Without Ceremony

Somebody must have hollowed me out and then forgotten to put the parts back in. Maybe they put them back in wrong, permanently altering the conduit through which I think and feel, crossing the wires, so that the things that came to me so seamlessly before are now as unfathomable as the universe before me.

There is space that I am unable to explore between me and myself. Be patient with me.

These are my thoughts:

I wish to be a circle.

Will a stake through the heart cure the itch in my chest?

I bet on losing dogs.

I have an eagerness to please drilled into me by a lifetime of choicelessness, and an affinity for decadence and indulgence, which, though not entirely new, are entirely mine. These do not mix well, and I am unsure whether they are good or bad. I am unsure about many things. They are either or both, depending on the day, and every day is a discovery.

Another day alive. *Deep breath*

It is confounding to have so much love and respect and value for life, and a fierce desire to fight for it; to be so palpably moved by how fickle and fleeting it is, how unsatisfactory and endlessly demanding, the routine destruction of everything that exemplifies true, uninhibited living in the world: trees and grass and insects you never see anymore and people who are not deemed people enough. To be so worn down by it that you dream of breathless escape. Of inexistence.

I want to live so desperately that it makes me want to die.

Look at the world. Is it not enough to be miserable? To teeter on the brink of hopelessness. In the face of such grand evil, every woe intensifies. Every minute not spent living feels like a lifetime.

I am so overwhelmed I could die. Yet I stand perfectly still, like the pin on a sundial, marking time, watching its shadow pass over and around and through me.

Pardon me while I burst into flames.

The thought of you suffocates me from miles away. And I should be so lucky that ‘you’ is a singular person, as opposed to everyone I’ve ever known whose memory now haunts me. And I am easy to haunt. I internalise everything. And the apprehension of haunting to come; the inevitability of it, so close, so far away, ever present, waiting, filling the air with breath and with depth, may feel even more insurmountable.

I must become accustomed to discomfort if I want to survive. Days on end of being paralysed by misery and angst are incompatible with living. Sleeping and hoping to wake up when everything wrong has corrected itself is incompatible with living.

Some of the best moments of my life were stolen. Barely lived, like shoes not properly broken in for fear of ruining them.

And if you don’t love me now, you will never love me again.

I am more simple than I thought. I can not handle complexity. The never-ending-ness of the weight of living. Of consciousness. Can you hear it? The agony in the breeze? The screaming and jumping of the very atmosphere around you and the stirring beneath your skin? Is it just me vibrating?

Many futile attempts to run away from myself have failed. And it is not myself I need to run away from. There is much else. Much.

I spend hours stationary, unable to do anything, ‘I need to think’ plays on a loop in my mind. I need to think. I need to think. And should I succeed in ordering my thoughts to the point of thinking them through, then it is like trying to think your way out of a maze with your hands and legs tied.

Time dulls my anger into sadness. A present sadness that revises the past. Is anything real? Are you even real?

I love talking to my best friend because they make me feel like anything is possible and like everything will be okay in a breeze, like it’s so obvious, don’t you see it? I love their second pair of eyes and their optimism, for me and for life.

My therapist said to write about how overwhelmed I feel. The thought of it overwhelms me. Where do I begin?

I hope I get a hit of good, old-fashioned, organic dopamine when I press send, as one does.

I hope this empty newsletter does not echo back to me.