This is the night you try to kill yourself.
this is the night like a blanket around you, a little giddy on the upswing, a little crying, a little laughing. you walk like you’re made of an explosion, like you’re a bridge crumbling, like everything is floating away from you and you’re stuck somewhere in a grey ocean with nothing to hold onto but the hope that you’ll be hit by a car one foggy morning. you are done with fantasizing about being broken down, you take the hammer and you take control. you walk red-carpet down the hall, three bottles in your palm.
mousetraps live in you, and they are all slamming shut. all of your bones hurt, but nothing hurts at all. you remember your first dance teacher, suddenly, telling you to present yourself like a princess in her sunday finery. you’re wearing fuzzy pajamas and a sleeve of deep cuts.
the vodka is harsh, but you expected it. you have a snakejaw, could always swallow things easily. the first fifty or so painkillers wash down with a sort of tedious rhythm. you don’t count them. you think of the boys who hurt you and the friends who left you and the fat that won’t let go and the ugly face and nasty teeth and trouble you lay in the hands of others.
it doesn’t seem real. your hands are moving like machine guns and you’re somehow also across the room, watching it happen calmly. you think to yourself that it all seems vaguely anticlimactic, silly. your family is gone for the night, honey. nobody comes home. nobody busts down the door.
if i remember correctly, we pass out halfway around the second bottle. what would have been our last thought is something about whether our math homework got done.
we don’t die here. this is the night you try to kill yourself, not the night you succeed. we don’t die.
instead, somehow, we are alive. and i don’t just mean we survive through it. no, something even better, something wild, something you have no idea about yet. we are alive it takes us a long time but we stop counting calories and caring about what people think. we wear whatever we want and we are honest, genuine. we have a job and a new dog and a stable family and are working on our college degree. we get a book published. we actually do - get this, though, it’s 100% poetry. i know, we never expected that from me. we make ice cream and milk a cow and pet goats and ride horses and go on boats and visit the islands and touch new oceans and find beautiful reading nooks in small libraries and see impossibly bright flowers and make friends and get drunk and mess up and fix things and do well and do good and be kind and be generous and be grateful and help little birds get better and help ourselves get better and help the world smile just a little harder and become somebody’s role model and become a success story and become something we’re proud to be
but most of all, we smile. we laugh all the time. we are never out of excuses to stop and smell the roses. we don’t apologize for quite so much. we still struggle with those panic attacks and relapse and everything: but we have swords and teeth and our bare fists to fight them all off. and we do fight them off. we are strong now. we are whole. we feel like we have fire in our bones. the world is less dark now. we are less numb. we have surrounded ourselves with warmth and with love.
sometimes it feels like i’m out of control, and then i remember you. i remember everything we came through. i remember the night where it all almost came undone in my hands: how i almost never got to see weddings, sunrises, tiny miracles. how i almost never learned how to find beauty in every waking moment. how i almost gave it all up just so i could stop being a burden. i’m gonna get better for you. it’s my job to make sure you never feel like that again.
you know what else tonight is, my love?
tonight’s the night we live.
titsay
gummygunk
janainaart
theartofmadeline
