desolation angel

rumination, black out days, and bleeding from the mouth

Children are frequently compared to sponges. It’s not like it’s a comparison that comes out of left field— from birth to approximately age six, our brains are absorbing everything they can. I don’t know what happens after that. Maybe we learn to filter it out. Maybe we stop caring.

Six years is a long time. I don’t think we realize how long of a time that is because six year olds are so young, but it only seems young because we’re supposed to get so old. The entirety of your body’s cells are regenerated every seven years, which means that if you’re six years old, you’re almost a whole new person. That’s not the point, though— the point is that the first six years of our lives are the most formative, which makes me think that I'm a bit doomed.

When I look back, my childhood always warps. More accurately, it slouches, like something weighed down with an imperceivable burden, a donkey en route to the manger. You know, we never found our salvation, but we sure tried. It’s a gossamer thing, that being saved business; we looked everywhere we could, including everywhere we shouldn’t have and places where we knew it wasn’t. It's Joan Didion’s interview with a child on LSD; the white lipstick, how her mother had given the drugs to her, that tiny tongue licking her lips over and over again. She was five years old— not a new person yet. I was about the same age when I saw someone shoot up the first time, for perspective.

I don’t like to ruminate on it.

Some things have gone radioactive inside me, turning into hungry suns I can’t look at— hundreds and hundreds of little lead boxes line up in me like soldiers, bayonets held high, ready for war. You must understand that I cannot afford war. Not right now. I prepare for it, though, because even if we don’t want to fight, war isn’t always something we have a choice to take part in. Over and over, I choose my safety and I choose metaphors as a way to engage with suffering.

It’s so much easier, you know? You don’t drown if you move the ocean with an eye dropper and your eyes don’t burn if you keep the sun in your periphery. I don’t use the specialty terms they use— those are for doctors and places where the wound needs cauterization to be examined. If I can maintain the fluidity of my heart, the meaning changes with me and with the reader, and we all reach perfect understanding through holding our own interpretations. I hope that you never know exactly what I mean if I describe something as it happened. I don’t think I’d wish that on anyone.

It’s kept vague for the sake of peace. My heart is a hundred different things that only have empty space in common, but never lonely. Oh, can’t you see those wild horses running through the hollow golden fields?

I keep myself vague, as well. If I can be anything then I don’t have to be myself, because why be myself when I could be something a whale swallowed, or the sky, or anything that is more precious? Why be myself when I can be someone who isn’t complicit in a tragic narrative? It’s not solely for escapism, either— this is how I’ve been since birth. Simply, I was whatever I wanted to be that day. Nobody had ever explained transgenderism to me, and yet some days I was a boy and other days I was a girl or a girlboy or a boygirl or neither. I took on aspects like a Barbie. Today a circus performer, tomorrow a paramedic! Do you remember what it was like to be young and anything you wanted the way I do? I have free will and a constant game of dress up. Life is a fun and beautiful animal if you want it to be, and I do, I do, I do, so it is.

In the end, though, my ability to take pleasure in the self-expression of evolution doesn’t mean that I’m not using it as a tool to avoid confronting myself. The genre of the narrative will not change, and so I must learn to exhale. My heart breathed in a long time ago and something came to live in the empty space, but now it has left me. It is past time for my heart to breathe out.

It’s sloppy and ugly, all this metamorphosis. This morning I woke up bleeding from my mouth again, and discovered directly afterwards that my period had come. Now, I could be a sick person or I could have a new type of stigmata— my choice, but either way I cannot contain the blood. It goes everywhere. When I smile at the gas station cashier, he sees the blood on my teeth and asks me if I need emergency services. Today I am a girl bleeding from the mouth and the blood is on my blankets and the blood is on my shirt and the blood is on a hand towel. It’s horrifically metaphorical. Good luck running from the blood, loser— it’s already inside you.

On it goes. I get in line at the DMV called Heaven to ask God a question and when I finally get to the end of the line, I ask him if I have to do it again. He says yes, I go back to the end of the line, and this is how I wake up in the morning and decide to be an ant that day. I am always going back to the food and hoping it will still be there when it’s my turn to collect. What can I say? I’m a dancer when the mood strikes me. I’m going to1 call it the “walking to school” dance— memorized since childhood, and yet, I’m still a baby.

Oh, my love. Where do I go from here? I sleep in my childhood bed every night and lose my low place. I can’t drive and I don’t have any money. I can’t go to the beaches or the highway when I need time to wallow in nostalgia, and I don’t fit under my parents’ bed anymore. All this grief, all these lead boxes— where do I put it down? Where can I be alone?

I can’t. I gave that up when I gave up a lifetime of free rides and free drugs and free love— no more escape hatches. Over and over, I remind myself that sitting with my thoughts is a good thing because I’ll never be able to outrun myself. And I was a fool for trying, too. I told myself I was indulging in pleasure for the sake of joy when I was really indulging in pleasure for the sake of pleasure, getting thrills that would’ve killed me if I made them habits. Habits, too, are things I can’t help but hate. I don’t know how, but somehow I managed to create an individualist complex within myself.

It’s strange and terrible and I don’t know how to undo it. I want to be able to write a love letter again and I want to be able to address something that isn’t an absence. (That’s the thing, isn’t it? Whenever we write love letters, we don’t write about the person we’re sending it to. We write about the hole in us that’s shaped like them. I’m terrible about this— I wish I didn’t have a self to write from, and you cannot be an impartial observer to love; it’s something that I need to actively partake in. Thus, I address the absence and not the person.)

How do I break this cycle of self-absorption? Because as far as I know, I can’t fucking escape it. No matter how many shapes and people I contort myself into, I cannot undo what has been done. This is, of course, where humanity’s concept of a haunting stems from. I am made a ghost by love. Girl who died. Girl who murdered herself.

I’ve abandoned myself a hundred times, and for what? For an oral exchange and a high that doesn’t last? Because I don’t know how to do anything else? It was foolish of me to assume that I could outrun desire by forgetting what I want. It was foolish of me to assume I could stop being angry if I forgot what I was angry about. I’ve tried so hard to put space between myself and it all but in my ignorance, it grew into a supernova inside me and is now impossible to touch. How could I mistake distance for serenity? I burnt out all my bodies with a blacked-out sun. There’s nowhere left to go back to— there’s no checkpoint I saved my progress at. Going backwards doesn’t exist but going forwards means I go into the sun and burn. Into the dark. Into the impossible heat. It’s desolation either way, but I cannot stay stationary.

It’s almost spring. The sunlight stretches cat-like across my floor, coating all the debris of a hundred lifes undecided and unlived in warmth. I step into it— not to touch the sun, to feel it. Emotional voyeurism.

You know what my problem is? It comes to me crumpled and sepia, and I know it like I know anything.

I miss him. I miss California. I miss the house my grandmother had to sell when I was seven. I miss the highway and having access to cigarettes and I miss doing something with my idle hands even if it meant doing work the Devil found for me and I think I’m always going to be five years old, watching a needle go into a teenager’s arm. More than any of that, though, I miss him. And nothing matters because nothing will bring any of it back or keep any of it away.

The universe has not always been kind to me and I have more than enough grief to show for it. There’s so much grief in me, enough grief to drown in, enough grief that a stranger paid for my tea two days ago because they said it seemed like I had a broken heart. Where can I put it down?

I go to sleep and I wake up and decide that today I will be the color blue. The clock ticks on. I go to sleep and I wake up and decide that today I will be a character from a film. The clock ticks on. I go to sleep and I wake up and decide that today I will be the concept of digestion. The clock ticks on and I cry and cry and cry in my bedroom because I can’t scrub my eyeliner all the way off. I go to sleep and I wake up dehydrated and decide that today I am so homesick I will be desolation.

I want to go back to my home planet. Can you tell me how to put it down?

Gently, I place my body down onto the floor and close my eyes to the sun. Easy, now. Easy.