Burn

 There’s a rage within me.

Isn’t it funny the power we hold when decisions narrow? I’ve always been good in a corner. Maybe this all happened because for a moment I was less desperate, though the end result is not so. It’s ugly and clawing, like the spasming of a felled doe. I’d much rather be the one to shoot the arrow. There’s this tar stuck to my kindness. Kindness survives. Even when teeth are bared and knuckles white. An anguish tainted fealty. Loyalty to something that may continue on when I have not felt it so easy. 

In friendship there’s safety, in softness a place to land and grow. I still value these things. But I’d like to be so viscerally angry that my eyes set ablaze. That my heart becomes fire rather than this sputtering dying thing. I don’t think survival has to be pretty. But to be warm, to dream. Rather than to sleep. 

Thanks Shakes. I think I smoke to not only remember the dead but to die. I realised that looking at my knife. He said he learnt to enjoy being. I only feel that when I’m naked alone in my bed, fresh sheets whispering over skin, my feet curling with an innocent tactile sort of bliss. That doesn’t incentivise great movement. Maybe I lied. 

Cold water on my face. 

Learning. 

Sheets. 

The idea of worshipping a human without overtake of my own humanity. 

Kisses, with love. 

The slack jawed warmth of an animal that sleeps next to you without fear.

To be a warm animal that is safe. 

To be warm.

To be safe. 

HCG doubles every 24 hours after conception. Most miscarriages occur within the first six weeks. Modern science means we have access to a grief that we’ve never known before. For three days I knew. And on the third day— when it had sunk in, I pictured a life. Difficult but with direction. With warmth and I felt it move through my body with a certainty I haven’t felt in years. They were my next corner. The unlikeliness of it. When irresponsibility doesn’t have the full follow through. I thought life, which has taken so much, was giving something back. Is it grief or a dream? Grief of a dream? The blood was a full stop. And I can’t work out if that’s why I want to die, or if it’s always been there. Or if the only reason it happened was because I’ve been dead for years. Were they a spark igniting or the final fizzling of that warmth? I wonder who they would have been. I wonder who I would have been. 

I say I always write these when grief overwhelms. Well it’s here now, in this odd grey. And my experience will only be a whisper, in a backstreet, behind a door. I want to scream. Do they live through me? Did they ever? 

Will I burn? 

I also always write these with an odd mournful hope that someone will read them. And see me. Well, fuck you, someone. This one’s for me.