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.
