with my cousins and I wish I had known that the last time I got to, before everyone else grew up a little more and had children of their own. I don’t even remember what year that was.
I wish it was possible to smoke cigarettes in the shower.
How does the quote go? “How will you survive being reminded?” Or is it “remembered”?
I often wonder if I bring my memories into consciousness to justify the pain of an absence or to make it last longer, and then I force myself to wonder why I believe I deserve punishment and that never leads to a positive spiral. Hobbes was right, people are selfish, and there is nothing I can do to change that, because if you could love someone into healing then nobody in my life ever would have left. Every bit of my anger and hatred is just love with a façade, a self-protective indignation to distract my chest from the pain of loving people who will never love me in the same way. I would surrender my soul for another without considering if I love them more than I hate myself.
I’m done asking questions I don’t actually want the answer to.
What the mentally stable don’t realize is that anything can be self-harm if you have self-destructive intentions.
I fight for others in the same ways I wish someone would fight for me, but my desperation to be wanted, to have someone see all of my shadows and still stay, has a habit of driving others away. No test will ever be sufficient to satisfy the depths of my mind that will always consider myself unlovable.
I am harsher than my own worst critic because there are moments when I inflate, elation filling me so wholly that I borderline invincibility, except they’re fleeting, and every time I lose one I forget how I found it in the first place. No amount of logic can compete with the generations of violence bred into my body.
I open my eyes to take in the sunlight streaming through my bedroom window, dust particles dancing in the light as a rude reminder of how long it’s been since I last cleaned, and upon finding myself on the left side of my bed, I let my thoughts wander to you. Enough time has passed that we would have to meet all over again, somehow forget that we once knew every story, every habit, every mark on each other’s bodies, though I’m not sure we would love each other in these new versions of ourselves and that holds some modicum of comfort. I wonder if you’ve changed as much as I have.
I wonder if we’ll ever find ourselves back at the beginning.