I wonder if this is self-sabotage (you can’t fire me I quit). I wonder whether this is the antithesis of falling in love with strangers on the train. I wonder when I will fall in love with myself and stop wondering whether I deserve it—and whether this wondering will weather any storms, I can’t tell you. Not tonight.

Emergency Room

You’re twisting your hands in your lap, trying to breathe normally as you take in the blank, beige walls, the blank, beige furniture, the blank, beige floor. The cameras in all four corners. The bullet-proof metal door. This room that seems better suited to an interrogation than to healing—an observation which, when voiced, gets you a reassurance from the school nurse sitting across from you.

“They just want to make sure you’re safe.”

You nod. “I know.”

And then in bustles the interrogator herself, wheeling a computer on a stand. She greets you both and plops down next to the nurse, pushing back her long, gray hair, and assures you that this won’t take long. She has a template. You smile and nod, and give her your name and date of birth when she asks.

“So, what’s your story? Why are you here?”

You answer, as briefly as you can. You explain how much of yourself you’ve been giving away, and how, and how much of it is blood. She is brisk, brusque, sympathetic. It’s all right. She reminds you that you’re still young and you don’t know everything. You nod. You know. She reminds you that sometimes people are just looking for attention. You know. She reminds you of the limitations of the internet as a means of forming and maintaining relationships. You know, you know, you know. And then she says it.

“Someone as fragile as you are should be careful.”

Fragile.

You’re on your feet, ready to shove the word back into her mouth and down her throat to die there. “How fucking dare you? ‘Fragile’? I’m not some sad girl with bruised eyes and olive-branch wrists come here for your protection. You don’t know me. Put that down on your template. Make a space for it. I may be in pain, but I have shoulders Atlas would envy. I have hands that can push hearts back into ribcages and remind them that they’re beating. This body holds as many microcosms as yours does, and it’s been bleeding like this for six years, and I am still here. When I was a child and I cried to see other people suffer, they called me ‘fragile,’ but even then, my heart was an ocean and there were stories in my veins. I was born loving. I was born limitless. And nothing, not even I, can take that away from me. I will be scared, in pain, fighting, falling, trapped, and even lost, but don’t you dare deny my strength. Don’t you ever.”

You nod and look down at your lap, feeling your face twist itself into the familiar rueful little grimace that comes with disagreeing and being afraid to say so. “I know.”

I wonder what an artist looks like.

If I had a quarter for every time someone said it-- "You're an artist! I can tell." I met a man on the street today who tried to guess my major. "I'm thinking Art," he said, and I said, "No, I-- I'm not-- I'm not, I-I just--"

How deep the desire must be that gives rise to these stuttering denials.

That's how it is with me. You know and I know. The more I want something, the more vehemently I deny its importance to me. I'm still not sure where I learned to do that.

He said, "Hey, it's okay," holding up his hands as if he thought he had scared me. He didn't. I do, though. It's difficult, trying to carve out some sense of identity when you're not sure you have the right to one or even the right to take up any space. I'm scared of how fiercely I can want.

It's true, though, what you said. I'm real at other times, but behind the lens, or with paint on my hands and scraps of paper littering the floor, I'm awake. I feel like myself. Nothing else feeds me like that. The closest I've ever come is being with you. If I try to subsist solely on love, though, I'll drain you dry and you're too good for me to begin with.

I know, I know.

Would it break your heart to know that a lot of the time I am as certain of my own worthlessness as I am of the fact that I'll never talk about loving you in the past tense? But I think you already know it.

I'm trying. I only want the best for you. If you want me to be happy, I want that, too-- for you, for you, for you. And for myself eventually, but writing has been so hard. Lately I've been trying to write without putting myself in it because there's something telling me that no one wants to read that. Even now it's telling me that doing this is selfish and self-indulgent. A waste of my time and, more to the point, yours and everyone else's. That I should stop. So I've been trying to keep myself out of the one way I've known how to speak because no one...wants me, right? That's what it's saying, even though the best things I write are, without fail, the things in which I was the most naked.

Lucy showed us a picture of herself she'd taken, posing in the forest without a scrap of clothing on her. "That's how you have to be if you want to be an artist," she said. "Completely naked." Instead I'm trying to take myself out of the picture.

I wonder what an artist looks like. I'm sorry for everything but I would like us both to learn how not to be.