The Eternal Return

Sometimes you stay up late, eyes blurring, checking all of your symptoms. The DSM -IV has nothing on your overactive imagination.

 

You feel something forming inside of you, where a baby would move, and you remember that horrifying image, the one you carried with you upstate, the decay you imagined spreading inside of you where only life should thrive.

 

Sometimes you open up the page, written by others in your precarious, delicate situation. Those who are waiting for the time bomb inside of them to go off at any moment. You nod your head silently, shout YES! YES! THIS! THAT TOO! In your head whilst perusing the checklists: disassociation, visions of grandeur, panic, using your body as a weapon. You’ve been demoted to a list of symptoms, the worst aspects of your panicky, ill-natured self.

 

You’d like to be more than this. You’d like to conceive of a personhood that has so much less to do with the past than you’ve let it. That can escape. That goes beyond: “I’m sorry I’m like this, it’s just this thing someone used to do behind closed doors, alone, and I’m afraid it’s infected me. I’m afraid it will come out in new, impossible, inconceivable ways. So here I am. Waiting for it.”

 

Your professor muttered something today: “Why don’t you shoot your heroin and DIE” when talking about some actor or another and you felt like he’d slapped you in the face. Like he knew about your secrets, his too, and thought you were both garbage.

 

You are tired of that feeling. It makes you sick to your stomach the way some people would abandon others to their fates.

 

Only you have that right to disavow, disdain, disown. And you use it so rarely these days.

 

I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m like this. I wish I wasn’t. I wish I could tell you a different story, but this is the one I have. I wish I could remake the world, reorder my insides.

I’m hoping you don’t get tired of the sound of my voice. I need you to hold on a little longer. I’m rooting through it all, I’m trying to make something better.

See me through.