Maybe selfishness moves like this: I am miserable, and I feel less miserable knowing that you're miserable (like me, with me?). That sounds terrible.
But maybe I just put it in the wrong terms. Maybe it should go like this: difficulty is made more bearable knowing that one is not singular, that one has someone else to bear it with. To share it.
Then it sounds like a generalized bullshit cliché. What does it matter: I am __________.
Today sounds mundane: exhaustion, followed by the best poetry reading (Carolyn Forché) I've attended so far in NY, then sobbing on my couch, followed by plucking my eyebrows.
Surely, this is not misery.
I haven't been the same the past few days. Everything has resumed its heavy quality of being unbearable, insurmountable, and yes, I with inconsolable. I don't understand. Even the dregs of anxiety reared its cowlicked presence.
I tried to figure it out three days ago--I felt like all the messiness of this emotional weight was wound into a ball of pieces. Something external from me, a messy sphere, but all the parcels adhered to a geometric whole. And I didn't contain it, or hold it.
Instead, I felt nothing--it wasn't even numbness. I felt empty, with a void. And then I when I tried to recall the memory--I couldn't. It was as though everything was bound into that ball in front of me, that everything was excised from my body and memory. The emptiness made me tired and wretched; I had nothing left.
My body, collapsing in on itself.
And then I was angry for still feeling miserable despite everything stowed away in that mound. I am inescapable.
I conjured up terrible thoughts. I was (& remain) alone. Unreliable & untrustworthy to make sense of the loss and the anxiety for the loss. I saw things simply, after things previously cleared. And I told myself I saw only bad omens.
I wanted to cut you from me. To snap each band, disband the sphere. There is no mini-world, no place for our alcove. Only the interminable miles, and how I lower myself waiting, pining, and diminishing. I consume myself. Anorexia is wasting away; cannibalism.
I cannot describe this radiating, focused, and tremendous small slow-motion burst of pain that flowers in my chest when I am reminded of you, or the lack of you. It is excruciating, and then when I save myself from drowning, I try to reach out for your hand. It is a futile involuntary impulse: of course you are not here. I revived myself from it only to endure it yet again.
This is not Sisyphean. It is more like Prometheus bound to have his liver slowly eaten by ravens as punishment for granting that beautiful gift of fire to man, only to have his punished liver grow back to continue to be eaten, again and again.
I would always give fire to you, I would never change any of it. But I am Prometheus and raven bound in one: I consume and destroy and excruciate.
I stopped having your pictures on my technology because it only made me cry in public. I'm paper and pray for no rain.
I don't know what I'm waiting for, but the liver grows and is eaten and grows, like a heart beating.
I fear the end is still the same. It breaks me. I stand up, I go to work, but I'm brittle. The unglued jigsaw. The mad wafer on the train.
