love turbulence

love on the receiving end of instability

I don’t remember when I realized that I loved badly. I love like it hurts, because it does. I love like I’m scared, because I am. I keep making mistakes and then surprising myself after I see the consequences. I turn the scissors inward and pull at the skin beneath my belly button.

I look at myself in the mirror and see a girl pretending to play a grown-up. I look twelve. I have sunken eyes and a skinny frame. The skinny that makes everyone worry about you. I have a small face, small hands, small hips, and thin legs. Nothing about me looks of age.

The sharp blades move to the waist of my stomach. I suck in a breath. I want to cut myself like a paper doll.

Intimacy unhinged feels like a frostbite after you’ve had ice cream. Sweet. Tingling. Cold and death strewn. It’s when being on the recieving end of the blade feels warm.

How much more can I push your hand into me? I ask you how much you want, and I’m ready to give it all; ready to lay myself on the floor like a dead body at a morgue. You kiss me and something sparkles. It feels like frozen sugar water on my lips.

I touch the places where you put your hands. I bring my hands up to my hair, my ribcage, my waist, my hips, my arms, my neck. But something is missing. Something always is.

I want I want I want I want.

I am sick of wanting.

I let my coffee sit out too long. It’s cold now. Everything is.

Why does November feel like the end of everything? What if it is?

I can be sad about so many things.

My rigid opinions on the things I used to dislike became the things I incorporated into my life. I am morphing into some other kind of person. I’m so large and heavy. Everything feels like too much at once.

On the way back home, to the city where I met you, I pay attention to the long stretches of barren road. Washington is so gloomy. Everything turns into a greyscale. This time of year, I forget what color nature is supposed to be. It feels like color becomes an abstract sort of thing, like you’re colorblind. I got used to thinking that the world is only theoretical in color.

There’s a pit in the center of my stomach and I make jokes about all the kinds of things that changed. I tell people that I think the definition of love for me warped, and I laugh like it’s not a viscerally destructive thing; like I don’t lay awake at night and wonder why I have to experience love fed to me by the teaspoon, only for it to be retracted again. You reach, then withdraw, then reach again. I don’t know when it started to feel like a game.

I can’t remember when I started seeing the pattern. You say sorry like you mean it, but then it’s like you forget what apologizing even means. I watch the way your eyes move. I wait for you by the lamp light. I say, are you going to sleep here tonight? And you turn the other way and walk out the door and say, I don’t think so. I act like it’s fine, when everything is not fine, and then I wake up in the morning and you’re suddenly acting like before. But then you remember you’re not supposed to be.

I tell my therapist I want to get over you. She makes me go through a worksheet and then asks me all kinds of questions about what worked and what didn’t.

I tell her it’s like being on a seesaw. You’re up, then you’re down, then you’re up again. I don’t tell her that I don’t blame you, because how could I? You’ve never known love that didn’t come from the end of a knife.

What else are you mourning? She asks.

I stare at the bowl of candies on the table, at the red cinder blocks. My eyes see nothing important. I feel like nothing important.

Me, I say.

I want myself back. The version of myself that didn’t know what it was like to wonder if you still thought of someone else when you touched me. The version that didn’t feel like sacrificial slaughter, left to rot at the hanging post.

Someone else looks back at me when I look in the mirror, now. I’m wearing a different face. My voice sounds different. I look at my hands and picture hers. I look at my eyes and picture you seeing her in them. I don’t know when I started comparing myself to her. I kept thinking there wasn’t enough of me. I kept thinking about how when we stayed up at night, it was always because you were trying to look for her.

Was she there? Was she in your head? Did you see her in my eyes? Did you wish I could be her? And have her hands, her waist, her skin, her lips? How did you feel when you rammed a shaky hand into my ribcage, slotting in between the bone and my skin, and came up empty? How did it feel when you turned to me, and she was nowhere to be found?

You always wanted me to be someone else, I think.

I guess, in a way, so did I.

I thought about her in my dreams. I kept waking up, afraid, thinking that I woke up with the pain of it all on my face. I tore open, slow at first, then all at once, and you kept withdrawing.

I spun stories out of the emptiness. I made excuses for you. For myself. I forgave everything I said I would never forgive. I waited. I kept waiting.

One day I looked into your eyes, and you had disappeared. By the time I realized, you were already gone. You had already left. Slow, and then all at once.

When do you know it’s time to give up? When should you?

Another woman’s children will have your eyes. Another woman will get to see you smile. She’ll get to wake up and lean over and look at you and hear your voice in the morning before the curtains have been drawn. She’ll remember the octave, the cadence. She’ll remember how you say things when you’re angry, when you’re happy, when you’re over it. She’ll get a happy relationship.

You’ll fight, surely. There’ll be arguments and cruelty. Surely. Even in the angriest moments, when she’s spitting fire at fire, and you’re looking at her, will you weigh two hypotheticals in your mind? Me or her? I laugh at myself even writing it. There’s no question.

Love is funny. I think we were happy, maybe. But you’d rather have a hundred lifetimes of unhappiness with her than a single lifetime of happiness with me. She is the love of your life, the face of your desire. You will not even consider me when you hold her again.

These are the kinds of things I think about while I wait for the bus. Everything is grey. Lifeless. I don’t hear the birds anymore. When the bus rounds the corner, I think about how hope gets you nowhere. Nothing I think of will change the fact I’ve been fighting a losing battle.

I had a dream once and I asked myself if I’d do it again. Of course, I would.

I’m a heartbreak addict. I would chase anything that made me burn from the inside out. I’d ram myself into a wall; play with fire for as long as I could; watch myself crumble just so I could pick myself up again and hurl myself into the flames once more.

Let me confess something else. I have been lying to everyone I know.

What I hide is that I want love, so close, but I can live without it. I did, for many years. As full as I try to appear, something inside me is cold and dead, and it rots inside me the more the years go by. I remember it’s there when I say something I shouldn’t and realize I’m stuffing myself with the crumbs of love from other people. I think I’m always going to be the sort of person who’s always empty, somehow.

The truth is, I’m selfish. Greedy. I wanted the feeling more than I wanted you. I was hungry, but with you, I always came up empty; always looking for more, always thinking of boys I’ve known in the past. You don’t know how much I begged; for my sake and not yours. Out of my emptiness and not yours. I fall whim to my feelings. I would get down on my knees for anything that looked at me long enough. That’s my secret — I run, and I hide, and I lie about everything, and I skin myself just for a small taste of something I’ve always been hungry for. Something I never get to taste and feel satisfied with.

I want the things that hurt me to make sense. I want to get out of my head, turn outward, and push myself into the worst possible outcome of my life just because I can.

Imposing suffering on myself gives me the ability to blame myself and hurt myself simultaneously. It gives me a stronger grip on my autonomy. But what do I do with it? I see it as an abstraction of blurry lines, and I cross every one of them. I tempt myself. I gnaw at myself. I chip and chip into myself — Do this better. You’re doing that wrong. You’ll never be good enough.

The individual violence I inflict on myself becomes a catalyst. I make excuses for why I do things, but in reality, I ruin myself just to see how I could do it differently next time. I’m so obsessed with perfection; I’d overcompensate in a hundred lifetimes just to get it right in one. Perpetual perfection-seeking is the only strategy I know.

There is stability in self-destruction, after all.

When I went back to campus, I told you that if things were different, I’d have stopped talking to you long before I went back. I was being sincere. There’s very little I’m naturally good at, but pushing people away — until they’re so far I can’t even see their shadow — that’s always been my specialty.

There are times when I’m making my way to the grocery store, under an increasingly shifting navy-colored sky, and I want to burst into tears. Mostly, because of my self-imposed loneliness. Partly, because sometimes I think I’m ruining my life, and I don’t know how to stop. I can’t even trust myself enough to believe that it’s not something I want.

I play this game sometimes. I call it: how small can you go? It’s tragic, in retrospect, but I play it constantly. I keep track of things in my head. I count how many mistakes I make in conversation. I keep track of how many awkward silences and pauses happen in group discussions. Is my voice calm enough? Am I saying the right things? Do I look open and welcoming? I test my kindness. Am I nice enough? Do I say, ‘Thank you,’ and ‘You’re welcome,’ enough times? The game goes on and on. I bet low on myself and then bet even lower. I please people to make myself tinier in comparison. I tally up how often I suppress my anger. I count how many hours I spend suffering and counteract it by trying to be overly happy. I’m trying to win a game against myself. I’m losing.

Now I’m nineteen and what have I gotten? More teeth than tongue? Legs sticking sweaty to the sheets? Wound sticky, rib gone. Am I going to swell and fall, again and again? I can make anything poetic if I try hard enough.

Like: The sound of a sigh in the dark. The heavy-hitting pulse on your wrist the lower you got to the thigh gap in between my legs. The dark cloud in your eyes when I knew you wanted to melt and melt. The sound of the cars driving past once you are half-inside me. The ghost in the light. The dim rust in my eyes. The tearing me open, removing the top first. Sweat-soaked skin. Scuffed hands. Moonlight on your shoulders. You unfurl me, hand me a pair of pliers, and say open yourself up. And I do. And we’ve never done it drunk but we’ve done it high, and I saw sparks in my eyes and thought they were fireworks. Knots in a chord. Untangle me, you ask. And I do. Softly, you say, ‘lie still, lie still.’ I have a comforting place to lay my head. You sleep to the left. The fan whirls.

I can’t help but look up at the ceiling and think about how, now, I will never be clean. It excites me. My body became half of yours. I gave it to you. I knew you were going to leave, so I tried to kiss you harder.

Your love slowly killed me. But that’s okay, because I realized I like the feeling of dying. It keeps me alive.

I realized the person I loved was not the person I thought it’d be, and I didn’t trust you to love me in a way I would enjoy. In a way that would make the hunger in me - so desperate and annihilating - calm. You were better than the both of us, even if you loved me weak and wrong. I know that because it takes a certain kind of self-hatred to want to break your own heart as many times as I do. I thought if I handed over my body, something interesting would happen.

I cried on the staircase, and I think that’s when my body became your body. I told you that I’m always sad and I don’t know why. You made me laugh. I think you’re more joyful thank you think.

You kissed me for the first time that night. You were careful not to look at me too intently.

You loved softly, at first. You said, talk to me, I’ll have the answers. And then you kept forgetting and remembering and forgetting again. You said I’ll heal the spots where the spiders crawl on your spine and leave behind bruises. And then you forgot again. Something turned into nothing. You said, talk to me. I became a pinwheel and a gravestone. I held out hope and didn’t. You said, I just need space. You were miles and miles away. How much more space do you need? I said, okay, sorry for waking you up. And I cried all night and realized I had dissolved too much into you.

We talked about swans once and you told me that they mate for life. I laughed and told you I thought it was romantic, but I knew. You weren’t thinking of me. That’s okay, I guess. At least we both knew.

I’m scared you’ll pick up the phone one day and I’ll see your number on my screen and the urge to consume will rush back in. Eat me, I’ll beg. And I’ll let you.

Did I ever tell you that all this love I give out is only sacrificial? I keep trying to fill empty spaces. I keep flinging myself into the fire hoping it makes the sadness go away. It never does.

I’m hungry again. I’m thinking of how to ruin myself this time.

I don’t need love, but I want it, because to me love is a noose, and I’ve always thought about death more than anything else.