I’m just going to lie here and try to remember that I am an okay person and all the pain and darkness in the world is not my fault and does not need to live within my skin. I’m just going to lie here and feel the tension of public life like a child trying to decide whether to tell the adults about the bad things happening, wondering what it costs me to be honest or to keep secrets, in my heart I’m walking the ocean alone by the sea grass and the pelican bones and I’m so flooded with ghosts I’m choking on them.

I’m just going to lie here and try to follow instructions, recall my successes and my skills, feel them in my body in my breath, in the bones of me, really feel them. I’m just going to try and stop the avalanche of self hate and darkness and failure that’s killing me that’s making so much noise I can’t hear the sound of my own tears falling or the breaking of my heart.

I’m just going to lie here and breathe and remember that I’m not alone and that my darkness is not even mine, it is ours, that I’ve borrowed it from one neighbor and it will pass from me onto another, that it climbs in the chest of all people on one night or another and turns us in violent panic against ourselves.

As I lie here I can feel myself moving in and out of anguish like the tide or waves of darkness or sex or rape. Self hate changes to deep sadness, to a howl of anguish that is somehow cleaner and deeper a wound but cut so far into the heart of me I can’t bear it and go back to self hate and the drums of war in my flesh.

Some days all my dreams are broken ships or wounded satellites, falling. I find myself walking a strange world dressed with lies I can’t believe and people who cannot love or speak the truth. My hands shed despair like skin or shadows and I remember that this is part of what it is to be alive, the anguish in the night and the sad wild cry of gulls and the body broken. I withe on my rack because we do not do pain in public in our world, we do not howl at graves or beat our breasts at funerals, we do not cry at work or scream at school or cut ourselves on campus or we’ll be escorted off and banned and no one minds terribly if you kill yourself as long as you don’t do it on public property or let your kids find you. It’s a strange and broken world and I’m just going to lie here. I’m just going to lie here.