Scar tissue often never regains nerve structure or feeling. Parts of me have suffered nerve-death, leaving regions empty and numb while others remain caustic and shredded. Such an unfortunate, contrary state. The only remedy might be total nerve-death, which ultimately is the achievement of death, invoking the absurd inquiry into how we live on after facing the precipice and seeing what cannot be unseen. The terminal affliction of despair.
Death caresses my thoughts, I must admit, but I don’t pursue it anymore. There are no longer fantasies of bleeding myself dry, drowning myself, or falling asleep with my head in the oven. No romantic notion associated with people succumbing to their desperation and leaving their world to understand why they could no longer endure it. I don’t intend to succumb, but I feel their desperation and embrace it. Acknowledging their courage gives me strength, and breaks my heart repeatedly for all they had to leave behind to release themselves from a personal hell. They are voices from the past crying out through archives, enfolding me in a solidarity otherwise elusive and reminding me that it's a shared curse, not being able to look away from life. Their suffering was not in vain. The ink they bled becomes etched into my skin, and I wonder if they ever considered just how much I could love them.
The only cure for anguish is turning into a “cavity of anti-matter". When my chest is caving and it feels as if I am collapsing into a vacuum, I consider what this means. I see the faces of the people called dissenters, and make love to them all in the dark. Death intoxicates me, but like all intoxicants, it’s not really a solution at all. The weight of existence only transfers from us to those we hold dear and is compounded within them.
Despite my personal sovereignty, it would be a mistake not to consider the legacy I will have created by making my children the beneficiaries of my demons while they’ll soon be facing their own.
For those of us who feel we must remain suspended in life, acceptance is the only answer and it only comes in waves. Waxing and waning, to be relearned time and time again, carrying within it sharp things unseen to remind us how little time there is to rest, or to heal.
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