Flake

I feel as if I am getting more and more unreliable as the years go by. Every time I realize I haven't done something that I said I would do, a knife twists in my gut and I get gripped by this cold terror that I'm slipping; the act is slipping and soon everyone will know how worthless I really am in spite of how hard I have worked to hide it.

No, but listen. I avoid my friends and family. I forget to do household tasks except at times when I'm not in a position to do them. I procrastinate on assignments and person requests and end up scrambling to finish them, if I remember to do them at all. I'm not making this stuff up. It happens. These are things that I do.

But they call me "steady." "Dependable." "Reliable." I believe that I used to be. That was a long time ago. The people who know me now still think I am as functional as I was then, and maybe they cut me slack because they think I'm going through a rough patch that I will recover from. That's what I tell myself, anyway. That's what makes sense to me.

I used to make promises to myself. Sometimes I even kept them. When the sun came out, I'd look at the terrified, aching child inside me and promise her that I would do better. I would be kind to her. I would keep her safe from harm. I would give her space to breathe, to dance, to create. I'd give her permission to tell stories. God, how she loved to tell stories. But it got to the point where the shadows would close back in and I would keep none of them, none of them. She doesn't trust me anymore. I don't trust me anymore. I don't know what the tipping point was, when the balance shifted. All I know is that now the bad days outnumber the good ones. All I know is that now I spend the "good" ones paralyzed by the knowledge that soon my veins will freeze over again.

I don't keep the promises I make to myself; to tell the truth, I hardly make them anymore. It's useless. If actions speak louder than words, my words say I am worth nothing and my actions scream it. I am not even worth honoring a promise. But as I treat myself with less and less consideration, I am losing the ability to have integrity everywhere else. Out of practice.

I used to write to get the bad blood out. I used to lay it all out on the table and come away seeing things a little more clearly. It was something like this. But now I look at this and all I see is how many times the letter "I" appears in it and I want to erase them all. How dare I? As if it isn't bad enough to waste this time, these words, acting as if I am important, I have to do it on a public forum, too. I don't have to, but I am doing it anyway and that is disgusting.

These are not rational thoughts. They're what the illness puts in my head.

See, this is why I want an official diagnosis. I don't care what it looks like to you. I want an expert to tell me that I am sick so that the little nagging voice at the back of my head that tells me I am just making excuses for weakness and laziness will shut up. I know I don't experience the world the way healthy people do. The way I am constantly aware of my heartbeat. It pounds. If you touch me. If I have to speak. If I walk into a room and there are people in it. If I think of the things I need to do. If I wake up. It pounds. It pounds. It pounds.

I am not a danger to myself in the way I was last year, but I am afraid of myself just the same. I think I will wait forever. I think I will turn to stone. I think I will die waiting for someone to give me permission to live. I don't starve anymore. I don't cut. I don't bruise or deliberately deprive myself of sleep. I don't destroy the things I make because there's nothing to destroy. I don't make. I lose. I lose. I lose. The things I defined myself by are gone.

I am surrounded by people who love me and I feel so goddamn alone. I need help. I need help. I need to stop being such a whiny little brat and face reality. I need help. I don't know what I need, besides sleep. I'm tired. Everything is heavy.

Good

Upon learning the news that you’re quitting, she says it’s a shame. “There are only a few good ones,” she says. Implication: you’re one of them. “They’re all good ones,” you say, but she shakes her head. “I have different eyes than you. I’m older.”

And you wonder, you wonder whether there is anything you could say that would make her pause to think, anything you could do that would let her see your eyes as anything other than clouded by youth and naiveté, make her wonder if maybe, just maybe, the reason you’re one of the good ones is the fact that you believe they all are.

They all are.

You want to explain to her that it’s not that you don’t see what she sees. On your fifteen-minute breaks you sit alone and grieve in silence for the ignorance, the gossip, the all-too-human failure to see outside one’s own sphere, to remember the fragility of the worlds of others and how it matches one’s own. Laziness, back-stabbing, off-color jokes—It’s not that you don’t see. It’s not that you don’t know. But you think maybe she doesn’t see what you see—the young mother raising her daughter alone and never complaining, never—with word or silence—letting anyone know if it’s hard. If it hurts. Does she see the couple who lost their son treat every “bad one” as their own? Does she see the old soldiers and the young drop-outs who hide their scars in equal measure and continue because they believe with everything they can bear to have that there is a way for all this to be better? They all do what they can with what they have.

The old man with the broken arm says it’s taken him a lifetime to learn the things you know, but you know where he’s come from and it’s not about you or about him. He did what he could with what he had. Now he reads the people coming through the door and knows the words to say to make them smile; he reads in the breakroom and comes back to tell you about what he hopes will happen when he dies. He tells you to keep a smile on your heart, not your face, because it doesn’t do much good if you can’t feel it.

They’re all good ones.

I wonder if she knows about the good ones. I wonder if she knows that, for so many of us, every word and gesture, every smile is consciously selected from our extensive armories, where we’ve kept it and honed it and polished it, practiced with it over and over again to protect ourselves please god let me make them happy don’t let me fail don’t let me fall please I don’t want to hurt anyone I just want it to be okay for me to be here. I wonder whether she knows. We have to be good because anything less than that and we are not sure whether we have permission to be here.

We are not sure whether we have permission to be here.

We do what we can with what we have and it is not enough, not enough, never enough and we wonder what it’s like to answer the phone without having to keep our voices from shaking. I wonder what it’s like to be able to answer emails without my hands shaking. I wonder what it’s like to be able to answer emails at all, to not smile at the first sign of fear or pain or confusion so that no one will know it hurts, no one believes it hurts, I wonder what it’s like to know how to say that it hurts and I am drowning. I wonder whether she knows how many of us look ahead when we’re told we have a bright future and see nothing, nothing. “With your positive attitude, I know you’ll go far,” he says, and I am a walking suit of armor with nothing inside, so I smile and say thank you.

I am one of the good ones. She doesn’t know what that means. I am one of the good ones and I have broken my own heart and blinded my own eyes to the things I don’t want to see. I am one of the good ones; I am opening my veins to water the earth in hopes that something better than me will grow—

all this good, and none of it will ever be enough.

It Goes Like This

Now.

This is what happens now.

It’s three AM, and you’re alone. You’re tired. It’s been a long, hard fight, but the end is finally in sight. Just one last push, you tell yourself, and the sun will rise.

Now is when they take you.

You should have known that it would be like this. They wait until you’re vulnerable, and then they strike. They surround you, circling. Hello again.

Worthless.
Pathetic.
Selfish.
Weak.
A waste of time.
Of breath.
Of love.
Everyone would be better off without you.
They’d only be sad until they realized how much unnecessary space you’d taken up.

Failure.
Promise-breaker.

Coward.

Do it.
Do it.

You deserve it.
You deserve to die.

They only have to wait. Exhaustion will bring you to your knees, and then they move in. Hands at your wrists, your hips, your throat. You can’t even scream. It’s cold. Freezing

This is what happens now.

There’s a blade on your dresser. You could give them something to appease them for a while. A hurt and a failure in one—Oh, they’d love it, and then maybe they’d at least let you breathe. God knows they play with their food.

This is what happens now: you fight.

You twist. You kick. You bite. The sky’s still dark, but there are birds waking up somewhere and singing to the sun. You hear them. Damned if you can’t have faith in the invisible, too. You fight. They’re too cold to understand a heartbeat. You decide what happens now. Shadows can’t exist without a source of light somewhere. You’ve beaten them back a thousand times, and they’re still stupid enough to try again? Not a chance. Not this time, and not the next, and not in every lifetime after this. You are a warrior.

Adamantine.

This is what happens now: you win.

Sure as fall turns into winter, they’ll be back; these battles are the price of seeing spring. But now, as night turns into morning—now, you’ve won.

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.

Living Arrangements

It’s better to write that you want to give up than to give up.

It’s better to say “I can’t do this” than to stop trying.

It’s better to get it out. It’s better to get it out.

This exhaustion hit me like a semi. I don’t know. I don’t know. Funny how people can be so different. From themselves. Funny.

I was okay five minutes ago.

I can do this, though. Yes, I hear you, little voice at the back of my head. “Sure you can, but what’s the point? You’re not worth it. You never amount to anything even when you’re trying. Just give up. Give up. Give up. You give up on everything else, after all.”

Yeah, okay. I hear you. I also remember that we have an arrangement. You stay on your side of the line and I’ll stay on mine. No, I won’t come over. You have nothing to offer me.

Maybe I want to give up now. Just from…being tired, really. It’s an exhaustion thing. Give up and you won’t have to fight anymore. Right. But you know and I know it doesn’t really work like that, just like you know and I know that giving in to the urges doesn’t make them go away permanently, and the next time it’s easier.

Fuck you. I am not making this easy for you.

“Want,” okay. Right now. But not “ready to.” I am not ready to give up. I have too much to look forward to. You are not ruining this for me. Fuck you.

You stay on your side and I’ll stay on mine.

I’ll take time. For myself. I’ll take it from you. You watch. Maybe I’ll miss some assignments. Maybe I won’t always make it to class. Sometimes I need that. To hell with perfect grades if getting them means I have to break this semester. I’ll take what I need. I’m worth it.

Yes, I am. Yes, I am.

To everyone who's ever told me not to care about them

Don't you dare tell me you don't matter.

You matter to me. You matter to me.

And don't you say you shouldn't. Don't fucking tell me what I should and shouldn't care about. Don't you tell me what belongs in my head and in my heart. Don't even. Don't you dare.

Don't tell me your story's not worth continuing when I am hanging on every word like reading my favorite book for the first time. I am, I am. You trust me, say you believe in me, yes--then don't tell me what I'm seeing isn't real.

This ain't no hallucination, darling. I'm wearing down my fingertips, pleading myself hoarse for this. For you. For you. For you. I'm not wasting my time; don't insult me.

You want to make this about me? Let's go. If this is all about me, if this is about me being "kind" and "deserving to be happy," okay. Okay. If you just want to make sure I don't get hurt, then don't hurt me, darling. Don't. If what I want is all that matters, then treat yourself with the kindness you'd treat me. That's what I want. But don't you sit there and tell me I can't see you when your light is hurting my fucking eyes. Don't tell me I can't fall a little in love with everyone I meet. I do. I do.

Oh god, I do.