i can feel myself disappearing.

i want to put on my headphones and turn this up really loud.

i want to make it hurt. get myself in the practice of making myself feel. convince myself this is the right thing.

i am thinking of last summer, when i almost disappeared completely, laying in my bed, in my family home. knowing every single line of that room, the soft blue of the walls. where i hide things there, what i wrote on the back of the headboard of my bed. the hardness of the 30 year old carpet on the soles of my feet. the sunlight through the bathroom window. the shadow of the olive tree lacing itself across my face in the afternoon as i hid from everyone.

holding onto myself, eyes clenched tight.

unsure of what was happening to me.

knew that who i knew myself to be was changing. everything was darker, hurt more, longer and at a stronger pitch. i felt as if i was clawing at myself, digging in, leaving deep grooves, burning, unable to look at what was collecting under my fingernails.

beaking apart and falling away at an alarming rate.

waiting for the shift of understanding to happen. like studying a new text, or a new system, everything is cloudy at first, none of it makes sense. try to find landmarks in the words and ideas, something familiar to hold onto. reading over and over again, , sliding the shapes over the conceptual landscape trying to find where they fit. working through the problem sets until everything blurs.

and then, without warning, the scrambled mess becomes language. the letters and ideas line themselves up into intelligible bits of information to be worked with, turned over and examined.

i can actually feel this happen, it's a physical phenomenon.

and last summer, i waited and waited for the shift, where i would understand myself. where this mess of color and darkness and stripped pulled edges would come into focus.

it never came.

eventually, i got used to the fog and the suffocation of this confusion. i got used to looking in the mirror and not seeing a person but a blown apart picture, a crumpled piece of paper.

and now i just want to lay down, wait for it to burn away. wait for the heaviness of this fog to finally pull apart this old skin, this rotting self. wanting to see what is waiting underneath.

because it's becoming far too clear to me that though i many times feel as if it is so, that the erratic nervous beat of my heart, the shaking of my quiet hands and the shallowness of my breath convince me that it is so, i am not dying.

and jesus christ, if i am not going to die, i need to start fucking living.

because what a waste otherwise.

and what a coward i would be.

and if there is something i can start with, something that would give me a reason to hold my head up and steady, it's learning to be brave.