This would have been easier to start had  I not disappeared with what I gave.

That I’m so many words because I couldn’t (be). What won’t be clear to me, but I must have under control for my demarcations. What I owe to myself follows the principle of that symptom. There’s some kind of time passing by, and I’m trying, for it, to reproduce a possibility of further existence. If I were to listen to myself,  I wouldn’t get a second chance. I am only left with that blind belief in an unpromised future. When you are mine, everything, and then you showed me the thing, I could, for the first time, imagine how and why so, but I was indifferent to whether I’d come alone or with you. I hum more than I can caution. And so, it’s important for you to know what loves me. And that it doesn’t love me enough to let me go… And I could’ve been fine with that if I hadn’t grown around the depth out of which I burgeoned. I wholly bend at the knees, so I carry closed doors on my back. Something always needs to be twisted for me to forget about the rifts I’ve carved into my centre, so I reduce everything to attempts without confession. Still, I thought something was opening up, and it kept me awake for months. Then all that waking fatigue turned into a junction for two pillars wrapping pasts around their waists. And once I saw it, I couldn’t stop seeing it. And now I lie as distance and become an effort which needs to be overcome… where I couldn’t have been had.

...

From the enormity of my desire, the softness stretches beyond and that hard shell I must carry to keep it from covering the world. 

What do I owe and what am I owed? Do I search as an empty vessel for my fill or a liquid for two hands that’ll hold me above the tender surface? Let me drip back into the vibrant collective and then lift me out again from the noise. Can my noise be heard in the cracks of the dream? That chasmic darkness I reach for, and my only hope is to desire it always. I cannot know what it is. I’d like to think it desires me. But I don’t extend beyond its sound indifference. Such reasonable fear I hold for it. And such immature longing to define me, my edges. To tell me what I am and how inside it I am not. I must learn to wait. I must bear to wait. 

And that wait is all mine. How can I even hope for it to return a gaze filled to me. I look, and it only stares back. I’ve tried being that indifference and indifferent to it. But even then, with that emotive act, I was only a small thing knotted by its hairs.

...

And near the rock’s vein, where my name slept, I was learning to be delicate and alive, how all things around were; how warm the rock could be, and how, in the opening, there’s a mood to give and receive. The earth was active and true. I wished to be a beating, as the rock I was sheltering within.

My name was condensed to a raisin. The little fruit was like a dam holding back and up the living truths which pumped anxieties into my veins. And I was being formed as I always seemed to be, back, retreating, hardening. There was a great power in being so close to the vein, and even more to be the vein, just to think whether I could be. I am uncovered, and I recover everything in silence. What goes there gives the possibility of the only existence. Nothing is lost in silence. As I traverse, in those split seconds of being none as one, I can receive acceptance. 

For a while, I stayed to live surrounded by half-etched lines and great planes, in the half-processing of interrupted amnesia.

On the edge of disappearance, a quiet noise can be heard. Deepened and edged. It merges with the shadow. For a while, I didn't return. It doesn’t show, nor do I, and it all leaves me before I can reach it. 

I am not brave before the fog. And you don’t even know it exists within me. I’ve evicted myself from this world. Every day, I hate to give more to it. There are no limits to how I feel it. How much can it have me before giving me up? I watch it unfold, and in its unfolding I am unfolded. I fold in on myself in the finding. How much am I losing? Based on what am I bonded? Can I go to it and return? How this wait hurts… 

...

We could come out right, we'd like to be others. Did I tell you I want to give up? I'm sick for these feelings.

Your hair’s alive, mine’s dead. I was crumbling alive into sand. The living and the moist have been reserved for the dead. 

And the soul? Have I been estranged from it? Evicted even? I don’t want to give myself to someone as an illness that needs to be cured. I’ve certainly forgotten something, neglected something. I’m somebody else in the past, and I find it difficult to see myself as lively. Such a separation that it seems nonexistent. Not someone else’s, but fictive, not mine. Not a name, another name, made-up. Made-up word, a word to be found, or left undiscovered. 

The words that don’t reach me are those of the body. I don’t hear them, nor feel them. Descriptions that can only be worded through the physical. I can’t produce such clear embodied syntaxes. Sometimes that isn’t part of me, but what follows me affects me. I don’t always speak in my body. But my body speaks for me. I’m often found in the belief that my body is a hindrance to my mind, with all the aches, disruptions in receptors, weakness, a constant clutching of teeth, jaw, and knuckles, the dull resonance in my knees that wakes me from dreams. The headaches and colds. The giveaways of my nervous system. My brain seems to me a barren plateau of a weak hill with edges that slouch to reach for the glistening freshness of the lake, but never reaching, struck by a cramp. I feel things that I can’t reason words for. I can’t get the impulse to pass from my body out of my throat. The one I have shut away. I am awakened in a rebellion against my own self. 

My fear stands behind everything, as an endless shadow etched deeply into the pavement. 

Where I keep finding is not where I love you. I want you to know how I exist, that it is not a matter of speaking my mind, as there is so much that is wordless. 

...

Pushing out of the wait. I cannot have my senses at the edge. I cannot take them over the edge. I’ve never been there with them. My senses would not reach me there. And before the last turn I look back and stay turning. I look back and stay turning. How clear to be back. How simple and true. I’ll never know of deceit. It doesn’t give like that. I’ll never know of my senses. It doesn’t take like that. What is to come of the edge and its life absent of my impulses? But in the revealing forward I only turn back. 

And the vague nothing at all. I was waiting to be back. Had I been so clear to wait for the distant and part from the physical through the maximum of senses. Tactile and lucid. And a chase of voices and a slow turn to the door with the eyes tracking back. And a fanned-out palm to clutch the seeping gaze failed to lock up dreams. The rough pending action with distant unease vibrating restlessly with a pent-up thought in the throat. I forbade myself to expand through the confines of my body. It wakes up before I do, and I’m thrown about and limp inside myself. This is what it’s like to remember my heaviness. And a shame of pointing to the wound. I was not born a still air with solid breath to uphold me.

...

Within the fog, I’ll keep the light to myself. Only a fragmented I reaches; a broken I, dispersed. How much of me resides in what is left? Where I could’ve been caught at the instant in which I change into a consolation. For myself, my solace, like I am when pretending to be when I am not. When I don’t accept what should be what I am.

What is created within me when language rolls over? What do I swallow when my tongue strips? My word as only security. I can’t stop as much as I would like. It asks of me that I be good and patient; with it, with myself. That I be patient towards the nothing and the other. 

...

Nobody thought so at dawn. There was just one far from me. To know was never dangerous. It was to speak of a path slowly. That winter has a silence that reads you long. Powerful wrongs and tough secrets. And it wasn’t that sleep was ready; might we not ask too much. Black had a gleaming ability to touch so violently. Had no answer been so wanted as that of our own desire. The reason hardens a few steps before the cage. With authority to be desired. What was already told arduously. And seeking the sweetest way, we won’t be able to condense. We give with a certain dryness. And there’s curiosity on the other side. I dared speak to it. Find it but not prove it. So there is no finding. How long do we go trusting? No, understand what is dared to be spoken. That what’s immediately discovered becomes what doesn’t exist. The continuance changes. To walk the steps away seemed lacking courage. The footsteps heavier with doubt. It’s in what we live. Under fluorescent illumination. A caged certainty unmasked in our own covert retreat from desire. No humility in a muted life. 

...

Because I am afraid of very real things. 

This is exactly how it was promised to me. And then I came to someone who follows the rules. Nothing happens behind me. If I turn around, it pretends to be okay. And when it stands in order, I think I’m right;

I think I have a sense of control. So I am the body, my own, and as one I lean over the edge, and I lose. There is no outcome in which I prevail. It will break off my back. Something very human has happened to me. In my dream, it kept going. I was spinning around my pillars. I could ask to be seen differently, but I will never be what is returned of me. I would like to be living and to be as the living changes, but in this happening, I am only as far as my body is. I don’t know, and the more I don’t know, the closer I am to leaving it. And to the remnants which know more than I do. They tell me about living. I don’t trust them. I don’t remember. Some things don’t exist. Some things don’t exist the way I look at them, the way they tell me of their existence. I only lose the way I forgot how to lose. And there I am, found only the way a lie is found; 

...

Asking would be bearable if the answers were to rid me of the questions. For the incoherent tongue, the truth is anything. It’s a potent and brimming possibility for anyone who’d follow. And in the words that are layered over the noise of the surroundings, there’s a silence that pulls me out of it all. Distance is how I come through. A distance spread out of silence that’s left when at last the word is spoken.

And if I must go on, I’d like to change; to be changed. I would like, as scared as I am when I am all surface. 

And I try to be as still as a mirror. I try not to ask. I try not to desire. When do I forget? I forget with the slightest movement of the hand. But my arms stretch out. The body still pulsates. And I don’t know.

...