i.
You’ve struggled and grappled and fought, but it all seems for nothing, because here you are, locked in your bathroom, falling to spectacular pieces.

Your heart is a bullet flying out of your chest and your face has never been so bleak, so blank, and your shampoo bottle has been upended, oozing everywhere, and you should really start cleaning it up, but you can’t. You can’t put out another fire, mend another broken thing. Your machinery has come to an end. You’ve run out of fuel, and, to be frank, you have been running on empty for far longer than you should.

This is the result.

You: Alone.
You: Kneecaps hitting ceramic tile.
You: Leaning over that porcelain rim, steadying yourself, readying yourself.
You: Pawing crazily through the mess in your drawers, looking for something sharp.
You: Pushing your hair out of your face, fingers all clenched but the index, which is extended, trembling toward your open mouth.
You: Sliding the plastic sheath from a razor.
You: Lurching forward as bile floods your throat.
You: Pressing metal into your skin, and deeper, and deeper, and—

(Nobody tells you what it will feel like when you reach the point of no return.)

ii.
Sickness likes to romanticize destruction, especially that of the self-inflicted sort. It’s a nauseating satisfaction, a bizarre high. Your clouded perception goes along with this fairytale, believing in the power of the blade, the food you expel, the food you don’t let yourself eat, the isolation.

Sickness convinces you that this and only this will make you right again. It eats you out and leaves you hemorrhaging, and when you gather enough strength to feebly resurrect yourself, the cycle repeats and you go under, victim to a poison as grotesque and unending as Dante’s Seven Circles of Hell.

You do try, at least at first, to stay normal. You cast about for a distraction, and maybe you find one. Maybe it’s that rocket-hearted boy, or anything fatty and sweet, or the internet and all these strangers you pour your secrets into, or the contents of your father’s liquor cabinet, but there’s always something, isn’t there?

Funny how inevitably it leaves a sour aftertaste. Funny how inevitably you fall, sinking like a bird with an arrow struck through it, lost.

iii.
You once learned about creation.

How all matter exploded into existence in a single bang, how the solar system burned to life, how planets formed from colliding asteroids, how every creature that has ever been since is made with dust left over from the formation of galaxies, how you and I are the flesh and heartbeat echo of the universe.

You once wore daisy chains and called yourself extraordinary.

Now you call yourself a waste of ******* oxygen and forget, dear human, that you are a meaningful part of this totality.

Consider this when despair comes for you. Grit your teeth and hold onto something and remember, remember, that you did not always feel this way. Call to mind the image of your little kid self, your missing teeth self, your loud laughter self, because if you take that piece of sharp metal and puncture your skin, if you ***** your breakfast, you are going to annihilate her.

If you keep choosing this, you’re going to be bleeding out on the floor someday when your mother walks in and sees you and cries out.
“What have you done to my little girl?” she’s going to ask, hysterical, reaching for you.

And you’ll look at her, eyes snapping and full of something frenzied and disastrous, and say, “I killed her,” and the whole world will wonder why they didn’t recognize the signs sooner.

Is this what you want?

iv.
There’s a little poem I keep close to my soul, which says, “You must set out to save the only life you can save,” meaning your own.

Meaning you have to stop this. Meaning put down your weapon. Meaning breathe.



v.**
Nobody tells you what it feels like to face yourself post-battle. There’s not a great deal of advice on how to be an elegant example of life after, so you feel very much on your own here. It’s hard to go on after talking yourself down from so many roofs. Everything is struck with a certain silence, and you realize this tumor was filling so many hollow places in you that you don’t quite know what to do with the emptiness yet.

Be patient. One day, this blank space will be bursting with flowers and firelight and a rising, beating love.

You cannot give up. Not yet.

We blossomed in the hot brilliance of discovery and the deep cold of grief, eating social norms alive, tracing deathly hallows in dusty window panes, standing chins-up eyes-shut arms-out in that flood of September sun, calling ourselves wild, because we were.

Beautiful days, I remember. Days of soft. Days of blueness and falling leaves. Days of numb fingers scrabbling with ice skate laces and racing each other onto the rink. Days of studying our fears. Days of madness. Days of converse sneakers and combat boots and teasing height comparisons. Days of mutual insanity, sleeplessness, midnight conversations. Days of standing shoulder to shoulder. Days of unspoken things traversing the silence between us, a communication entirely our own. Days of laughter up to our waists. Days of belonging. Days of young.

You’ve asked me many times, dear, if there’s anything you can do for me. I always say no, but there’s something this time, and it’s this, just this. One small act.

Don’t forget.

Years from now, when everything is different, keep this in you, alive. A second heartbeat. For me. Please.

Don’t forget our days.

Don’t forget how we felt.

Where do all the unsaid things in the world go? Do they end up in some metaphorical scrap-heap on the other side of the earth? Do they sink broken to the bottom of the sea? Do they swirl around our heads like nervous birds, filling the space between us with tingling anxiety? I imagine that, like an exhale, these unspoken truths disperse into the atmosphere, quiet and unnoticed. Silky, mirror-fogging anguish. Everywhere; everywhere. We breathe in each other’s unarticulated desire each day, each hour, without knowing it.

Example. Two countries over, there’s a woman who is watching a man, watching him walk away from her. Watching the place where his skull meets his neck meets his shoulder, that sweet parabola, and a terrible sorrow is rising up in her, her heart pounding fast and loud, begging her to say what’s needed saying for so long. She doesn’t. She exhales, and her exhale is my inhale. I breathe in the words she never speaks. My cells and blood are filled with her silent, undeclared want.

In another part of town, two people are together. Maybe they’re best friends. Maybe they love each other, have been in love with each other, for years, softly, without realizing it. Maybe they are watching a film, but the dialogue is spinning past without comprehension and the actors have become nothing more than a simple blur of color and anatomy. Maybe one of them has rested her head on the other’s shoulder. Maybe they’re each thinking to themselves of reaching for the other’s hand. Maybe they almost do, flexing and unflexing their fingers as they try to work up the courage, but stop themselves at the last moment. It’s infuriating, isn’t it? Someone should say something. Do something. Anything. But we never do, do we? We eat cereal after sunrise and lace our shoes and live our little lives and inhale a thousand others’ heartache without knowing a thing, and we fill volumes with all the things we will never let see light.

My dear, you must see why I don’t want us to be like that. God, I can’t bear the thought of it. I wasn’t meant for burying or suppressing. My spirit likes living aloud. It enjoys being bright with hunger and pain, and doesn’t mind being in love. If we part like two passing vessels without ever intersecting, it will crumble. It will burn. If we allow each other to slip away, we will be caught in a great tumbling mess of felt things that were never put to words, like rain or bodies or ash.

Don’t let it happen.

This is what say to myself, over and over, repeated suffering, hands on the bathroom counter while I lean over it and look my reflection in the eye, petrified: Don’t become another lost kiss, another neglected love, another pair of people that could have come together but didn’t.

Be the truth that escapes the scrap-heap. Be the I love you that makes its way out of the mouth.

i.

What sustains me is the lushness of vulnerability.

I live in pursuit of exposure, soul-baring, the practice of being what we are without apology. We are all different. No one else carries our specific memories or desires. No body is formed exactly like ours. We play at oneness, but shared experience only stretches so far. In the end, we are left with the reality of what this really is—a colony of beings, endlessly individual, utterly separate.

ii.

Sometimes, I catch snippets of the light inside us.

Maybe it’s the boy with a pegasus tattoo laughing outside in the cold. Maybe it’s the parting words of the librarian as I scrape my pile of poetry books off the counter: Take care. Maybe it’s the eyes of old woman at the corner of this street and the next, so clear and penetrating, like an elephant queen’s. Maybe it’s as simple as the wisdom offered to me by a friend, as quiet as the man tipping his face toward thin, Decemberish sunshine.

I hunt for it. I await its presence. Where is it, I wonder? Where’s that throbbing openness I covet so fiercely? When I am feeling especially aware, I see it everywhere. Beneath these layers of makeup I apply to my skin. Behind the gloss of sitcom utopia. Under the practiced apathy of all of us, under our coats and scarves and skin, curled up over our hearts, in tangled love with our veins and aortas. A luminous octopus, a sort of eight-limbed love.

It’s there, yes. Indubitably.

iii.

Tell me what shakes you.

Tell it to me like you would tell someone you are in love with them. Be trembling and slashed-open. Be frightened. Stop holding your facade together. Don’t clutch your persona so tightly. It cannot contain you. Let it pass away.

Tell me what elevates you.

Is it the warm burn of your favorite song? The tin-gray feathers on a starling’s belly? Bonfires in autumn? Say it now. Quickly. Without pausing to make it coherent or acceptable. Be as jagged as you like. Give up the dream of normal. You’re dirt and madness and screaming beauty; normal is never going to fit you. It pulls on you already, pinches your elbows and upper back like an old ill-fitting sweater. Loosen your fingers. Let it fall.

Tell me what moves you.

What climbs into your cells and bones and tells you to inhale, to make something of your precious time here? Speak it. Speak it, and it will wash over you like a great light, and it will feel good, better than you knew possible. It will feel like being alive, which is what you are. Not flawless or bad or worthy or weird. Alive. A deep continual sweetness of breath.

iv.

I’ve fallen in love.

I’ve spit words onto pages I later tore and tore away. I’ve run into the ocean in mid-October and shouted at the cold pooling around my ankles. I’ve cried at the death of a dragonfly. I’ve taken a fine edge to my flesh because I could not bear to be the person I am. I’ve said ridiculous things. I’ve walked beneath ambulatory stars and felt great, expansive joy at the fact of my existence. I’ve pinched the wobble of my upper thighs, the places on my body that are round and soft, been ashamed of it. I’ve written things that will never see daylight, because they are too indicative of the darkness I carry with me. I’ve been very loud and very, very bright. I’ve longed to tell people how I feel about them, how my heart swells or shrinks in their presence. I’ve bled. I’ve changed. I’ve danced so hard I thought I would die, and laughed afterward, laughed and laughed.

I am a creature of unearthly peculiarity, and I will not pretend otherwise.

This is my power.
This, too, is yours.

v.

It feels like hell, I know.

Nobody ever likes saying I want you or I need you or I am afraid or I love you. In the moment, the fear is nauseating. In the moment, we are small as children, and just as breakable. But you have to trust in the majesty of vulnerability. You have to trust that even though your throat is a vice and your heart is jumping like hell, these things you’re admitting—they are reaching through. People are listening. Their souls are shifting into resonance with yours, and you are there, standing together in your realness, all the armor gone, all the light rushing in.

Scraggle haired, red-cheeked, grass stained
         things, running with wild flowers in hand
         and mud underfoot, shouting and stomping
         and grinning, sunshine sliding through
         let-down curls, all missing teeth and
         ankles showing beneath cuffs;

who  sprawl crazily on park benches, on
          dirt, on chalk-ruined cement, faces
          upturned to taste the rain,

who  drop everything to watch an airplane's
          ascent, a scarlet fire truck, the
          scrambled flight of migrating geese,

who  seize mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles
          around the waist and hang on for
          dear life, squeezing with affection
          almost too ferocious to bear,

who  wail at the butterfly smashed
           on the pavement,

who  scatter like autumn leaves when
          told to come inside, darting into
          the shadows, teeth glinting wolfishly,
          scampering into the boughs of trees
          to hide with bated breath,

who  ****** their hands out of car
          windows to tickle the wind,

who  choke on laughter all day and
          dream of dragons and stardust
          all night,

who  want the answer to every
         question,

who  are the embodiment of wild sunsets
          and turbulent skies,

who  haven't yet inherited the rust
         of adulthood,

who  chase pigeons in the park,
          flower chains slung haphazardly
          round small necks in the
         slanting rays,

who  dance on the sidewalk to songs
          that exist only in their minds, arms
          flailing, heads bouncing, indifferent
          to passers-by,

who  walk the earth with wide eyes  
          and bursting hearts,

whose  love could power a stellar
             explosion;

            Scab-kneed, angel headed, sun-burned
            beings, flushed and bare legged, tearing
            across fields of dandelions with
            mad smiles and outstretched arms:
            a band of the best and
            brightest creatures

is here
and it tastes
like rain
The slight chill in
the air sends spasms of
delight down
my spine
during long walks
through mud, gravel, and
new grass
Splintered sunlight throws
shadows dancing
and geese form their
bold vee's overheard
sailing through the
stratosphere like
feathered ships with
trails of
cosmic sparkle
The sandpipers I watch
as they scuttle
about on
spindly legs, making funny
little tracks in
the sand at
the roadside
Waves lap on the
shore of a pond, ripples
made by a clean wind blowing
down from the ether
A star burst sky
hangs above
dotted with gossamer
wisps of vapor
and the occasional
falcon or hawk, swooping
with the greatest intensity
you could imagine,
wings going
down
up
down
There is music in
our veins
this time of year;
the dirt has
a pulse
of its own
And as I squint
out at the
light-drenched scape
I begin to
grasp the sweetness
of renewal,
the infinitesimal bravery
of that
tiny flower
pushing its way out
of the earth