straight-up prose sorta


There are times when I sink very broken down and low in the water.

At these times it is less the absurd blackness and heartbreaking overwhelm I felt in adolescence and more a half-light, a darkness tinged with brown of earth, a sullen silence.

I do not wish so much for death at all. I wish for some sort of escape, of oblivion to myself. Freedom from the confines of my own mind. If you could tie me down within my toes I think I’d be happy, but as it is I can’t escape the incessant terrors, babblings, tumescent rumors and inane obsessions of my own silly skull. My own head. I don’t wish for death or contemplate suicide, unless as a side thought, a means to an end—of escaping myself. The personality has become a prison. Perhaps I could shift it around from the inside, go Picasso and crank things about a bit, rearrange the bars, but I don’t know quite how.

Drugs don’t help as they simply raise the interference broadcasting from within me to a din strong enough to dim the outside world, and the outside world simply is not the problem here; and drinking helped for quite some time, but I’m beginning to see also that it merely dulls me to some bits of myself and magnifies others, raising aches and pains long gone irrelevant within my chest like fingerprints from decade-old crime scenes.

So it is less that I wish to absent myself from the world or from others than I wish to vacation permanently from my own mind. If my ghost came upon a parade of travelers it wouldn’t bother me a bit, as long as I didn’t have to be there myself.

There are times when I see the world I’ve woven securely around me as just my own mind unraveling into loose coils around my person, to hold me in a stiff woolen embrace wherever I go; and I think that I might like to leave all these milling people a bit—even my beloved pup, who’s become so dear to me and is so full of the wonder of the new, I love him so much—I’d like to just be alone in silence. Join a nunnery and leave the space around me born-again, virginal and protected, clear as starlight, lucid and silent. Above all, silent.

This wish to be alone is not accompanied by any of the usual things women go on about—or I assume I should be going on about—when they divest themselves of certain people or certain ways of living—no talk of finding myself, no interest in seeking my inner voice that’s been so silent all these years, no bit about career or personal sovereignty. No Bridget Jones here.

No. I don’t care about work, or my selfhood, or any self-help blather. I just want to bury myself deep into my own chest and lie silent and still.

I have been damaged deeply, and I wish to shrink away now, because now of all times—with the world extending the tantalizing possibility that things might actually, finally be looking up—now of all times I wish to hit the pause button, run and hide, crawl under the bed like I used to do as a child when I was scared and lie very very still, listening to my heartbeat. Here I am safe. Here no one will find me.

I am filled with grief sloshing around tidally. Life has hurt so much, been so hard these past several years. If it really is congealing now, coming into form, it still hurts. I am still angry.
My friend Jen is jetting back and forth between LA and New York, settling into the apartment her dad’s money will buy for her, settling into the job her father’s connections primed her for and her own drive and energy through school and subsequent career trajectories had launched her into.

At least, I guess, there will be a place for me to crash when I whirl my way into New York like a badly spun top, some years from now and still lost.





posted at 1:00 PM

west hills hospital

and the quiet is
deafening
i get this now
transmission after exchange is complete
transfusion after it all went cold
recognitions taking form out of things that perhaps should stay
nebulous and undefined,
indefinite and unnamed,
the way the language bites down hard
on the back of the moments that ticked--ticked--ticked
by in the metered bits drawn out from your pulse
they measured in tin machines and plastic wires, elemental things
torn from the way they should have been left
should have remained
i am so sad, have lost something here
lost something when they put me under
and came up less human
gasping for air
and screaming in here
six years old again
six years old and scared






posted at 5:50 PM

i thought this would be
different,
somehow stupidly i believed
it could have ended better;
now piled and broken and smoke is starting,
and my road is pulling.
i didn't want to leave you this way
didn't want to leave you this way
if i could remember the words that i'd said
i'd take them all back and choke on each breath i didn't deserve to spit them out at you,
drunken and fucked-up,
a hillside at night,
a fall I've forgotten.
(The scars on my knees know things I never will,
a girl I am and and not, a separate life I get when the blood's thinned enough, and
you didn't stop my fall fast enough to prevent them--)
and I can't blame you
I can't blame you.
if there's ever a next time love,
just let me break my damn neck.

i thought this would be
different,
somehow stupidly i believed
it could have ended better;
and now the words scrawled on a table that I followed to find you,
--words always get me--,
our exchange is still cut into the wood, by the computers and the ashtray.
everything will haunt me forever
except the blacked-out memories I deserve to remember.

hey love,
tell me now,
how's it goin on yer edge of hollywood,
the freeway river
rushin in your window with the heavy hanging air;
i look
every time I drive by.





posted at 5:16 PM