A letter from Mar 26, 2025

it feels as if the world has fallen apart a little. you have been rejected so many times the salt in your wounds barely stings. days blur into one anachronistic non-sequeter of a life, months which I hope have been mercifully blacked out by memory. memory is kind like that, shrowding your pain in mysticism and nostalgia until it does not feel sharp, like being nailed to a cross, but instead like the dull throb of a headache. an old friend. you have wept, and choked, and cussed and clawed at your face. you have deemed the world your worst enemy and then forgiven it twelve times over. you have held your palms open and slit down the middle, where your life line is, held then towards the sky and screeched at a god that will not hear you. you have prayed, and repented and spewed blasphemy all in one day - and have come to know your god as indifferent. you have looked in the mirror and watched your face melt into something barely recognisable, jagged and hollowed like a canyon, lips cracked and skin flaky like the sand of the desert, eyes wet like the only rainfall of the season. you have smoked your lungs black and coughed up strings of red tinted saliva down the porcelain sink and you've sat bare *** on the toilet at school and goddamnit you have let the bacteria crawl up your skin and wind around your waist and into your ears. your mother said your soul hurts, under your ribs burning like a still-hot stovetop, and you laughed at that. a little too loud, a little too high-pitched, like a hyena on his final breath, half-laugh half-bark half-prayer in the library. you count your chakras down from your throat and cannot seem to remember what the one in your crotch is called but oh well. you have lied compressed like a spring under the blanket and sobbed into the crusted fur of each of your stuffed animals, and then broken dishes at the dinner table. you have left your house too many times for your dignity to remain unqestioned, lacing up your boots only to turn back before you reach the elevator. you have imagined the cold of the barrel of a *** in your hands. pointed at someone. pointed at yourself. then back to someone else. never loaded, only heavy in your grip like a dead body. you have begged on your hands and knees like a good dog, like a starving good dog, and then vomited up anything offered. you have looked every gift horse in the mouth and spat in his face, you have said his teeth are too big, meanwhile yellow bile drips from between your crooked teeth. meanwhile you drool the second the contents of your stomach have been emptied. meanwhile you wait for the churning to stop. you have been awful, truly, really appallingly bad. and you have dug yourself out. i do not know where you are, what shore this ocean has spit you out on, what sand clings to your skin and clogs your pores. i don't know who you are, really, or what it is you have done to get there but for once i don't give a ****. i don't give a **** about the dirt under your nails as long as you have washed yourself clean of this. you have dug yourself out, whether upwards or downwards you have clawed your way inch by inch like a worm summoned by the thrum of the rain. you have purged yourself of their filthy money, you have broken even, you have laid every penny at their feet and you have counted all of them you know exactly how much it took to pay it off. you have no debt. you are weightless. free to go as you please, untethered by what you owe and what you are owed. you have survived. you lived. breathe. once, twice, deep. you have set fire to it all, salted the earth behind you, you have upheaved it and nestled your feet in the raw earth. you are clean. clean clean clean. clean of it.