Ad Meliora

love me like my demons do

2021-04-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

My face pressed into the mattress, I try to be smaller, smaller. My mouth is so dry and I clench my jaw involuntarily. My gums are numb. 6 lines of cocaine. You remind me this is why I can't sleep.

"I hate talking to you like this," you say. "Like you are a child." "But I'm worried about you, you aren't acting like yourself. I like the girl I know. I like you when you are sober."

I ramble on about hating myself, being bad, being a mimic, being dangerous and drawn to chaos, and destined for the darkness.

You pull me towards you, so we lay in the semi-glow of early morning facing each other:

"Stop. You're high, this isn't you. I forgive you. I want to be with you. I want you to realize you can trust me, when you feel out of control, you can tell me. You don't have to always be in control. I know you aren't used to it, to letting someone take care of you, but I can. Let me hold you, let me be in control now. "

"It can't be that easy. "

"It is."

Oh God, how I want it to be. But I think I might love you and I think I am so terrified of every inevitable ending I imagine for us that I am starting fires so at least I can say I was the one to burn us to the ground.

An emotional arsonist.

But I will douse the flames this time and I swear I will try to remember your words.

I will repeat them like a prayer. A blessing. An incantation.

Serendipity

2021-04-18T03:03:00.001-07:00

"... to love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief" - Anne Sexton

And all of a sudden here you are. A garden I stumbled into when I wasn't even looking. How did I transcend?

You press your mouth against the soft skin at the nape of my neck and whisper i love yous so soft I can barely hear them. You pull me against you as if you cannot get me close enough. My head on your chest, I listen to the sound of your heart beat. Do you feel that? I ask. You nod. That's a soul connection, I say. That's something beyond us, something cosmic. You kiss my fingertips, you tell me I taste of flowers.

What a dizzying ascention this has been, what great heights! From here I can see everything and all I can think is: this must be the place.

At the post office, the clerk hands you the package and you say something about me, call me your girlfriend, squeeze my hand, your joy is infectious, the clerk laughs with us, tells us she is happy we are happy. We bask in being together, the sun warm through the windows of my jeep, our fingers linked as we drive over the bridge, the scent of sagebrush is pungent in the air.

How hesitant I am to label this love, to throw myself chaotically into pleasure as I have so many times before. And yet every day with you feels like the spring mornings of my childhood, the promise of sunshine, the smell of dew on a freshly cut lawn, the trill of songbirds waking up. It feels like finding a thing you'd lost and forgotten about, a missing part you didn't realize was missing, a key to a lock you'd long ago thought sealed shut. And here I am, opening, unfolding, blooming, a flower in time-lapse motion, undoing the damage I once thought irreversible, healing wounds I thought permanent.

There should be such darkness in you and yet you are pure light. Even when you tell me of the most terrible things done to you, when I kiss the salty tears from your cheeks, there is no feeling of wading through a swamp, of blood in my mouth. It is a cleansing, a baptism, with every secret shared between us it feels like letting go, I can feel something slip away, the tight edges of pain begin to soften and dissolve and we are brand new again.

"I am your family now". When I tell you this, I am certain. I feel like I've known you forever. Somehow you found me, in all the entropy, in all the turmoil, somehow you found me and all of a sudden, everything is right.

Fait Accompli

2021-04-04T16:28:00.002-07:00

What the fuck did I do to deserve a boy who kisses my skin and says that I taste like rose petals?

Kismet

2021-03-30T13:42:00.001-07:00

Well shit, this just got complicated.

Decadence & Decay

2021-03-28T15:11:00.001-07:00

"We might die from medication, but we sure killed all the pain. What was normal in the evening, by the morning seems insane. I'm not sure what the trouble was that started all of this, the reasons all have run away, but the feeling never did. It's not something I would recommend, but is one way to live, cause what is simple in the moonlight by the morning never is."

- Bright Eyes "Lua"

My bed smells like someone it shouldn't. I wonder perhaps if this is what madness feels like. I don't sleep, there is no need for it anymore. Food is ashes in my mouth, I lose 10 lbs in a week. All the cues that make someone human disappear, at first I think I am beyond human, above it. Then I realize I am a wild thing, a beast.

The boy leaves earlier than expected yesterday and I rage at being left alone with little warning. I am a tempest, a wild-fire.

The things I'm doing will put myself and other people in danger. I invite him over regardless of who is going to get hurt. I do 3 days worth of drugs in a night and feed him pills, he curls sick on the floor and I giggle: "oh shit, I forgot you probably wouldn't have my tolerance". After some anti-emetics and ginger tea, he can enjoy the euphoria I was trying to tell him about. "You see," I say, starry-eyed as we try to waltz in my kitchen, "this is what I was talking about". Later I beg him to hurt me, hit me with his belt and hands, choke me until all I can see are blinking pinpricks of light in my fading vision. I forget the safe-word and pray for my own death.

At 5 am we sleep fitfully for an hour or so, and then fuck again while the sun rises, my body aching as he contorts my limbs like a puppet, my shoulder joints screaming in protest. I revel in the pain. In the morning light we inspect the marks on my body; "shit," he laughs, "it looks like someone tried to murder you. How are you going to cover that up?" I try not to think about my boyfriend and this boy's girlfriend and who is going to pay the most for this. I tell him I don't want to think about it right now because it's making me anxious. I tell him it's time to go.

By 10 am, I can feel the withdrawals start and I curl up under my heated blanket, nauseated and sore to the bone. Outside, the wind howls and the branches scratch against the windowpanes. I cannot remember how I ended up here.

Foreign Phrases

2021-03-25T22:11:00.002-07:00

I call him. "Come over, I need cheering up."

We lay in bed eating strawberry shortcake for breakfast, watching Labyrinth, my head tucked up against his shoulder. We are going through all our favourite childhood movies and this one is my pick and the shit he scored is really good and we are floating and in this moment I am un-fucking-touchable.

But then later he mentions that he is going to have to go out of town for "a couple of days". "Business," he says. I am terrified by the thought of being alone again. I worry about the enemies I've made. I worry about my own recklessness. I'm not sure which worries me more. I pout. I plead. Can I come? But he is firm when he tells me no, and I understand in his tone that there will be no acquiescence.

"Are you still having the dreams?" he asks. And I think of almost every night, the dreams of men kicking down my door or crawling through windows, always waiting, silent gloved predators, moving stealthily through the night. "You'll be okay," he assures me, "as long as you behave. Just please behave. Just lay low while I'm gone."

He knows me too well. Knows the moment he said he was going, I was already contemplating whose bed I was going to climb into while he was gone.

Even later, I tell him a little about how I reached out to her. I talk of the desperation, the sick pooling of need I feel inside myself when it comes to her. I don't cry. Didn't cry when she told me she couldn't talk to me, when she said goodbye. I think I felt nothing. Did I expect it? Maybe it's the drugs? Or is it that I'm no longer that fawn, terrorized by slamming doors and unreturned emotions. As a wolf, I just slink back to my den, unfazed, reassured that the world is as brutal as expected.

I tell him:

"I guess what it is is that the person I loved is gone, the person I keep looking for doesn't exist anymore. So I'll just keep grasping at a ghost. So it doesn't hurt much when they slip away because I know it's not real, just a remembering of something that once felt like home but now is just a place I once went."

Birds of Prey

2021-03-22T23:32:00.000-07:00

"Here we are now, we've got no time left. I don't know where you are in the world. I'm still dreaming, in a twilight sleep, that I am still your girl"

- Lily Kershaw "The Last Light"

Tossing and turning amidst sweat-soaked sheets, I try to trace the origins of my downfall. Because all I remember is love and possibility, hope for the future and then all at once, like the sudden darkening of the sky when a storm comes that wasn't forecast, chaos and the destruction of everything we'd built. I cannot identify the trigger for the collapse, the moment it was all set into motion. I think if I could it would be easier to accept the inevitability of the end instead of wonder how I could have protected us from the injuries of doubt and fear and impatience. Wonder how I could have made us last.

The drugs help blur you, softening the pain to a shadowy silhouette that lingers at the periphery rather than a constant tightening hand on my throat. In brief moments of clearheadedness, I remember all the things I miss and I am quick to turn back to inebriation, sure that if I linger for too long in memories I will seek you out although I know the you I am looking for no longer exists.

Inevitably, our supply of pills dwindle. The world pulling back into sharp focus, pain blossoming from all the psychic wounds I've been ignoring, I writhe in bed, desperate for a fix. "Maybe we need to come up for air for a little bit," he says to me, brushing the damp hair from my forehead, "come up for air with me". I roar and gnash my teeth, I am a vicious beast faced with the dual knife blades of withdrawal and heartbreak.

The months stretch before me, uncomprehendingly. I cannot imagine surviving beyond summer. The long light-filled days filled with so many hours to try to forget, so many hours to doze away in an opiate haze. The sticky heat of leather seats and long car rides with the wind in my hair and trying always to get further away from myself. I cannot see beyond summer. There is nothing I want now except to forget and to escape.

empty devils

2021-03-21T23:01:00.000-07:00

The drugs run out so we return to the place we started. My house is like a mausoleum of memories, a shrine to the girl I had wanted to be before all of this. The plants are beginning to die, neglected and left alone for too long. I am frantic to destroy everything that reminds me of what could have been, the things I know I'll never have. We step inside and close the door and I am struck with such a sense of claustrophobia, I have the feeling of being entombed.

With no pills left, he places 2 tabs on my tongue to calm my frenzied mind. The world dissolves slowly into a watercolor painting and we lay on the sloping hill behind my house, staring at the clouds. The world is a kaleidoscope, I murmur, running my fingers through the long grass, watching the sky and mountains merge into each other as if playing hide-and-seek. The sun is warm on my skin and I feel as light as a balloon, weightless, like I might just float off into the atmosphere at any moment. The veins in the leaves on the nearby trees pulse and instead of blood, it is as if I can see light flowing through them. We wander to the riverbank and find a 70's rattan rocking chair that someone has left propped up on the sandy beach. We sit in it and marvel at our discovery. Everything feels as if it is in perfect synchronicity. We watch an eagle catching fish in the water and I climb a tree for a better vantage spot, becoming entranced by the intricate patterns in the bark and the way they seems to swirl and move, an ever-changing labyrinth. Walking home, he slips his fingers between mine and it feels less like being caught and more like being soothed and I wonder if I've mischaracterized him all along.

In the come-down, there is no afterglow. I sleep all day and wake up, nauseated and headache-y. I feel rubbed raw, wilted. I lay curled in bed in the fetal position all evening. I want to be alone but I don't want to be left alone, my ambivalence frustrates me. He brings me a cup of peppermint tea and I snap, I want drugs, pills, and If you don't have any of those, leave me alone. But then I cry. Maybe I just want to be held. My skin feels like it's on fire. My mind spins and spins. Anything to dull it, I beg. Or just go.

Later, he returns with percs and vegetarian dumplings. I try to crush the pills but my hands shake. Let me do it, he says, gently sliding beside me. In that moment, I am so aware of how grateful I am for this pocket of light I have found in the midst of the depravity I have chosen. I am certain that, one way or another, the light will be extinguished sooner or later, but for now I will remember that it could always be worse.

The Denouement

2021-03-18T10:36:00.001-07:00

"I tried to love but you know I'd never stay. I'd never stay. But if I OD, I want you to OD right beside me, I want you to follow right behind me. I want you to hold me while I'm smiling, while I'm dying. And if you know me when I go missing, you know where to find me" - "Faith" by The Weeknd.

Driving the desolute stretch of highway between Blue River and Tête Jaune Cache, I think only of you. Only of this time last year. Of how I made this same journey alone. Desperately clinging to my sobriety and videochatting you from cheap roadside motels, listening to you play me guitar, dreaming of meadows and eventually my lips against your warm skin.

As we driving further north, the landscape becomes more barren, the land more inhospitable. The mountains loom against a grey foreboding sky, storms always on the horizon. "Where are we even going?" he asks, as we drive further and further into the Rockies, the weather matching my mood. "Why don't we go somewhere warm?"

But you see, I am learning how not to love you. And it's here, with the miles of empty highway stretching into forest and the rest stops with the bitter winds, our jackets pulled tight to our throats as we cough on the thick smoke we inhale from the tinfoil we pass back and forth, it's here that I can do that. In the tiny tiny towns where no one knows our names, where no one will remember us once we are gone, I can pretend to be someone else altogether.

High, sprawled out on the scratchy motel quilt, some cable TV movie droning on in the background, we talk about our childhoods, all the things we lost. In the beginning we were both woodland creatures, soft before we were hunted, now doing what needs to be done to survive. On the road, we are wild beasts, brought together by fate, homesick for places we cannot return. But there are so many moments of tenderness between us as we attempt egress, the world razor sharp at our backs. I am running from the memory of a girl who loved me but not enough and him from a family who didn't love him at all. I run my fingertips over the cigarette burn scars on his forearms, he presses his gently against my still swollen lip. We fall asleep in a pile of tangled limbs and wake to newly fallen snow. We have no future but we drive north anyways.

Saudade

2021-03-15T17:30:00.000-07:00

I cannot see beyond my love for her. I am saturated with it. She is the kind of girl you would write stories for, poems. Would that have kept her here? Would it have mattered at all?

Some days it is like I am trying to dredge all that love up like a sickness, sweat it out like a fever. I draw a bath and lay in the water until it goes cold, until he finds me half-conscious and lifts me naked and shivering, my wet hair dripping puddles as he carries me across the room. What are we but storytellers, writing our own endings in order to forget the beginnings we cannot bear to remember. I want her still. I want her today, tomorrow, next week, next month, for the foreseeable eternity. I go mad with yearning. There are not nearly enough drugs to smoke, to snort, to swallow, to make me forget how much I still want her but I try. I swear I will die trying and she will hate me all the more for it (is it possible for her to hate me more?)

Some days I hope she has found peace. Free from the shadow I cast over her life. Other days I hope that I haunt her. I hope she also has to live with the thoughts of this alternate reality: the one where I make her blueberry pancakes in bed, the one where we are happy together.

The Conservatory

2021-03-13T09:05:00.000-08:00

I find peace among the plants, the humid air sticky against my skin. Brightly colored birds flit through the giant palms, their wings making fleeting shadow patterns against the sunlit glass ceiling. I am cocooned, surrounded by orchids and hyacinths, mind quieted by pills.

I spend so much time on my knees that they are always rubbed raw, sex is my only salvation, there is no God that I believe in. I keep my fangs sharp but practice smiling.

We drive with the windows down, his hand slipped between my legs. The days get warmer and longer. Sometimes it hits me: I don't want this. But. I keep driving. There is always somewhere else to go. More drugs to take. It's been a month today since I lost the only thing I cared about. Looking back, I don't think I ever had her to begin with. A trick. A trap. But I pulled myself out, bloody and alive. A lesson learned. Trust no one, love nothing. I was a deer, first hunted by men and then finished off in the forest by predators when I was weak and wounded.

But as I felt every last bit of my soul ripped from me in the last light of a cold dawn, I thought to myself, how do you survive in a den of wolves?

And then I realized. You also become a wolf.

Estocada

2021-03-10T16:55:00.000-08:00

I inhale the thick cloying smoke the way he taught me to, hold it in my lungs, feel the drugs reach my neurotransmitters, drenching my brain in dopamine. I lay back and look out the window, the sky endless and blue, a perfect spring afternoon. "You know, today would have been six months clean for me," I say. I try to touch the part of me that should feel something: shame? regret? But all I feel is an aching emptiness. A void.

"I told the last person I loved that if I ever relapsed again, that was it, I'd be dead. Do drugs again and you're dead, I told myself this over and over. I know this for a fact." I say this and laugh. I watch the birds building a nest in the tree outside the window, the opiates insulating me from every feeling I don't want to feel.

We could stop, he says. His skin is warm against mine, the sunlight making tiny rainbows on the ceiling as it refracts through the window glass. His breathing is slow and for a moment I think of waking up next to him in bed one morning, finding him dead and cold, rigid, eyes fixed unmoving towards nothingness.

"I don't want to stop. I don't ever want to not be high again"

He smiles and stretches out his limbs, languid like a kitten at rest. He pulls me towards him. And I fall, dizzyingly, into oblivion.

Protection

2021-03-08T09:20:00.001-08:00

"When they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you."

These days I often wake unsure of my surroundings, uncertain of the things I've done in the hours preceding. I often emerge, as if from a hibernation, mind still slicked with sleepy intoxication, limbs clumsy and not yet remembering how to move. I pull myself achingly into the here and now.

It is already too late when I discover there isn't enough time. I am old and I should have just written that book, followed the girl, taken the leap. Instead I did the safe thing, always the safe thing. Until it wasn't safe anymore. And now, now the birds are making their nests in my roof and I have reoccurring dreams of men kicking down my front door. I get myself my own boy-wolf to sleep in my bed for I am certain they are coming for me, it is only a matter of time.

The morning dawns hazy and golden, the promise of a spring that will never arrive. He kisses my shoulderblade, his pupils pinned. I have earned my disillusionment.

How did I fall in love with her? Slowly. And then all at once. Is that how I will forget her too? Slowly. And then suddenly? One day where I will wake up and I won't remember the intonation of her voice. Or the half-smirk that got me wet every time. Her silly goat sweater. The way she said my name.

Today I wake up from a dream of a masked intruder, a gloved hand over my mouth, the abject helplessness of it all, knowing what will happen next. Unsettled and on edge, I bite the sides of my fingers bloody as he crushes the pills and passes them over. "You're okay, you're safe," he reassures me as I feel the familiar bitter dust hit the back of my throat.

I close my eyes. My thoughts become slow and viscous, I have a difficult time wading through them anymore.

Tell me about the ocean, I say. Tell me about the sea.

A prayer

2021-02-28T20:09:00.007-08:00

As soon as the drugs cross the blood-brain barrier, I feel them hit immediately, the whole world going fuzzy at the edges. Sinking back into the carpet, my breath slowing, I think I can still hear him talking to me, the words low and melodic but losing meaning as I slide into the somewhere else.

I imagine taking the train from the city to Montauk. Standing on the oceanside cliffs, hair tangling in the wind, our fingers looped together. The beach at 2 am, the heavy fog obscuring where the sea and sky meet like a surreal dreamscape, the waves lapping at our feet. Swimming in the warm water with the night air heavy, humid and silent around us. Pushing wet strands of hair behind your ear as I guide your mouth to mine, our bodies answering each other's unspoken words. I imagine licking the drying saltwater from your skin as you lay in the sand, your eyes closed, your lips parted in exaltation.

You were never mine. But oh god, how I wanted you to be. In the furthest reaches of my mind, under the influence of opiates, I hide in this alternate reality. Oh how we tried, again and again, to transcend the impossibility of us together. The digital garden we wrote into existence to escape the wilds of our loneliness.

In exile now, without your voice in my ear, your words as a promise, I can only return to this make-believe land we dreamed up when I am high. There is a perilous cost, it is a Faustian bargain, of this I am certain and yet, as I feel the warmth spreading into my limbs I can picture you in a meadow waiting for me and in that moment, I know I would give anything to join you.

Tabula Rasa

2021-02-27T18:37:00.000-08:00

I used to wake, eager to tell her my dreams, to hear her voice, the way it always felt like coming home. Instead I wake, disoriented, in an unfamiliar room, clutching for my phone to make some sense of these surroundings. The glowing numbers on the screen seem like a foreign language I can't decipher, AM or PM? The room is dark. It must be night, I decide. I press the heels of my hands hard into my eyes, trying to rub some of the fogginess away. My fingers smell like cigarettes and beneath that, something else, something unpleasant but indiscernible. The inside of my mouth and throat feel coated in a thick acrid dust, I swallow with difficulty, my tongue rough and sandpaper-y.

As I try to stand, I feel the true extent of whatever damage I've done to myself. Everything aches, I press my fingers gently to my legs trying to knead out the cramping muscles. Even my skin hurts. Another attempt at standing and my legs wobble, my head swims. I feel like a fawn, newly born, attempting to walk for the first time in a world that is already too frightening to exist in. The pain seems disproportionate, I check myself for obvious injuries, for bruises. I search for a memory.

In pursuit of water, I slink through darkened halls on shaky legs. Outside, the sun begins its slow ascent from behind the desert mountains. It is beautiful. The dichotomy makes me want to cry. In the kitchen, I find him, hunched over the table, kit open nearby, and I don't know if I'm relieved or furious.

Where are we?
A friend's.
What happened?
Nothing.
Nothing?
Nothing.

I exist in a state of nebulous grief, mind still murky from intoxicants, wandering about my house like a ghost. My nose is raw and bloody so I swallow the pills instead, curl under my heated blanket listening to classical piano music and the hum of trains in the distance.

There is a sense that time has stood still. I exist now in a place outside of the confines of clocks. Everything is being erased and I let it happen, my soul now just the tiniest flicker in a body anesthetized as things are done to it. The light is waning. I welcome the dark.

Non est ad astra mollis e terris via

2021-02-25T08:45:00.000-08:00

Without work, the days stretch endlessly before me. I sleep like a kitten, random hours of naps, day and night are meaningless, my circadian rhythm long abandoned in a haze of drug use and despair. This morning I wake at 4 am after several hours of sleep filled with intensely vivid dreams. I stand at the window and watch the sun rise. As everything around me illuminates, I struggle to understand why, of all the lives that might have been mine, this is the one I have chosen for myself. For these few brief early morning moments, I am sober. I watch a fly caught on the sticky film trap, squirming to free itself. Tears spring quick to my eyes for I understand too well its plight.

The day is sunlit, it promises spring. I allow myself a few minutes to stand in the warmth, remembering how we used to talk of laying together on my living room floor, limbs intwined in these same pools of light, our fingers mapping each other's skin like newly discovered territory. The pain of missing you leaves me breathless, like the air has been knocked from my lungs. Resigned, I return to my darkened room and musty bed and pile of blankets. Opiates obliterate these memories, like hands pulling me downwards into a dark and churning sea of nothingness, I close my eyes and you are gone.

Awake. You. You. You. I am haunted. The sun slides behind the mountains and it is early evening, I am losing time again. I scroll through my phone contacts, desperate for company. Use my body as a bargaining chip again and again. I have nothing else. Regret is as familiar as loss as loneliness, there is no hierarchy. I swallow the pills and forget what it was like to ever be loved.

Later, his sweat still warm on my skin, I cry about her:

"Now, all I am is the villain in every story she tells other people"

"Listen baby," he replies, his voice a low growl next to my ear, "I am the villian in everyones' stories. It will get easier with time".

ya'aburnee

2021-02-23T09:41:00.005-08:00

I don't know how to find you in all this noise. You are lost to me in some unknowable place, somewhere in this chaotic universe, that vestigial string to our souls that I used to tug disconnected and floating aimlessly, a reminder of a thing no longer needed. I try to reach you but our mind connection is broken, yet I call and call, my voice adrift in time and space.

I have accepted your loss like a death, every day a death when I wake and I can't tell you how much you are loved, how much I want you here. I mourn your absence and the parts of me ripped open in its wake. The drugs bring oblivion, unconsciousness, but always I will wake and remember the way it felt to hear your voice telling me that you loved me and always, there will be no substitute.

Perhaps once I prayed for a redemption arc but find none in the dens of wolves where I find myself again and again. Here, I watch the sunlight filter through the layers of filth on the windowpane and fall pale and muted on a carpet full of cigarette burns and unknown stains. It is nearly spring but there are no dreams of meadows or forests glades here. There is only this: dirty fingernails, dirty hair, half-closed eyes, half-slurred words, bruises of varying colors like fruit left out to rot but no recollection of how they came to appear on your skin, minutes and hours that slide by in beds that are never your own.