well, anyway.
there’s only one question to resolve. i’m scared. i feel a little crazy. i’m not lucid. the assumptions are right. i can feel my fear growing. now is the time for the answer. just one question. one question to answer.
i’ve been thinking of ending things again.
it’s not a new thought - far from it. i can’t recall an era of my life in which these haven’t been the domineering ideas flooding my brain, colouring all others that try to swim to the top with a stroke grey, opaque. it floats above, a lifesaver, a plank of wood to grasp and pull myself up from the vortex. but even with its normalisation, its increasingly stable, furnished treehouse in the branches of my mind, it seems to have taken up firmer root in recent months. the question remains.
you sigh into the onslaught of identical days.
one might as well, at a time.
i often look into the cracking plaster of my walls, amusing myself with the question of if watching paint dry might be more fulfilling than what i am watching now: a life happening. to me, i think. some version of me that exists in the periphery of those around me. a knowledge that there is a self. i could pass today, tomorrow, a week from now. some loose idea of me would persist. in minds, memories, records, identification, conversations. there is the you that remains and remains and remains.
you yourself were cut
from a different cloudy cloth,
returned,
remaindered.
i’ve been hurting myself again.
perhaps i willed it into existence by daring to write about it previously. more likely, i’ve simply been tempted by the promise of a change from the deafening emptiness. a moment of real feeling, a sensation untouchable by the frail abyss. a pain i cannot obsessively rationalise, a pain i cannot convince myself could have been avoided by differing decisions in the past. a pain that just is.
and so i drag the edge across coarse metal, soak it in sanitising spirit, wipe the blade clean and draw the life from myself. i think again about my insistence on a sharp tool, to ensure a cut as smooth as a cut can be. i think again about my care to avoid infection, to ensure a cut as safe as a cut can be. the irony is still not lost on me. the irony does not make me change my mind. it still feels right.
well,
anyway.
you’re back.
these are the days you inhabit now. the wondering of if you’ll make it into the next year. the pain returning. you cope with it however you feel is best.
you open your cutlery drawer again.
everything you see now,
all of it: bone.