Sweet And Delicate

[Softly but with a lot of feeling] fuck

“Nemesis inhabited a dark paradise of her own making. She never held back. I loved her for her frightful hatred, her frightful love. I admired her stunning passion for revenge; the mercilessness in her eyes.”

— Lola Ridge, from To the Many; Collected Poems of Lola Ridge; “Hellish,”

You deserve all the happiness in the world, and I’m sorry you deal with so much pain. I love you, and I’m always here for you.

Trigger warning:

I tried to end my life exactly a year ago today. I came dangerously close to dying, spent weeks in a hospital. my life completely changed. this morning I woke up early to a quiet world, save for some birds outside my window. I saw the night change to dusk turn to morning and couldn’t help but remember how I would’ve missed something so wonderful if I died. how I wouldn’t have seen the flashes of orange and gold and honey swirl and change in the sky. how the endless black turned to sunshine. how depression didn’t win.

coffee, the sunrise and the buildings awash in the light of a new morning all around me. how lovely is it to be alive. to experience all this busyness and splendour. how the clouds whisper good morning and the heavens themselves shine through each crack in the sky. how the sun calls my body to wake. how the birds tell me today is a new day and aren’t there just endless possibilities. the promise of a new sunrise makes me so glad I’m still alive.

I write so much about ugly past relationships but you, you were something entirely different. what role I did I play in our pathetic little love scene, honey? was I the main love interest, or just an extra in your miserable play?

all those bus rides at night, sharing earphones and listening to pop punk, my head on your shoulder whilst I ignored the missed calls from my parents. it was so naive, all of it. so empty. the fairytale with a thousand plot holes: the unavailable prince, midnight but still in tattered boots and ripped jeans, no fireworks, no true love’s kiss. just pain. just so much pain.

you were so shallow and insincere, talking about some girl whilst your hand was on my knee. kissing me in the back so your friends wouldn’t see, saying that she was boring and I was just, so different. I knew it was just a line, a lie, but god, was I willing to play the role of the girl who’d change you.

all those nights spent holding your hair back as you threw up vodka and pills. all those days spent lying in the sun as you came down, trying to convince you that life was worth living. all those aching, violent emotions and clenched fists. no softness. a love like sandpaper, a love like drowning, a love like violence.

tousling my hair and spinning like a ballerina, dizzy and worn out but used to the merry go round. a puppet to play with when you grew bored. your manic pixie dream girl, directing your love story. your manic pixie dream girl, teaching you how to live. your manic pixie dream girl, banished from your life as soon as you didn’t need her.

turning lonely into angry and angry into occupied was a coping mechanism for so long for me. I mean, what else was I supposed to do with all this empty space inside me, hollowed from the inside out by my own mind? I tried to lobotomise myself, tried to extract all the bad like a field doctor without supplies on the battlefield: improvising, desperate, bloody- willing to do anything to just make it stop.

What is the word for a building that is on fire and that building is ruined and gone and everyone else can feel the effects of the smoke and the heat and that building is not a building but a person and that person is the i in my poetry, except it’s my real body that aches. The depression was physical just as much as it was mental.

All that destruction, pain, all the hollowness my illness brought. The “I can’t sleep but I’m so fucking tired”, “I can’t come into school today because the world scares me and I haven’t showered in weeks” and “I’m so sad and so numb” and “im sorry I have to cancel on you but I just can’t face the day”. I felt like I hurt people more than I hurt myself.

It’s hard to forget that part of my life, sometimes it feels like all the darkness never left. It still creeps on me, on days where I’m too tired or haven’t eaten. And I still write about it in the present tense. It’s still here. still here.

sunshine lover. body shaped like the word devour and I’m hungry, so hungry. sunshine lover. come lay in the garrets of my heart. let me kiss your wrists. let me love you. let me take all of you for myself. won’t you come linger, love?

winter lover. I’ll never be your snow covered sweetheart, wrapped up in a white sheet. you’ve devoured every aching corner of my heart. winter lover. all my poetry and writing is yours, though I didn’t want them to be. winter lover. cut my wrists. staple them to a cross. I am nothing more than yours.

“you’re like an angel, nothing touches you.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

coffee, the sunrise and the buildings awash in the light of a new morning all around me. how lovely is it to be alive. to experience all this busyness and splendour. how the clouds whisper good morning and the heavens themselves shine through each crack in the sky. how the sun calls my body to wake. how the birds tell me today is a new day and aren’t there just endless possibilities. the promise of a new sunrise makes me so glad I’m still alive.