Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is, compensates for the misery of being it.

every Frodo needs a Sam. where is mine when i need him?

------------------------------------------------

Frodo: I can't do this Sam!

Sam: I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn't. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to Sam?

Sam: That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo and it's worth fighting for.

I do not like to be touched, but it is a strange dislike. I do not like to be touched because I crave it too much. I want to be held very tightly so I do not break. Even now, when people lean down to touch me, or hug me, or put a hand on my shoulder, I hold my breath. I turn my face. I want to cry.

I was conflicted even about so primary an issue as survival. I wasn’t sure I wanted to ambush my own downward spiral, where the light at the end of the tunnel, as the mood-disordered Robert Lowell once said, was just the light of the oncoming train. I saw myself go splat on the pavement with a kind of equanimity, with a sense of a foretold conclusion. Self-inflicted death had always held out a stark allure for me: I was fascinated by people who had the temerity to bring down the curtain on their own suffering — who didn’t hang around, moping, in hopes of a brighter day. I knew all the arguments about the cowardice and selfishness (not to mention anger) involved in committing suicide, but nothing could persuade me that the act didn’t require a perverse sort of courage, some steely embrace of self-extinction. At one and the same time, I have also always believed that suicide victims don’t realize they won’t be coming this way again. If you are depressed enough, it seems to me, you begin to conceive of death as a cradle, rocking you gently back to a fresh life, glistening with newness, unsullied by you.

Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.

this is drowning.

it feels like someone punched the air out of my lungs. clean out.
they're just saturated, unable to pull the oxygen out of the air. unable to inhale a damn thing, and instead of converting life giving oxgyen they exhale an oily thick steam of yellow puss.
is this the first step of dying? when your lungs just stop working. when you cant walk 10 metres to the toilet without needing 20 minutes after to get your breathing in control.
how limiting. when your body is starting to slowly pack in, but your mind wants to live forever.

i feel like a prisoner, locked in a sleepless cell, screaming for the keys.

i hate it
when i get so crazy
i scare myself.

this is my suicide dress
she told him
I only wear it on days
when I'm afraid
I might kill myself
if I don't wear it

you've been wearing it
every day since we met
he said

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.

Ask the girl with the dirt in her mouth.
Ask the girl who is all poem
now, all shapes between the shapes
she carved into her flesh
like a tattoo artist falling in love.

with what remains un-inked, the border crossings
and blue edges
and the razor bleeding
in her hand.

You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.

the photograph.

The photo has been cut; a third of it has been cut off. In the lower left corner there's a hand, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass. It's the hand of the other one, the one who is always in the picture whether seen or not. The hand that will set things down.

How could I have been so ignorant? So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next--if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions--you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

Drowned now - the tree as well, the sky, the wind, the clouds. All I have left is the picture. Also the story of it.

i often wonder why i look at the stars so much.

i guess sometimes you have to look outside and see the enormity of everything, so you realise that you are in fact quite small, and quite insignificant. and something as small and insignificant as you doesn't really matter, so all the silly problems in your life aren't really problems at all.

i look at the stars so i remember i'm mortal. and nothing a mortal can do is ever going to change anything. you could say the universe is the perfect antidote to my over inflated ego.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

"Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun."

- Romeo & Juliet 

i never really believed in "cool" until i met you, and i realised that for all my swagger, i was speachless.

to my coolest friend, and his song!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTSJYZyouek&feature=related

i'm in love with life at the minute. everything. i'm so happy i could cry. my world is finally spinning in time, long may it continue!

Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time. It's only a natural feeling.

What happens when you find your missing piece, and its 3000 miles away? 

Answer: the journey of your life.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.

i believe everyone is beautiful on the inside.
but not me.
no.
not me.

i want to slit my wrists.

but i wont.
so lets not entertain that thought.
and keep typing until it goes away.
because if i wasn't writing this, i'd be running a razor blade across my wrists. and i'd do it the proper way. lengthways, where you open your veins up, and just bleed out. i guess you're wondering if that hurts? i've tried it before, it's like the strength is draining out of your body. it feels like dying. and in a way its beautiful. because the more you bleed, the less you feel, and you transcend into euphoria.

the last time i tried that though i bottled it, and ended up screaming the house down in the middle of the night. psych ward taught me one thing. if i ever slit my wrists again, don't scream for help. "help" is a subjective word. you think you're helping me by making me talk about being raped. i beg to disagree. that just makes me angry. and when i get angry i want to stick a knife in you. i want you to hurt like i do. if you want to know how i feel,stab yourself through your fucking heart. but not so much that it will kill you. stab yourself so that you'll die slowly. over the course of a lifetime.

some ways it seems that life is not LIVING, its an extended DYING. yeah there are lucid moments, but the pain, the epic all consuming, wretched sadness, is worse than death.

i do not want to remember.
i want to MURDER you.
for taking my life from me.
i wish you were alive, just so i could kill you. i'd make you scream. for every little girl you ever touched i would BURN you. i would BLISTER you. i'd make you live off your own fucking flesh or starve to death. what a pretty way you'd die.. eating your own liver..

i'd laugh. like you laughed when you stuck your fingers inside me and dug your nails into me. oh, and when i screamed in pain and you beat me back to senselessness. and i'd wake up with your cum mixed in my blood.

remember when you made me suck your cock whilst you ripped the hair from my head? i do. my nerves like fucking electric, scalp bleeding. raw. HELPLESS.

i wish you were alive, so i could mutilate you.  if you think i'm sick, then my congratulations, you created me- this monster who wants to kill. but unlike you i can restrain it. i can bottle every impulse, my own toxicity. store it up. wherever souls go after death, you'll be their. and so will i.

can't fucking wait.

bipolar is like living with a dormant volcano. one minute the sky is blue and pretty, everything lies dormant and beautiful. the next, you're sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss. and no matter how hard you will it to stop, you can't stop falling. 

you can feel it, descending further and further towards that primal rock bottom. the part  that tells you to make yourself bleed or vomit. the impulses to kill. the impulse to do ANYTHING except feel the pain, the loneliness. 

you push everyone away, which is ridiculous really, because its the time you need someone the most. but you're too scared to open up and show that brutal side. you're too scared of your thoughts, the impulses. and all you really want to do is just lie next to someone who loves you, and cry. but that option isn't open to you. because the sickness destroyed every meaningful relationship you've ever had. so there's no-one there. not one person on the fucking planet who understands. 

and that's all you ever wanted. someone to care. someone to get it. someone not to run when you scare them. someone to hold you when you can't take being you anymore.

You made me your Queen.

Then stole my wretched crown.

And dashed it onto the rocks.

Along with your worthless life.

But a Queen without a crown is still a Queen.

And this is my kingdom now.

A hard place where the furrows of my soul are ploughed by pain.

But it is my pain.

And my place.

Here you cannot touch me.

We all leave childhood with wounds. I wonder if in time we may transform our liabilities into gifts. The faults that pockmark the psyche may become the source of a man's or woman's beauty. The injuries we have suffered invite us to assume the most human of all vocations - to heal ourselves and others.


I wonder, if the abuse has not made me who I am. Then in a twisted way should I be thankful for it? The fumbling ball of tepid feeling I am today would simply not be without those prior events. Instead of regret, should I not be pleased that I am one of the rare few on this planet who can truely call themselves a survivor.


A bit like a cockroach.

Life.
It comes with no rule book.
It comes with no destination, and if you have one in mind then there are no maps to get you their.
Navigate by your heart and the stars.
It's your life. Put your arms out to the limits and keep fucking reaching.
Failure is an option.
But not for me.

Dave

i still miss you.

you didn't just end your life that day - you ended mine.

i just wish i could have put you back together again.

remember holding your head in my lap, and all the blood.

sometimes when i wash my hands i still see it.

rivers of red running down the plug hole.

the last parts of you mixing with the water and being washed from my skin.

i remember sitting their for hours.

until you went cold.

and kissing you, even though you had half a face.

tears and brains and blood.

all mixed together.

it was eternity. me and you.

i could feel your soul in that room.

thats why i didnt want to go.

thats why i didnt call them.

i remember it getting dark.

and then it getting light again.

just me and your corpse.

i remember you leaving, i felt it. when your parents came in.

to see me.

wrapped in your chocolate blood.

dirty dried blood.

i just remember holding on to you.

and not letting go.

but the medical people came and they made me let go.

they tore you from me.

and put you in a black bag.

took you away.

and i remember screaming

"He's afraid of the dark!"

when they covered you up.

But they didn't listen,

and i cried for you.

i cryed so much they made me have a drip.

and they took me away to a cold, dark hospital.

but i couldnt see anyone.

because they didnt know if i'd killed you.

how funny, they thought I might have killed you?!!

so i couldnt see my mum

or my dad

and i was left all alone

except i could feel you.

id sit at the bay window

all day.

then after a while my mum and dad came

and tried to love me enough

to make me speak again.

but they couldnt

didn't have a heart left.

you took it.

i didnt want to live anymore.

but in that place,

i didnt have the option.

i was too tired to die.

too tired to move.

sightless sockets and that bay window.

looking at the grass.

and then one day,

the grass changed to my back garden,

and i was home.

and i spoke

because words made my mum smile instead of cry.

and i didnt want her to cry anymore.

and words made dad's heart pains get better

so i didnt speak for me

i spoke for them.

BECAUSE UNLIKE YOU I'M NOT A SELFISH SCHIZOPHRENIC FUCK.

i LOVE you.

but i fucking HATE YOU.

and i can do better.

you might have died that day.

and part of me did too

but i will NOT be your legacy.

it's a god job you died.

because right now

if i could

i'd stab you through that fucking vacant hole you called a fucking heart.

REMEMBER, that one you PROMISED me.

So yes.

I miss you.

I love you.

But overwhelmingly, I FUCKING DESPISE you.

If words could kill.

This letter is a bullet.

Because you are dead to me.

As I was to you.

And it might be a tad retrospective.
But I'm dumping you.
I refuse to be your emotional prisoner.
Have a nice death.
Don't wait for me.
I ain't coming!

cough medicine.

16 bottles in 7 days...Is that normal? When do I admit its the only thing in my life preventing me from completely breaking down.
In a lot of ways i'm grateful for the ability to numb myself with anaesthetic for £2 a bottle. In other ways I wish i'd discovered it sooner. Nothing like wasting your life laid out on your bed completely high as fuck and glazed over in your eyes. DMX, Codeine, i'll drink it all if it stops me from feeling.
I stopped looking for someone to save me and instead found an answer in the medicine cabinet.

It is soft and warm, and I am not soft or warm but I imagine that it would be nice to be that way. I have never known it. I know a cold, hard, raging fury deep inside of me and I am tired of it. I am tired of the feeling, I want to die so I don't have to feel it anymore. I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself.

"By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell -- and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed."


Is it a sign of tolerance or insanity when some of the things Hitler wrote actually make sense?

A decade of cutting away
dead flesh, cauterizing
old scars ripped open over and over
and still it is not enough.

Something was welling up inside me, clenching at my heart like a fist. Biting my lip i placed the razor shakily on the washstand and reached for the soap, fixing my eyes on the rising foam as the brush swirled round and round inside the cup. But the pressure inside me didn’t stop. It swelled between each of the knobs of my spine, pressing out between my ribs. It felt as though i might explode at any moment. My hands jerked and eyes burned,eyelids scouring them as though they were lined with sand. Frightened, I gripped the edges of the porcelain basin of water, trying to force the feelings back, but on and on they came, stronger and stronger. I could not calm down. The pressure swelled in my head, forcing itself against the fragile cap of my skull. It roared in my ears, filling my throat and nostrils till I could barely breathe. I dug my fingernails hard into my wrist, leaving white half-moons in the flesh, but felt nothing, nothing but the blackness that I could not hold back. Desperately I hurled the soap-cup across the room, saw it smash against the wall but heard nothing. And then distantly, as though I were suspended above my own body, I watched my hand reach out for the razor. The pressure inside was different already, its clotted darkness streaked with a growing sense of purpose. Very slowly, hand not quite steady, I drew the blade down my unsoaped cheek, pressing it quite deliberately into the flesh until it sliced into the skin.
         The cut was shallow but it worked with the perfect predictability of a valve on a steam engine. The release was exquisite. As the blood flowed out so too did the terrible blackness. The rush of the blood soothed me, purged me. And it showed me that I am alive. I felt elated but at the same time quite calm.

I was trying to cut myself. I wanted to cut for the cut itself, for the delicate severing of capillaries, the transgression of veins. I needed to cut the way your lungs scream for air when you swim the length of the pool underwater in one breath. It was a craving so organic it seemed to have arisen from the skin itself. Imagining the sticky-slick scarlet trails of my own blood soothed me.

this is confusion.

having 50 million things to say but not being able to explain a single one.

today is one of those cold winter days when everyone seems to be busy. they all scurry around like little ants, buying shit they don't need for christmas.

first of all i don't like christmas - the modern idea of which is centred around the notion of spend, spend, spend rather than any real values.

silly me for thinking christmas was meant to be about love and togetherness, rather than the size of your wallet.

i've never asked for anything for christmas, when i was a kid i gave all my money to the children in need appeal (this big charity night on TV where all the money goes to sick/poor children).

i've always believed that the only things worth having are those which cant be bought. what i really want for christmas is a cuddle, i want to have fun with all my friends and be happy. i want a kiss from a boy i like under the mistletoe. you can't buy what i want, and i might not get it, but it's the only thing of value to me.

This darkness. What is it but a theatre in which we work our magic; where we can express our desires and our fears, our dreams and our pain. In this dimly lit place, we seek the visions that both inspire and horrify us.

it's times like these when you know who your true friends are.
only when you're teetering on the edge do you realise who will pull you back and who will let you fall.
to the few that caught me, i love you more than words can say, if i could express my gratitude, words would not do it justice.
to those who pushed me, one day you will fall.. and i will catch you. but you will not know my soul.

there is no sunshine anymore. No laughter to warm my heart, no hope to make me think tomorrow is worth waking up for. There's no manual that tells you how to operate from absolute zero. And that's all I am. Just a shell of a person where all the empty dreams are housed.

If I took my life tonight noone would remember me. But would it matter? It would be strangely beautiful to walk amongs the snow flakes under the darkness of starlight. It would be familiar to feel as cold outside as I am inside.

My head hurts, I can barely breathe from the choking tears that engulf me in soggy stiflingly floods. I'm spoilt, I know it, and I know I should pick myself up and carry on. But what if you've been doing that your whole life? And the pain never stops. Just when you find happiness, health, love, it goes away just as quickly.

I don't want to die, I just want to feel alive. And death is the only thing that feels like living for me. At least ill be a cadaver, more good would come of my death than my life, I'm sure of it.

Lets go for a walk in the snow at 2am and hope I never have to write in this cursed fucking thing again.

Goodbye.

P.s always..x

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it:
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

At least you know you’re still alive—that’s the one great thing about post-breakup anger. You want him to drop dead—well, maybe suffer some agonizing disfigurement first—and you can’t stay his name without spitting it and you want to slap every happy couple you see on the street. Not very pretty, but it beats being numb and limp.

I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give up.

If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard—and in order to forget.

We don’t even realize it but technology is destroying the fabric of our society. More people use the Internet these days than ever. We are now socializing through boxes with virtual personalities. Gone are the days where we would actually go out to places to meet people. It’s so much easier to just log onto a chat room and create instant friends than actually having to make a concerted effort to build real life relationships. Social consciousness is now on autopilot.
         We have mass murders in High Schools, rotting polluted oceans, corrupt governments filled with greedy actors, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
         Do we need a revolution? What would we be revolting against exactly? The price of gasoline? Not enough cheese in our Big Macs? Not enough porn on cable?
         I just think it’s human nature to be selfish and miserable. We’re all just a genetic accident. We all have this disease called life and the only cure is death.

The sky
Is a suspended blue ocean.
The stars are the fish
That swim.

The planets are the white whales
I sometimes hitch a ride on,

And the sun and all light
Have forever fused themselves

Into my heart and upon
My skin.

Somewhere a seed falls to the ground
That will become a tree
That will someday be felled
From which thin shafts will be extracted
To be made into arrows
To be fitted with warheads
One of which, someday when you least expect it,
While a winter sun is shining
On a river of ice
And you feel farthest from self-pity,
Will pierce your shit-filled heart.

Heart, I told you before and twice, and three times, don’t knock at that door. No one will answer.

I write only because
there is a voice within me
that will not be still.

Excerpts from my Dead Lover's Letters

"If you loved me with all the power of your soul for a whole lifetime, you couldn't love me as much as I love you in a single day."

"I knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I love you more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. "

From his diary "I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her."

From an unsuccessful suicide letter "When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt -- we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts, my dear, then we are myths. But still we are together. We are the past together, we are a distant past. Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars, I still hear your voice."

"You are closed and shuttered to me now, a room without doors or windows, and I cannot enter. But I fell in love with you under the open sky and death cannot change that.

Death can change the body but not the heart."

It was a crippling thing, this sensation that a huge hole had been punched through my chest, excising my most vital organs and leaving ragged, unhealed gashes around the edges that continued to throb and bleed despite the passage of time. Rationally, I knew my lungs must still be intact, yet I gasped for air and my head spun like my efforts yielded me nothing. My heart must have been beating, too, but I couldn't hear the sound of my pulse in my ears; my hands felt blue with cold. I curled inward, hugging my ribs to hold myself together. I scrambled for my numbness, my denial, but it evaded me.

And yet, I found I could survive. I was alert, I felt the pain--the aching loss that radiated out from my chest, sending wracking waves of hurt through my limbs and head--but it was manageable. I could live through it. It didn't feel like the pain had weakened over time, rather that I'd grown strong enough to bear it.

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

She awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day her heart would descend from her chest into her stomach. By early afternoon she was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for her, and by the desire to be alone. By evening she was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of her grief, alone in her aimless guilt, alone even in her loneliness. I am not sad, she would repeat to herself over and over, I am not sad. As if she might one day convince herself. Or fool herself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because her life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. She would fall asleep with her heart at the foot of her bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of her at all. And each morning she would wake with it again in the cupboard of her rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping.

By the midafternoon she was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.

.

Just for future reference, don't use words like "love" anymore. It's a very sensitive word and it wears out quickly. Romeo barely says it, but John Hinckley filled up a whole journal with it. To put it into your terms, it's a currency that's easily devalued. Pretty soon you're saying it whenever you hang up the phone or whenever you leave. It turns into an apology. Then it's an excuse. Some assholes want it to be a bulletproof vest: don't hate me; I love you. But mostly it just means--more. More, more--give me something more. A couple of years from now, when you're on your own completely, if you really fall in love, if it really comes to that--and I pity you if it does--you have to look right down into the black of her eyes, right down into the emptiness in there and feel everything, absolutely everything she needs and you have to be willing to drown in it. You'd have to want to be crushed, buried alive. Because that's what real love feels like--choking. They used to bury some women in their wedding dresses, you know. I thought it was because all those husbands were too cheap to spring for another gown, but now it makes sense: love is your first foot in the grave.

It's why the second most abused word is "forever".

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment only. 
I would like to be that unnoticed
and that necessary.

Have you ever tried to use someone before? And no, I don't mean in the sense where you borrow money and don't pay it back, or hitch a ride once more that courtesy allows. I mean the real using, the kind that doesn't hurt someone's wallet, or time, but their feelings. That raw pool of internal gloop where all the hopes, dreams and fears are housed.

It turns out that it's possible to use someone without any intention. It's as simple as talking to someone, laughing with them, flirting a bit, going round to their place to watch a DVD - and BAM - it hits you. Like ice. YOU DON'T EVEN FUCKING LIKE HIM. And you realise to your own horror, that all this time you've projected your inner delusion on to this poor guy who actually genuinely likes you back -he cooked you dinner, bought your favourite drink for you at work, waited for you in the pouring rain to make sure you got back safe in the dark to your car. And you realise in that instant that even if he was Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp - even some divine cross breed of the two - that you wouldn't want to kiss him. Because your heart isn't your own any more, it's his. And as much as he doesn't love you, you can't erase your feelings with the power of thought. As much as you want to turn a light off and it go out, love isn't like that.

I'm no less capable of loving him than the earth is capable of breaking out of it's orbit from around the sun. And with realisation of that comes the utter devastation of the powerless. The familiar slide into nihilism that comes over me with a melancholy comfort. A blanket of thorns over which I wrap this wretched thing that used to be my heart. 

I don't know if the worst thing was realising that I used him, or the afterthought of complete loneliness and longing for someone I can never have. Desire isn't new to me. If willpower alone could have resurrected a corpse, I would have done it by now. But there is no magic, there is no happy ending, and I know that more than anyone. 

I'm so tired of being the person stood on the sidelines, looking in at all the happy people, with their perfect cookie-cutter lives. Married, kids, a house, well travelled, and most of all HAPPY. Why oh WHY can't that be me?! Was I put on this earth as a study into human misery? 

The rage of maddening thoughts pounded my head so fucking hard that I felt like laying down on the floor of John's apartment and dying. Not even doing anything to aid the act, just lying their, eyes closed, refusing to eat or drink until this is all over.

No more broken heart.

No more longing.

No more sadness.

I knew I couldn't take another instant of this. That I could NOT be me for a second longer. As if another instant would detonate me. End me.

So I called up an old friend (read: dealer), and within 30 minutes I'd snorted 5 lines of coke off the kitchen table. It's comforting to know that divinity can be achieved for £50. White powder brings me immortality. When i'm high on coke the world is my play thing. I'm immortal. I can drive my car as fast as I like through the streets and no-one dare stop me. And most of all, everyone loves me, even you. And for a fleeting moment, i'm actually happy.

Ah, the sweetness of illusion. The bitterness of waking up from my cocaine high, ashamed and alone. Without you. You won't even speak to me, and I cry into my pillow. Just like last night.

And i just want more coke. Not because i'm addicted. But because it's the only place you love me.

my people

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.

It would solve a thousand problems if I rolled the car over an embankment. It's not like I haven't thought about it, you know. On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive- the sum of the parts equals more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart.

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.

But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

i spoke to god.
but he never spoke back to me.

How many cuts could I count? How many could I place in time and context? I had to admit that I couldn’t remember the occasion of almost any of them, their catalysts, whether epic or mundane, completely obscured by time. So many moments of supposedly unendurable pain, now utterly forgotten. You start to think, Maybe I don’t need this anymore. Maybe I never did.

I stopped cutting because I always could have stopped cutting; that’s the plain and inelegant truth. No matter how compelling the urge, the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the urge, but the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the flood tide of emotions that drove me to that brink, but I had the power to decide whether or not to step over. Eventually I decided not to.

Stopping, however, was not at all the same thing as ending the desire. Even now, I still sometimes ache with a fierce, organic need for cutting’s seductive, minimalist simplicity. I expect that I will always be the kind of person who is too much aware of the boundlessness of chaos; it’s like having an unfortunate sixth sense, alive to the teeming, invisible undercurrents of anarchy streaming past us as every moment. I don’t say it makes me stronger, or more interesting, or gives me character; it’s just a part of my fabric of self.

When I met him nothing was ever the same again.

The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape: the air never smelt the same, food never tasted the same. Every word I knew changed its meaning, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind, and every puff of wind became a solid thing I could feel and touch.


Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.


How to seperate the humiliation from the loss, that's the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected.


None of this is important in itself, but I feel somewhere that it has a lot to do with why I have always felt separate, why I have always felt unable to join in, to let go, to become part of the tribe, why I have always sniped or joked from the sidelines, why I have never, ever, lost my overwhelmingly self-conscious self-consciousness.

It's not all that bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.


Thank you, to my sculptors x

"fade out again".. the droaning lyrics of radiohead meld into my brain, taking me to an autumnal place of dreary white walls, clouds so thick you can't see the stars and a thin vail of persistant drizzle. 

not enough to drown my soul with inner turmoil. but enough to make it indecently wet to the point that it's possible to catch pneumonia, and suffer a long, agonising and painful slide into desecration, then enevitable death.

how i love radiohead. so cheerful.

the onlooker.

I like looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there's a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I stop and look so hard I never forget.

I learn a lot of things I would have never learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprise me or make me sick, I never let on, but pretend that's the way i knew things were all the time.

everytime i get sick, i get scared that im dying. please, not again. please.

take me as i am.
or throw me aside
in your brown paper dreams.

i am not an iron railing,
you cannot lean on me.
i am not the wind,
i will not let you see me sigh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIbepKZC7Po

it's calm in the eye of the tornado.

is it worth feeling like nothing. in order to be your something.

my faithful poison

It felt so good. It made me feel light, free. ... I suppose I should feel ashamed, or disappointed in myself. It’s like a relapse into old, familiar, self-destructive blackness. I had been doing so well, and now I’m back to where I started from. But wrist-slashing is a kind of anchor for me, a sense of safety and security, even though I know it means I’m not well. It’s like a person returning to a mental institution that she spent a considerable amount of time in. It’s good to be out, she knows it’s the right thing. But it’s terrifying when people deem you mentally healthy, because that’s how you appear, when you know you’re not. And returning to the asylum means returning to safety and familiarity. It’s a sense of liberation, for it enables you to return to what you’ve always been, rather than being imprisoned in the social constructs of the outside world, where you must build a new (and sometimes false) life for yourself. Wrist-slashing is me. It is the reaffirmation that something is wrong with me, when other people and I start mistakenly believing that I’m okay. It’s a significant part of my identity. Apart from making me feel good in a “hooray, I’m back!” sort of way, it also enabled me to bleed the hurt and anger I feel towards [him] out of my system. It enabled me to simultaneously become purer than him (for he has been dirtied in my eyes) and tainted like him.

bring me to life with a kiss.

you could have it all
my empire of dirt
i will let you down
i will make you hurt

NIN- Hurt

nothing profound, but still a revolution

its funny, maybe there is a cure to depression. and maybe it's one that's been staring me in the face the whole time. it involves going out into the world and attacking it each day head on. giving every bit of yourself to your job, your friends, your family. educating yourself in culture, literature, music. becoming the best version of you that you can be.

maybe it's wishful thinking. or maybe, just maybe, this is the start of my life turning around..

..probably manic optimism.. even when im optimistic i'm a pessimist! natural order restored..

Love hurts. I say that because I know. Love is... or was amazing. It's an incredible feeling to know what he's going to say. It's more incredible the way he has me on the edge of my seat because he's so completely random, I never know what's coming next. It's hard to explain, but he filled some void in me, and now, without him, I'm missing something again. I wonder if it will ever truly, whole heartedly be filled again. I just don't want to know what it's like to hurt any more...

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

It is impossible to think that I shall never sit with you again and hear your laugh. That every day for the rest of my life you will be away.

letter from dave to me

B,

I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems to best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight it any longer, I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that –everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been..

D x

The logic of suicide is different. It is like the unanswerable logic of a nightmare, or like the science-fiction fantasy of being projected suddenly into another dimension: everything makes sense and follows its own strict rules; yet, at the same time, everything is also different, perverted, upside down. Once a man decides to take his own life he enters a shut-off, impregnable but wholly convincing world where every detail fits and each incident reinforces his decision.

The world of the suicide is superstitious, full of omens. Freud saw suicide as a great passion, like being in love: “In the two opposed situations of being most intensely in love and of suicide, the ego is overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways.” As in love, things which seem trivial to the outsider, tiresome or amusing, assume enormous importance to those in the grip of the monster, while the sanest arguments against it seem to them simply absurd. 

You never lied to me. You said your love wouldn't last forever, and that you were too pure for this world. At the time I thought it only words, a wasp in the night that would freeze with the first autumn frost. But your wasp never died. You kept it locked away in a jar inside yourself, and as the days dragged to months and to years you let it eat away at you.

Me and you. We weren't just lovers. We were two people trying to lick away the dirt.

who are you to think that you know me?
who are you to throw your stupid beige life into the path of mine and expect me to step around you, rather than walk straight through.

i am not charitable.
i am not kind.
i do not suffer fools gladly, and when i walk over you i will not apologise for it. no-one apologised to me.

if you step too close i will burn you, so unless you want to be set on fire by my negativity i suggest, sir, that you get out of the ring.

unless of course, i'm worth burning with.

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more.

"Do you like me as I am now?" The bluish whites of Dave's eyes were like a question mark on his pale face. he seemed to have stored up a wave of courage in preperation for this chat. "Naturally, you needn't lie".

"How long have we known each other? It's almost 4 years, but it seems much longer, and we'll last a century, ten thousand years because I love you. But if you don't hurry up and get well...I can't think" I reply.

He looked at me with steel before saying "If one day I die - no don't interrupt me, I mean when I die, at that instant when I close my eyes never to open them again, what kind of a person will you think I've been?"

I didn't want to eat any more. My tongue had lost all feeling and my stomach was numb too. Separated by the plates, glasses and forks, we held each others eyes for a long time. The whites of his eyes turned bluer until, as the playwrite Joan Hawkes put it, 'they oozed a misty liquid'.

"I will H-A-T-E you", I enunciated clearly.

"Death is the expression of exhaustion, a solution arrived at rationally once one has known the deepest depths of tiredness. I've thought about it for a long time, perhaps all my life, and having thought it through, i'm not ashamed of dying. A person like me can't go on constantly polluting himself, annihilating his soul". he jabbed the left side of his chest with his finger, but it would have looked more natural if he'd used a dagger.

"It's an impulse in the dark of the soul. psychologists always say impulses are dangerous and discourage them, but an impulse comes uninvited". His voice was crystal clear and cool, his lips pale and unemotional. despite the impersonal pronoun he was talking about himself.

My despair turned to anger. "I'm not going to bullshit you. In one work, you're degenerate".

"Perhaps. the dying never have the chance to explain themselves to the living. Actually, a lot of people are even more degenerate". I clutched his hand. cold as ice.

"What are we talking about for god's sake? Don't go on. Why do we have to talk about something so horrible here and now? Don't tell me about life and death, love and hate, the ego and the id. We're alive together, aren't we? If there's something you don't like abou our life: get specific: I talk in my sleep, my novel isn't profound enough - it's utter rubbish -whatever. OK! I can change; I can try and do things perfectly. But for heaven's sake, don't say such horrible things..I'm always dreaming of finding wings and soaring inbto the sky with you, but you're always thinking of abandoning me and leaping into hell. Why?"

A lot of people were looking our way. I raised my head and saw myself in the mirror: frantic tear filled eyes, and a fierce expression. I felt really idiotic. We so obviously loved one another.

"Bev". Dave's face remained absolutely sombre. "right from the start we were too different sorts of people, I said so at the time. But that hasn't stopped us loving each other.; you so full of energy and ambition and me devoid of desire, drifting with the tide. philosophers say "everything originates in nothingness" and nothingness accentuates everything"

I interrupt. "whoever the hell said that can drop dead! Don't read those books any more. You need to be amongst living, breathing human beings. You need to do my physical work. My Dad often says "Work makes a person healthy". You needsunlight and grass , and dreams and happiness and all the joy that goes with them. For starters tomorrow you should go to that damn detox centre" I said crying, the mirrors on the wall were a blur.

He hugged me then. "You're crazy". he took out a tissue and gave it me to dry my eyes. I looked at him through my fog of tears. "i am crazy, because you are too".

That night we barely closed our eyes. We kissed through the night, and the bitterness of our saliva filled the room. Our bed drifted in the boundless sea like a lonely island in imminent danger. We took refuge in each others love.

What a time. What a long lonely time. I never knew the days could stretch out so endlessly. Stretch so far I think they’ll break, but they only heave and sag. The weight of them bears down on me mercilessly. I wake … into another day of dread. Dread with no name or face. Nothing to fight with my body or wits. Just a gnawing gripping fear. So hard and heavy. I can’t breathe. I can’t swallow.
       
The emptiness of my depression turns to grief, then to numbness and back again. My world is filled with underwater voices, people, lists of things to do. They gurgle and dart in and out of my vision and reach. But they are so fast and slippery that I can never keep up. Every inch of me aches. I can’t believe that a person can hurt this bad and still breathe. All escapes are illusory—distractions, sleep, drugs, doctors, answers, hope…

The sky
Is a suspended blue ocean.
The stars are the fish
That swim.

The planets are the white whales
I sometimes hitch a ride on,

And the sun and all light
Have forever fused themselves

Into my heart and upon
My skin.

two souls colliding.
do you feel it too?

i feel unclean.

you cling to me like sulphur, and no matter what i do to mask it i can't escape your stench.

like fog on a winter morning you envelop me, suffocate me, drown me.

i want to flush you away.

like an unwanted tattoo that's malevolent presence taunts my skin, i want to cut you out. 

you are not part of me any more, yet you cling to me.

no matter how many times i wash my hands, your blood never comes out. 

i want to fuck just to forget you. as if by being someone else's you will magically lose your place in my heart.

it's like you left.

but you never undid the handcuffs.

i don't want to be yours any more, and this is one prison from which i'm finding it hard to escape.

separated
two magnets, swinging, circling, repulsing, attracting,
wanting, needing, hurting
separated
by your vision
you unchanging, trying to move toward me
through the storm of my ever-changing emotions
to leave me
to loathe me
to ignore me
i will deal
but what do I do with this love?

i thought
how nice it would be to be here with you
and then I thought
how much better it is to be here
with someone who wants to be with me.

they'll say it's sad,
she killed herself at 24,
how tragic.

but im lucky.
i get to be part of the air
flowers will grow from parts of me
that burnt with apathy.
i will be the stars,
the dirt under your feet,
the bird in the sky.
you'll swim in my oceans,
and dance to my songs.

i'm not dead.
i'm born.

i wish i was you.

anyone.

i wish i could trade places.

i hate moaning about my life. but it's like you were given a royal flush and i have all the 2's. no matter how i play the hand i'm dealt i cannot win.

time to step away from the table.

eyes of ether, i stare back at you, with streaked charcoal tear marks down the pinkest of cheeks. 

i look like decay. 

scars on my arms fade like diamonds embedded in sand, moments of clarity sinking back into sagging puddles of disregard.

externally i'm placid, inside i burn. 

i'm disfigured, a cripple of my own self hatred.

i want the lights to go out.

i want to take all the pills. feel my kidneys ache with analgesia. nausea in my belly. before i lie down with you in my mind and take my final sleep. 

i hope to dream. 

i hope to hope.

please wake me up from this nightmare. 

ah, if only words could scream. 

Meet an empty space,
it wasn’t empty in the beginning,
but it is burned for so long,
that its contents
have long been extinguished.
All that are left are the scars
from the burning
with the odd flick of fire
from time to time
to make sure the contents can’t grow again…

Since you walked out on me
I’m getting lovelier by the hour.
I glow like a corpse in the dark.
No one sees how round and sharp
my eyes have grown
how my carcass looks like a glass urn,
how I hold up things in the rags of my hands,
the way I can stand through crippled by lust.
No, there’s just your cruelty circling
my head like a bright rotting halo.

I don’t know whether you’re young or not. I sort of hope you’re young and sad. If you’re old and happy, I can imagine that you’ll maybe smile to yourself when you hear me going, He broke my heart. You’ll remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the Embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach? Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? Can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that he was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again? Can you remember carving his initials in your arm with a kitchen knife? Can you remember standing too close to the edge of train platform? No? Well, fucking shut up, then. Stick your smile up your saggy old arse.

That which I have dreamed is always very far from that which I am able to hold fast and write down on paper. An artist seems to me to be a man who looks at beauty through a pair of glasses which, as he breathes, becomes clouded over and veils the beauty he sees. He takes his handkerchief. He cleans his glasses. He sees clearly again. But at the first breath the absolute beauty disappears. It is only the veil, the approximation, that we can perceive.

please don’t let me stop thinking and start blindly frightenedly accepting! I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain, and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out..

I suppose being raped and left for dead will add a sobering though to any 4-years old's life. But I am certain that even before that memorable incident I could never really suppress bleak thoughts, especially the most inopportune ones, a habit that has persisted. For instance: called upon to view a friend’s newborn baby, the precious bundle from which protrude adorable bits of infant anatomy, I always find myself wondering (even as my voice supplies the requisite pleasantries) whether it will grow up to be force-fed human excrement and drowned in a barracks latrine, as uncounted Russian Jews were in the Second World War. Or else is it destined to die of a drug overdose at seventeen, choke to death in a restaurant in its thirties, or fall victim to a hit-and-run driver while walking the dog? In short, there is nothing like the sight of a new life to make me wonder how it will end. This must be one of those yardsticks of a person’s basic character, like the one that supposedly distinguishes optimists from pessimists (is the glass half full or half empty?). Is this baby alive or merely laggard in its dying? It does add a dimension of pity to what is otherwise a flat and goofy spectacle of inapprehensive love. And I am powerless to stop it.

Since you walked out on me
I’m getting lovelier by the hour.
I glow like a corpse in the dark.
No one sees how round and sharp
my eyes have grown
how my carcass looks like a glass urn,
how I hold up things in the rags of my hands,
the way I can stand through crippled by lust.
No, there’s just your cruelty circling
my head like a bright rotting halo.

I’m leaving.

You didn’t make me suffer
so you needn’t expect
my hatred.
That would be too splendid
and important a gift.
You’re not worth anything
as precious
as a shred of living flesh.

I’ve killed
your presence within me,
easily.

I’m cleansed.
I’m dancing a festive dance of murder.