Sometimes, when I’m still enough to hear it, I hear changes in the universal rhythm. I hear the demolition of old buildings and the applause at small theaters. I hear flies on murder victims and the closing of high school textbooks. All this noise, all individual, wholly mistake-ridden, spotted and varied maintains somehow a rhythm I can feel. I don’t know music, so I can’t offer written beats, but I know and feel the measures overheating, and I wind up weeping with broccoli against my neck.

   
     My letters to you are a sort of diary, I think I’ve mentioned. Love letters and journal pages, drawn in wrinkled leaves and heartbeats too heavy to pen. It might be easier to understand years from now, but please know these two sides of me, (dialogue and universal experience), have never truly met before in words. I don’t know if that’s pertinent to mention, but it feels of some consequence.

       
      I’m sitting in the car beneath shy sunlight and am feeling a heavy death in my core. My legs ache again, and I haven’t looked in the mirror for over a week now, I think. I’ve stopped counting. I know I look raw because I am especially raw today. My hair is greasy and hangs haggard and wilted. I’m ashamed. I have never been such a detailed portrait of depression. I am ashamed I am ashamed I am ashamed. Being outside sours my stomach.

      I wonder how lucky, really, any of us are to be alive. Many people say it’s worth it, but is it? and I wonder if they only say that because life is a dictatorship, an intimidating black-out curtain of limitations. It doesn’t want us to see the “other” side until it sucks us through its inky cloth and spats us out to whatever there is or isn’t. I sometimes think I should end it just to rebel, to say life hasn’t won, because if it had, I would keep putting myself through hell just to live it. I am tiring of public promises and quote-book quackery, aggressive agendas and pseudo compassionate crap. Greasy hair, tearful eyes, scarred up flesh, and zombie gait, that’s what having lived looks like. I’m not the sage of suffering, but I have Infection in me so I’ve racked up credentials.

     
      I’ll buy ceramics for us to paint, and none of it will matter. It’ll be you and me at our small kitchen table, painting away. We’ll get paint all over old copies of the New York Times we purchased at the corner-store. And you’ll be good at it, I told you, because it’s similar to painting nails. Obviously though that means my own ceramics will look a little splotchy.

      Things will not be easy, but they’ll be better. I’ll find a good therapist and learn how to breathe properly. I’ll invest in ice packs so I don’t thaw our vegetables when I need to cool down. I’ll take walks when I can and bake when I’m feeling sad. I’ll start reading books again if I haven’t already and quote my favorite lines by memory to you. Things won’t be easy. If they were, it wouldn’t be living, and I still hail to the universal oppressor. Things will be better, though. They will be better. They do get better when I keep New York in mind.

(Source: fluidly)