Today I had scarf envy, three times.
I don't know how to begin. Or what to say.
I am devastated every time I get his email. Yesterday, I started reading one during my class break, and had to go to the restroom stall to sob in silence. It's overwhelming, not a despair, but the intense loss. To look at all the feelings laid out. The wishes, the wanting of something more.
It hurts to hear them, to remember how I wanted it so badly that my entire body was wrought with the fever of aching. That I was made dry and barren with the aching. That beneath my reaction to his words--more than anything, I want to take it back. To fit inside, to make the dream.
But I know the comfort, the happiest moments, the bliss--I don't think they would be there. If we could even work at it--would it work? Aren't we damaged with the turning of things. It saddens me to hear the words from him--quiet, intimate moments and days, that he wanted them to, but couldn't do. That I couldn't be the one to push action from his side. That I tried, so hard, and so often, to get it. To make it--
That I had to give up. The giving up part is the most difficult. Even the loss now, the pain of wanting the familiar hand--the soft, soft hands. The narrow curve of his jaw. I can see them now, and the echo of what they felt like is removed from my body. Like the shadow of those moments of touching only cast on me from a great distance. There is not a numbness, just a great slack, a loosened place before loss. Conscious kidnapping.
I don't know the right words. It's not I love him, or I loved him, or I'll never ______ him. It's only the slack, the emptiness filled with how bloating loss is. The blow from no physical object.
My days without communication from him are smoother. I love my classes, I sleep well, I laugh a lot, and feel comfortable in my program. This is drastically different from last semester. But I can't help but feel like I had to pay such a high price for this calm, this peace, if I can call it that.
And maybe I can tell you that I've been happy. That there is this huge motion which overtakes me and lets me know happiness. That I recognize the wonder and wonder and wonder of it. That now, it is I, who has the constant fears, the pulling away, lack of strength to pull together.
That instead, I want to play a different part. That I turn to my solitude, that I want to bowl over in the pain of what I've lost, alone. That I want no other hand of comfort, that I want to be wrecked in my own home. That I want no leavening of it. But the riding of it to follow course.
I don't know what happens next. I have this great awe in my life, pitch perfect, really, and that it does not once ever let me be not happy, but that I worry that plates will imperceptibly shift all of a sudden one day. I do not want loss. I fear a different letting go--the release into something beautiful. That it might be wrought with my own undoing. That it would kill me and leave all the years remaining to be something so much worse.
I do not trust myself to want. It should be an easy thing.
I don't know if I can reach a point where it no longer grieves me to communicate with him. Loss is sewn into every place between us. That his words place a tender touch, familiar, warm--yet to grasp at the ghost is such a cruel thing.
I do not know what I can do. I want no seams.
Did I say, too, how I feel like a hack? That I feel like a person playing at being a person. That I loathe myself, the rhythm, that everything is false. It feels so futile, my writing. My laughable pawing at words, at poems. I cannot stand my writing. It's garbage. I've come unsnapped, and I don't know yet, how to really feel for my way back.
It's beyond frustration. I feel embarrassed, constantly, and unhappy, and I hate myself. I cannot stand to see my hands, my pencil, the ugly words smeared onto the page. Abject is a word that flashes when I try to read. I disgust myself, I disgust myself. I'm useless.
This, more than anything, fills the rest of my body with this overwhelming sense of failure. That I have made nothing--I cannot deal with the grief or loss, and cannot even claim this passion of words. That I've become a useless entity filled with mud. Burnt sand.
I want to lie on a sidewalk filled with piercing small things.
Yesterday, I kept repeating to myself how I wanted a cab to hit me. How I just wanted to be smacked by a cold metal thing, to feel nothing from too much pain. To let blood. Have bone crumple, to cease responsibility for my life.
I wanted to feel some overwhelming force from outside of my doing undo myself. To divert this bloating emptiness. I want to outline myself. To feel snapped in place, to be right.
There is no pitch here but shrug of fingers to an askew rest. But there is no rest, no release, no tide curving back from a smooth bend.
I feel wrought and undeniably ugly.
