Tonight I’m deeply sad. Treading water, far from land, memories that chill me slowly numb. Wrists that want to weep. The comfort of self destruction, mind turning over all the most delicious ways to die. Riding it down as night falls in my heart, as winter falls, as the sirens call to me with their tongues like knives and I find myself wishing for blades, wishing for someone who would beat me until I could cry and melt the frozen place in my heart. Some part of my mind separate from the engulfing despair, enough control to get the car safely home, no kissing trees with bumpers, enough to shuffle us into bed with inks and books as substitutes for blood and torture and loneliness.

I have memories of love and brokenness, some nights the ghosts rise from graves and their chill comes over me and I’m haunted by that which once comforted me. Smaller losses evoke larger ones, the petty indifference of day calls to the memories of an indifference so large and collective it tore spirit from flesh, it first sang blood into my life.

My inks speak to me and for me and of me and of pain. Sleep aches in my bones like desire, in rest will I be sanctified? [‘I went to reach a pannikin off the shelf, in it was a dead man’s brains’] I’m standing in a field of snow, enchanted by glitter until I realise it’s glass dust from a lifetime of broken dreams. The secret seems to be to love anyway, to be willing to bleed, to dream just one time more. It’s ground into my skin, in the light I have a halo, in the mirror I’m an angel with a scarred face and ruined breasts, ink running from my mouth.

Love, I say to her, darling, (they don’t give a f**k about you, like I do) this is my spirit which was broken for you, put your fingers into my palms and believe.