when im alone youre all i think about

but im never alone very long

how we are haunted, how we are cured

"I sit on the subway hold
my hand. You are not the only one who
goes home and thinks about killing yourself."

"Elsa, what is mourning and can it be
learned. Elsa, how we start to tear from
the middle. When I forget who I am
I put on pearls and spray my perfume. The
only narrative I have running through
my head is I need someone to kiss me.
Like boats shaped like birds set to the west, her
heart will never be rid of its ghosting."

angela veronica wong

“My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance--this is why people tell me secrets--my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is ever lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound.” 

“We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.” 

we always had world enough

oh, but time

So don't you say to me
That life's a trap
The future is nothing but a tragedy
'cause I'll be out of that window
Yeah, I'll start wishing to die again
Just say we're not walking backwards, kid
And show me to the door
And I'll walk behind
Out into the hot sunlight
Where the world's very much alive
Even when I close my eyes

600 days of sobriety today

mostly thinking about how i used to drink myself to sleep because my heartbeat was too loud

how i drank to still the world when it became overwhelming, to still my brain

how easy it was to create distance, from other people and myself

remembering something someone wrote about addicts and how there is a lack of true connection between us and other people and the world when we are actively addicted. "they have about them the air of elsewhere, that they're looking through you to somewhere else they'd rather be". and of course, that's exactly what we're doing. it's always been about escape. fucked up to think that at the base of it the main reason that i drank for a decade straight was because i was in so much psychic pain that the world sober was literally unbearable.

there is a widely-accepted belief that addiction is messy, loud, unavoidable. that self-harm is so strange and sad and against nature that one who carries it out must be manic, obviously quite mad, forgetting themselves, out of their minds and having public breakdowns. that it will always be unavoidably noticeable to those who interact with the addicted person.
it was always very quiet for me. it was always very methodological. it stilled the world. i'd never stopped time like that before. i've never stopped time like that since. public downward spirals are the face of addiction, but the quiet spaces are where i damaged myself the most successfully. i needed those quiet spaces. no longer feeling the weight of having to appear functional to the waking world, no longer feeling the weight of trying to keep up with a life that was outrunning me. no longer feeling any weight at all

a famous psychologist said that the goal of all life is death. that self destruction is the way in which we express our inescapable 'death instincts'. the only way to beat it is if your 'life instincts' are stronger.
mine never were.
if you chase destruction, the 'elsewhere', you'll always find it.

realising that i haven't kissed anyone in over 6 months, haven't slept with anyone in even longer

alone but not lonely

for the first time in a long time i belong completely and wholly to myself. feeling both the strength and the weight of it

I had done so much injury with this body. How could I want to preserve any of it for eternity, and suddenly I remembered a phrase of Richard’s - about human beings inventing the doctrines to satisfy their desires, and I thought how wrong he is. If I were to invent a doctrine it would be that the body was never born again, that it rotted with last year’s vermin. It’s strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum’s swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there. Well, the pendulum swung today and I thought, instead of my own body, of Maurice’s. I thought of certain lines life had put on his face as personal as a line of his writing: I thought of a new scar on his shoulder that wouldn’t have been there if once he hadn’t tried to protect another man’s body from a falling wall. He didn’t tell me why he was in hospital those three days: Henry told me. That scar was part of his character as much as his jealousy. And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour (mine yes, but his?), and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity. But could my vapour love that scar? Then I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar. We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can even love with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

i mean...

throughout it all, every single stupid fucked up thing i've ever done, i never wanted to hurt anybody except myself

the innocent-bystander effect, i guess