undertow

I remember sand. Not glittering, sparkling dunes but pure grit, choking up my nose and throat. Scratching and scraping as I try to breathe. I’m trying to escape but something is pulling me down. Trapped in the current. I don’t know how I got here. The last thing I remember is sharp words, uncaring tongue, dispassionate gaze. It started out as a gasp for help. A clearing of the throat. Looking for a tiny spark to chase away the blackness. I thought that we were in this together. I’m always carrying your weight, chasing down your demons and laying them to rest. I don’t know why it’s always a shock that you just look away. Act like I’m howling and shrieking, a rabid wolf and an angry moon. Unreasonable. And violent in my unreasonableness. The proverb is true – no man is an island – but you’re always happy to launch me off towards the darkness on my own. My general, average emotional responses – the fears and stresses you find standard across the board – are not character flaws. But your inability to deal with anyone’s emotional state is absolutely something broken in you. How do I love someone who is devoid of empathy? Who would rather let me drown that extend one tiny sliver of hope? The truth of the matter is that you are the salt in my wounds. You make it so difficult for me to heal that I sink deeper and faster into the darkness than I ever would on my own. And instead of dragging myself out of this fucking hopeless, passionless existence, I just let you pull me further and further away from land, hope, love, freedom. And so I drown. And it’s no one’s fault but my own.

quiver.

Quiver. Just a tiny little movement.  Almost invisible, if you hadn’t been so precisely watching. As it is, you were. A thin quick breath, a sudden fluttering of rested snow, the contour of a jawbone.

Ten days ago you were wide-eyed and smiling, sitting at a restaurant table or walking in the park or swimming in the sea. You were gaily chatting and voraciously smiling, being engaged and engaging and drinking in the all the heady goldenness of existence.

You had a home, a job, the requisite stock of material belongings.  You had a family and some really nice friends and a dog that loved you like dogs are supposed to do. You woke up, went to sleep, lived, breathed and sometimes, when you were lucky, were loved.

And then the other came along. Fresh and new and so inviting. So unique in their otherness that you couldn’t resist. Eyes like arctic pools that sometimes seemed to focus only on you. Moments of bliss where you forgot all of the things you were supposed to remember. A smile doled out in precise, calculated quantities. A crack opened, just enough to see in but not enough to fit through.

Light shone through, blindingly beautiful. The beams caught your heart and twisted it, tight and tighter. Compressing you until you couldn’t see what was ahead any more than you could remember what was behind. The things that were you began to shrink and shrivel and tear away, skin from muscle from bone, everything to dust. You breathed in the dust and it all started again.

Meanwhile the other sat drinking in your exhaustion. Feeding nimbly off your disintegration. Not out of malice but rather of an unknowing impulse, an innate reaction. Inbred or inborn, it doesn’t really matter. Until there was nothing left but a shell or a sketch or a tiny speck of dust sparkling in the sunlight.

And then you sank. Poured into the grass, softly crumbing piece by piece by piece. Returning to the earth, down with the ants and the grubs and the dark quiet dampness of relief. Breathed one long, still breath and settled in to hibernate. Lay still as the leaves fell and the wind blew and the inevitable snow began to fall. A silvery blanket rendered everything indistinguishable. Homogenized the landscape so you melted incongruously into the background. Became invisible.

And now you see, a tiny fluttering of snow, a thin little movement, and realize it is just the wind rustling the laid flakes. That it is too late. That there is no turning back. That you are gone.

christmas eve, almost.

Words are easy, slippery, slide off the tongue like nothing, like eels, simple and deceiving and sharp, a flick of the tail, sting. You go on talking like nothing has just happened but I feel the dog’s jaws clamped tight around my throat. Can’t breathe, not for lack of trying. Not sure where these choppy waves of speech stem from; do you just not know what to say? I try to love you but you make it really hard. I cannot love myself.

When you sleep it is so easy to breathe and be calm and understand. But the variability in your awakeness, my fear, your withdrawal, my own self-loathing make it impossible for this to just be. Is it supposed to be this hard?

So I sit here awake in this hotel room and just dissect. I cannot be just some random girl. You certainly don’t behave as if I am. But your actions just don’t match up. The inconsistency keeps throwing me off-balance. Are you trying to catch me off-guard? It seems so easy to be an afterthought in your world. I don’t want to be anyone’s stop-gap, time-filler, this-minute. I may not love myself but I have enough pride to reject that.

It gets better, worse, better, worse, slowly in increments it seems like the overall feeling improves. But just as I get comfortable, it’s like I step on a sharp rock and collapse, only the sharp rock is a snake and the venom courses through me, fear fear fear fear fear and I cannot stop it. I don’t know where these barbs come from, if it’s your insensitivity or my oversensitivity but I sometimes I feel like it is going to break me. And sometimes I know it is only making me stronger.

sprout

back alive. tiny sprig of green from the blackest earth yet. so exhausted. takes all my everything to rise above this time. drowning drowning but it’s not water, its viscous tangible hate and fear and it covers everything. sticks to me like paste, slowly dripping as I try to move around the world like an actual human being. I don’t know how long this will last. I don’t know how long I will be human and alive and awake. until it uncoils itself again, slowly twisting around my innards until I cannot breathe. leaving me no choice but to surrender. lay down in oncoming traffic, let it all wash over me and consume all that’s left.

and now, here’s the list of things that will keep the dragon quiet. so easy to check off like a shopping list. tiny little things. but the very instant it starts all those tiny things become entirely inaccessible. skyscrapers, and I am an ant. this is why there is no way out.

there are limits to human capability. I wonder sometimes if I’m just not meant to fly. not meant to survive. there’s no way, from an evolutionary standpoint, that someone like me would survive. natural selection would just wipe me out, like a Neanderthal or a woolly mammoth. Nature is exact like that. unforgiving.

the only thing I know how to do is treasure this tiny bit of sunlight I have been given, and hope that when the sprout inevitably dies, I have made the roots strong enough to survive. to live another day. I lie awake and dream.

"i wiped the snow off my face. There was someone waiting for me. And that's the only thing that stops us from freezing solid"- Sergei Lukyaneko

Slowly but surely I am thawing out. Thank you for never giving up on me.

phos- + Greek phainein to show ; date: circa 1860; : a luminous impression due to excitation of the retina

"Wouldn't you like the moon to tattoo you? Imagine that, eh, being inked by the point of the moon, it would be so glowing. Who would look at me again if I had one of those? I'd be too bright, wouldn't I?"

(Catherine Owen, Cusp/detrius, 2006)

"If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well." -Rilke

http://www.marciwashington.com/paintings.html