every year on the 24th of june
i stay up past midnight and watch
the 25th roll in, and i step outside
and swallow a little warm summer air, and
i think how much it doesn't taste like
trying to douse a week-long internal inferno
with an entire bottle of nyquil.
it's been eight years since i sat in
the buzzing winterglow of my computer monitor
on a sticky summer night, the window open
and the bugs singing and my throat
tight with relaxation after days and
days of bludgeoning myself to sleep
with medication, and looked over at the
deep purple of an off-brand bottle of cough syrup
and thought it might taste like peace.
i wasn't going to leave a note. i didn't think
anything i said would mean anything - i
didn't know how to tell anyone it was never about
leaving, but rather about rest, and how when
you've been awake for a week because your stomach
has migrated to your throat and stayed there you'd
probably do anything to get some sleep, too.
even if it meant your throat closed up. even if it
meant you didn't wake up - because when you're that
on fire, that thoroughly and totally consumed, you
can't imagine not being on fire anymore. you no
longer conceive of a world that isn't heat and panic
and sleeplessness. waking up, you realize, meant going
back to the consumption, and i was so tired of eating
myself alive.
the first thing i remember after the off-brand bottle
of peace is waking up, 45 minutes later - the fire
had at last exhausted itself, banked into a tight and
painful knot in my throat. what they tell you is that
most people on the other side of this kind of thing
feel regret - that they tried to do something so drastic.
what i remember most is being furious that i was so far
gone that an entire bottle of cough syrup put me under for
less than an hour.
then the regret set in, of course. then it
was the therapy, then the medication, and the
slow process of picking through my own
ashes for whatever was left to rebuild with;
i found precious little, but it was precious, still.
every year on the 24th of june
i stay up past midnight and watch
the 25th roll in, and i step outside
and swallow a little warm summer air, and
i think how much it tastes like next year,
and i drink it deeper still, grateful for the
way it feels.
i don't know who needs to hear this, but guilt, self-hatred and shame are not sustainable sources of growth and healing. you can't hate yourself into feeling better, or being better. you can't repeatedly punish yourself for your flawed humanity and expect wholesome results.
The most basic, intractable fact about mental illnesses is that you simply cannot willpower your way out of them. The only exceptions to this rule are the ones I have, which continue to disable me due to lack of determination and other grave personal flaws
I have one summer memory I always come back to, whenever June rolls in.
It was 2007. (God, that was 19 years ago.) I went with some friends down to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. It was a pretty impromptu trip, but we planned to stay for a few days, see a few sights, try to pull ourselves together just after graduating high school. I remember it partly because it was the first time I really felt like an adult, striking out with just myself and other people my age on a trip of our own for the first time.
The other reason I remember it is a walk on the beach I took with one of those friends one night.
I'm never going to forget the sight of the sea at night, even if I never make it back to a coast. It's abyssal - this huge, endless dark, so dim and deep I couldn't even make out the shapes of waves on the surface. I remember staring out at it and feeling incredibly small. I found that to be a comfort, really, especially in the burgeoning days of what would become a severe self-image issue (and a weight issue, but that's a topic for another time.) My friend and I sat down in the sand, let the wind whip around us, and talked for a while.
It was one of those weighty conversations you have with someone on the tail end of a chapter in your life - a look back at high school, where we'd just come from, and the world ahead, where we were going, whether we wanted to or not. I don't remember how we ended up on the topic of one another's demeanors; I think she asked me how I saw myself and I said I was nervous (and I did not know how nervous - not yet familiar with the unending quake of irrational terror that would beset me in my twenties) but relatively happy otherwise.
She seemed surprised. She told me I was the angriest person she'd ever met.
I felt shocked. I didn't consider myself an angry person - I didn't yell at people, outside of a few choice conversations in all capital letters on gaming forums that meant next to nothing anyway. I didn't hit anyone, except in self-defense when things went too far south to manage. I just tried to get through it. I told her I didn't understand.
She said I was angry all the time, and didn't even know it.
Angry at what? I asked. I felt almost like I needed to prove her wrong. Angry couldn't be me, I said. Angry was my father, the way you'd tell someone to call you by your first name. I'm not angry, I said. What do you think I'm so mad about?
Everything, she said. Mad at God. Mad at your family. But more than anything, she said, you are constantly, always, purely and totally furious with yourself. You're the first person you blame for anything. You never see yourself as good enough. And I think no matter how good you do or how far you get, you won't see yourself as good enough, and I worry about that.
(Even as I'm writing this, I've told myself it's performative, and dramatic, and shallow, and just on the wrong side of some woe-is-me thinkpiece pretending to be something deep. But it's therapeutic, so my brain can shut up and take its proverbial AND tangible medicines.)
I was quiet for a long while, and I said maybe she's right, and maybe I've got some thinking to do, and maybe we should talk about something else while we were 500 miles from home and at the beach on vacation. She laughed a bit and said that was okay.
I still think about that conversation a lot. I think I'm still the angriest person I know. Certainly for a long time that bled through into my online presence - every other post was a completely ineffectual rant about people whose minds I was never going to change doing things I couldn't stop them from doing. I had the requisite militant atheist phase nearly every post-Fundamentalist Baptist kid goes through after they make their escape. ("Thank God I don't have to go to church," was the running refrain.) To a lot of folks, I probably seem mad all the time about everything.
But if I'm being honest - totally, wholly, completely straightforward with you - I'm still angriest at myself. I'm furious with myself for what I've allowed to happen to my body. I'm furious that I didn't build a better career that required fewer visits to my friends' inboxes with long-winded pleas that never needed to be more than "Can I have some help" because I have, against all reason, built a network of people who trust and love me. There's been a few nights that came very close to being what I think is popularly being described as "grippy sock vacations," because I constantly find myself viciously mad that I let myself become the person that I am.
But that's the thing about illness, isn't it? It's a filter, laid over every input headed my way. It's a lens in a funhouse mirror, distorting me until I resemble something I hate. It distorts every good thing I do into some kind of mistake and every kind word from a friend into pity, or undue kindness, or some cloaked attempt at getting me to go away. The important word here is "distort," because all of those things are patently untrue.
I do good work, even if it's mostly from my desk at home. I make good things, even if it's mostly words and the occasional tabletop session. While I'm sure I'm not everyone's favorite cup of tea, and I'm sure I've irritated more than a few people, the only person really *angry* with me is me, and I shouldn't be. I'm going to try very hard not to be.
Hi, I'm Chez. You can call me Chez, not angry. Angry was my father, and these days he goes by James, I hear.
roald dahl was antisemitic and misogynistic. george orwell was openly homophobic. edgar allan poe married his 13 year old cousin. dr seuss cheated on his wife (and was racist as well as antisemitic!). hp lovecraft was racist as fuck.
anyways they’re fucking dead it’s not like you’re enabling their behaviors in the afterlife or something. then again I think they bleed into the books so uh keep an eye out for that
the difference between these old white guys and jk rowling is that the former group is all dead. jk rowling is alive and using your money to oppress trans people
and what damocles never tells anyone
is that every night he gets a little stepladder
and he climbs up to the top of it
and he feels around the blade, the hilt, the pommel
to that tiny knot of sinews
and he loosens it a bit
just so he has a say.
just so he has a say.
I draw flowers -
I fracture every hour with fractals
That devour every ounce of fibered flour
Til the ink has overpowered all the other
Little towers that I doodled off in periphery -
I draw flowers,
That spiral into nothing, hushing up the buzzing
From crushing thoughts all shoving into every open
Space inside my head so I can't breathe,
Humming fright a pilot light on a brain set to seethe -
I draw flowers,
In patterns intricate, nonsensical,
Liquescent and whimsical, dissonant and
Cyclical, intimate, inimical, catastrophically analytical,
All signs of a mind bordering apocalyptical
I draw flowers,
That constantly expand because I constantly demand
To do something with my hands,
I draw flowers,
Right up to the edge when I'm right up on a ledge
With this plunging sort of pledge,
I draw flowers,
Because I hate the alternative: the violent silence
Of anxiety interpretative -
The pictures I produce inside my head are red and black
I draw a flower on every inch of territory I take back.
He stares hard at a candle situated on their little table – the only light in the tent. The swaying flame carves hard shadows into his craggy features and grim expression, and throws wild shadows across the tent’s damp slopes. A thin rain patters across the top of the tent and drums staccato on the leaves of whispering trees beyond the tent’s entrance. A brittle chill – the sort of wavering cold you find just before dawn in late winter, before warmth can roll in over the mountains – causes him to tug his raincloak closer to him.
It doesn’t seem right, he thinks. The moment deserves more than a light drizzle and an old man shivering in his tent in the forest. It ought to be storming. The skies ought to be swelling with the weight of it, the gods weeping with the enormity of their deed, the heavens quaking with thunderous anxiety at the new world approaching them all.
But no. It’s just quiet rain, which does little to distract him from nervous visions of failure. What if she’s caught? What if something happens? What if the bastard tyrant proves a more capable sort than they accounted for? What if –
He nearly goes for his knife when the tent flap sweeps open; as old a soldier as he is, a life of hurried, dirty little killings has prepared his reflexes well past the point where age could dull them. But no, it’s her, sulking her way into the tent, her hood tugged up over her head. She meets his eyes, and in the ochre glow of the candlelight, he can see blood spattered across her cheek. Not for the first time, a pang of regret sounds off in his chest cavity. She’s so young. She shouldn’t have had to do this. She shouldn’t have had to give everything up this way.
“It’s done,” she says, quietly. “He’s dead.”
“Then it’s over,” he returns, sinking back down into his seat.
“It’s over.”
“Well, don’t stand there and soak, you lunatic,” he mutters. “Sit down. Were there any surprises? Did anyone else get hurt?”
“A couple,” the younger woman says, seating herself. “A maid where she shouldn’t have been, and a guard I didn’t know about.”
He stares at her a moment longer, inviting her to elaborate. Something in his face looks repulsed, despite his best efforts. She doesn’t seem to notice, focused as she is on retrieving her waterskin from her pack. It’s not until she catches his look that she – reluctantly, by all appearances – continues.
“…the maid is sleeping soundly in the larder, where she’ll be discovered in the morning, I imagine,” the woman says, coolly, after just a beat too long. “The guard got what he deserved.”
“Thank you,” the older man says. He seems to relax a little. He hates killing innocent bystanders. He always has. An image of his sergeant, a beast of a man with enough air in him to be heard across the mountains and back again, licks across the backs of his eyelids: get in there and set those fires, you daft bastard, and if you give me lip again I’ll tie you down with ‘em. We had orders, man, and damn clear ones too – each and every one. Each and every one. Each. And every. One.
“You alright?” the woman asks. She’s leaning toward him, one hand reached out as though to touch him. “You’ve got that far-off look in your eyes again. Stay with me, aye?”
The vision swims away. The old man blinks, and stares back at her.
“It’s over,” he repeats.
“It’s over,” she confirms.
--
It was the hate in her eyes that made him stop. There it was: a firelit glare from somewhere further back in the ashen room, half hidden as she was by the smoke. It was hatred like he’d never experienced – deeply felt fury that dwarfed anything he’d ever seen in his most desperate enemy’s stare as a sword went right past the plates and into something soft. She seemed to be choking on the smoke, but trying to bite back the coughing, as though she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
It put him in mind of coals, and then embers, and suddenly a part of him caught fire too. This wasn’t right. They shouldn’t be burning people. They shouldn’t be killing people that had never picked up a sword or flung a spell in their lives. None of this made any sense – and here was a child, about to choke to death on smoke, so hateful and defiant that she was trying to die quiet. None of it was right. The king was a tyrant, and the soldier’s hands were the bloodier for having fought in the bastard’s name.
He caught himself glancing back over his shoulder. She didn’t have to die here. It was chaos out there – he could grab her and go. He could get her beyond the mountains, somewhere safer, leave her with someone, anything except letting that ruthless beast’s plans claim another life.
He turned back to stare at her, grimaced, and weathered a rain of blows on his head as he seized the girl around the waist, hoisted over his shoulder, and disappeared into the shadows beyond the macabre light of the burning village.
--
They busy themselves in the tent for an hour or so packing their things. Neither of them seem especially keen on taking down the tent itself, given the rain and the cold. It’s not until every bit of gear has been stashed somewhere on their person that the older man sighs the sigh of someone extremely put-upon, and tugs at the supporting poles. Chill’s going to get right into his bones, he knows; he’ll ache for days after this. Not that they’ll have time to stop or rest – not until they’re both beyond the mountains and off to somewhere else.
It's quiet, this slow dismantling of a decade’s worth of plans. Again, it seems disproportionate, like the brief excitement of a holiday dinner – prepared for months, gone in minutes. The younger woman almost marvels at it, once everything is packed away in bags on their horses. There was never a resistance here. There was never a rebellion. There was just her, and the old man, and a knife in the dark, cutting the old world away.
She can feel her hands clench around nothing; she instead wraps her fingers tight around her belt. The only evidence left of what she’d just done is the adrenaline still singing in her veins, and the image of the king’s wide-eyed stare as his life poured past a fresh hole in his throat. It was too quick, she tells herself. He deserved worse. He should have suffered – should have burned. But it wasn’t about revenge. It was about carving out a future for this place – something new, something better. Well, mutters something cynical in her, something new, anyway.
“Right,” the old man says. “Let’s be off. Long road ahead of us.”
“There’s a place I’d like to stop,” she says. There’s almost a bit of sentiment in her voice, which causes the older man to turn and stare at her agog, as though he’d just watched a corpse move.
“We don’t have—”
“Please,” she says. “It’s a ridge, just on our way. All I ask is that we watch the sun come up over the valley one last time, old man. I think we care spare a few minutes for that, don’t you?”
He doesn’t answer right away – she can see him instead turning his head to regard the rainy woods around them. To its limited credit, the rain seems to be coming to a stop, and the bruise-dark sky has begun to blush, signaling the sun’s slow ascent over the mountains. That isn’t sentimental, she knows. He’s gauging the risk, determining if they’re more likely to get caught as a result of a short rest. She finds herself briefly wondering if there’s ever been a moment where the old man stopped worrying about things. He ought to now.
It’s over, after all. Their work is done.
“Just a few minutes,” he says.
“Just a few minutes,” she responds.
--
At first, he expected her to bolt the first chance he got. Now that the fury had left him, doubt had poured in to take its place. He had no business trying to take care of a child, much less one who hated his living guts. If anything, he should have foisted the poor girl off on the first doorstep he passed, but each town they came to as they moved toward the mountains, she refused. She wouldn’t talk, exactly – hadn’t said a word to him since she first woke up in his camp – but she would shake her head and stare hard at him, and eventually he would relent and they’d move on to the next town.
Of course, it didn’t help matters that his plan was changing, too. At first, it was simply escape: over the mountains, out to the sea, somewhere else. Not here. Not under that creature’s rule. But the more he walked, and the more he thought, the angrier the soldier became. It wasn’t the iridescent, short-lived rage that possessed him back at the village, but rather something more persistent, something deeper. It was a righteous certainty that something had to be done. The king had to die.
Moving from escape to resistance presented a dizzying array of complications – not least of which was how to get this poor girl to safety before she became entangled in his traitorous machinations and he became twice responsible for her sorrows. But no, no matter where he tried to stop with her, no matter how kind or concerned the people were offering to take her in, she wouldn’t say a word, nor leave him be. On one occasion he thought he’d managed to leave her sleeping at a church that took them in for the night, only for her to appear quietly at his side, nearly startling him into an early grave. She made no comment on his escape attempt – merely fell into step next to him, and on they went.
Finally, one stormy evening at a tavern, over a hot meal, he told her: “I’m planning something bad. You can’t stay with me.”
For the first time since he’d pulled her from the fire, she spoke: “I know what you’re going to do. I know what you’re planning, old man.”
Once he’s recovered from the shock of hearing her voice – scratchy, he notes with a painful stab of guilt – the soldier stammered, “You do?”
She nodded, and then, still keeping her eyes trained on his, continued: “And if you don’t let me help, I’m going to run to the first guard I see and tell them all about it.”
And thus it was that the resistance was born – one bad old soldier and one little girl, neither of which liked the other overmuch.
--
The horses stand placidly next to the tree line, watching as their riders find a spot to sit on the grassy ridge overlooking the broad sweep of the valley below. The sky has caught fire as bloody crimson suffuses the dawn’s muted gloom.
“We’ll give it fifteen minutes,” the old man mutters.
“Sure,” the younger woman says. She lays her cloak across the wet grass, and they both take a seat just before she begins peeling off her gloves. There’s another moment of silence between them both. She isn’t sure what to say. Before a couple of hours ago, there was purpose. There was nothing but purpose – a sole and murderous cause to which she had dedicated hours of training, days of study, weeks and months of conditioning.
She had forged herself into a weapon for a single throat, and now that it had been opened, she found herself staring into something huge and frightening. What would tomorrow morning look like? The one after that? What would she do with herself now?
She looks over at her companion. He’s older now – must have been middle aged when he found her in the fire, and the ten years they spent planning the assassination had done the work of decades more. She could see crows-feet along the edges of his eyes, hear him panting after even the short walk from the horses to the ridge. Still, the tension’s gone. His shoulders have dropped, and his jaw’s relaxed, for once.
“I wonder if the chancellor will be any better?” she says, leaning back on her hands. “He seemed sympathetic to the cause enough, I suppose, but that could simply be back-dealing to get his arse on the throne.”
“Oh it was certainly back-dealing to get his arse on the throne,” the old man chuckles. She flinches as she hears a wheeze on the edge of the sound. “But the tyrant – all his cruelty came from fear. Fear that he would be replaced. Fear that he’d lose control – control that he wanted for control’s sake.”
“The chancellor doesn’t want control for control’s sake?” she ventures.
“It’s hard to know what the chancellor wants, but when I was a soldier, the man did his best to curb the king’s worst impulses,” the old man says. “He failed, of course, but he tried. So – I imagine it’ll be a little better, at least. It’ll be something. It’ll be a change, even if it’s only the face on the coins.”
“Not that we’ll ever know,” she mutters.
“Not that we’ll ever know,” he confirms.
--
She had a natural knack for sneaking – all she needed was a polished knack for putting a knife where it shouldn’t be, and years of soldiering had taught him plenty of that, at least. She was a prodigal student: it took her little time to grasp a concept, and she set about practicing each and every maneuver, each martial principle, each exercise that he taught her with gusto. Within months, he’d have favored her chances against two or three men. Within a year, he figured she could present a serious threat to an entire squad, if she had a few minutes to prepare and sufficient shadow.
Planning the assassination itself took more time, if only because the tyrant himself was paranoid and presented little opportunity to get at his bared throat. Moreover, seeds had to be sewn, or the proverbial garden would just be overgrown again shortly after weeding it. The soldier was careful, of course, utilizing his understanding of the chain of command to make contact with sympathizers throughout the ranks. Men and women like him, who had seen too much murder and too little justice to be good soldiers any longer – and nobles like the chancellor, who understood well enough that the foundations of an empire began to slip if you muddied the soil with blood.
It took them the better part of a decade to put all the pieces on the board, and less than an hour for a guard to conveniently leave a gate unlocked at the right time, another to abandon his post a moment later for some imagined distraction, and for a young woman, cloaked in black, to open the king’s throat and escape through the window into a conveniently placed haycart just beneath.
There were considerations, of course. The king’s allies would want answers, and blood, and neither the old solider nor the young assassin were dumb enough to believe their tongues could stay still, sufficiently provoked. They would have to leave the valley, over the mountains, and disappear into another country across the sea – to be sure the chancellor could never be connected to the plot.
It was worth it, they told each other.
--
“Look,” she says. “The sun’s coming up.”
He glances away from her and back to the haloed mountains, where slow gold begins to crest the jagged horizon. It spills and rolls and pours into the valley below the water spills into a basin. It’s the last time either of them will ever see the sight.
They turn to look toward the valley’s northern edge, where the castle sits. They hear the trumpet blare – the birth cry of a new world, the signal that they’ve found the old one dead in its bed, its eyes opened, its mouth slackened in a surprised, misshapen “O.”
“We’ve done it,” the old man says. “We’ve seen it through. It’s theirs now. Think of what we’ve given them – a brand new world.”
She nods solemnly, and despite themselves, they watch the sun a little longer, and see the flurry of activity down the valley as people begin to wake up.
“Time to go?” the young woman says, after a while.
“Time to go,” the old man says.
They each climb to their feet, though the old man takes a little longer than he used to. They turn and head back to their horses, each climbing quietly into their saddles. Together, they maneuver back into the thick of the forest, heading west. With any luck, they’ll be at the summit by evening, and down by the docks on the other side by dawn the next day.
dailybridgerton
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