I think knowing yourself comes with knowing your limits. Things you can’t achieve, no matter how badly you want them. I cannot achieve companionship. I know this about myself. I have learned it, through trial and error. I cannot spend time with another person like that. I cannot be someone’s half because I am already whole; three-quarters, anyway, and no one is half of a half, even if that is all that I need. I drink enough coffee to feel like I might throw up. There is something disconnected, like a loose wire, sitting in my chest. I see the image but I hear no sound, I knock on its side to fix the connection. I don’t know why I only want the vision of someone beside me. I want the idea of a person, the consciousness of an answered text, or an inside joke. I don’t want to stitch a tear or sleep next to anyone. I don’t want to touch them. I always thought I wanted some sort of life partner, a soul mate, a girl to kiss or a boy to look up at. I search and search and take things out to find what I’m looking for and ultimately see nothing. Why can’t I want someone? Why don’t I need someone to want? Why do I want to need someone to want? Why do I want to want to want? Why do I want like I’ve taken my feet off the bicycle’s pedals and I wait for them to slow down? Now, anyway. But now I don’t know what I want anymore.
It’s exceptionally lonely, knowing you don’t want someone, anyone at all, and you can’t force yourself to. I feel like a piece of my chest has been removed, somewhere deep I don’t know about. It feels like a phantom pain. The blistering of a heel the sock has run down on. Knowing this, taking this hypothesis forward - that I want no one, and unfortunately might never change that - I can assume I cannot marry. I could, if I wanted to. But the wanting is the problem. It seems I want all the wrong things, and don’t want all the things I should. I want to burn high and bright, and I want to be alone. I want to speak to myself out loud in cold sheets, and I don’t want to tell someone I love them. I want to be talented. I want to know I’m talented. I don’t want to be told I’m talented. I don’t want to bandage the same calloused wound with another complement, and another, and another. They build up in me and burn like Greek fire in water. I want to be made of nothing, and I want people to want to fill me. I want to empty out anyway. I want people to want to save me but I don’t want to die. I want people to want to save me but I don’t want to be seen as needing to be saved. I want to vomit. I don’t want to vomit in this coffee shop. I want to have a normal conversation. I don’t want to vomit in this coffee shop.
I want to have children. What I really want is to raise children, and show them things, and explain things to them: therefore, what I want is to hold someone hostage until I demonstrate all I know and take a long rest after I have proven that I know things. Breaking it down to that is sobering. I want a half-person who is never real, because a real person feels like more than one. I want someone who I don’t see enough to know very well, and I don’t know enough to see through. I want to build someone from the ground up then let them go, because I have enough to build them with, and then maybe I will be empty enough, finally, to see them through. I want to have children, in the abstract. I want to have children, because I want a relationship I control, with people I design, where the rules are made by me and I am all the worse for it. I know I couldn’t have children, though, when I really sit down and think about it, I mean, when I really sit down and think, what could happen here? For another person to grow? They’d need a father, and I am father and mother enough for everyone. But being father and mother enough for everyone isn’t enough for everyone, that is, being enough can sometimes be too much and you have to spread it all out between different people - that’s what I’m getting at, here, that I am too much something in one package, and that to be less than something is to be a perfect person, so you can hold someone else’s something in your one empty hand - what I’m saying here is that I have only so many hands and so, so many somethings. Too many for children, or for lovers, or for best friends.
My grandmother sat there. She thought, and she waited to die. She lived longer than any relatives I had known before, and I hadn’t known her very well, but I hadn’t known any others, so ostensibly I knew her the best and was the closest with her. I hadn’t known her, and we weren’t close. But I saw in her the same detachment, and the same ice that sank into her bones years ago, holding her still, away. She had children, and she broke them with how much of a person she was. All together. She didn’t have enough hands, and they had to learn to use their own. She sat there until she died, in her chair. Batting around the same fifteen stories over and over again, trapped in an echoing well of her own experiences, doubling, folding, smothering her. She chewed what she had said before over and over again for every meal. I saw my own death in her. I saw my own death: a girl, armored, eating herself to keep from being hungry, forgetting to mourn. Not needing to. Too stuffed.
The only time I saw her breathe was when I told her something she didn’t already know: then, she’d sit there, face open, voice lilting, curious. To know more. Then she was a person with a hand free and grasping. Rare. Human. I did not cry when she died. I am still eating parts of her. They’re still coming back up.
There is a wall as thick as steel but as clear as glass and sometimes I mistake it for air. I fly into it and break my wings. I cannot teach myself yet to learn the difference between window and sky. I’ve only been taught to look up.