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