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[prismaticbleed]

“If love is going to be done differently I will have to do it. I don’t mean as a messiah-thing, I mean as a me-thing. I want to look into your eyes and not get blown up. I want you to see me as I am and not destroy me. I don’t want to retreat into plant life, or have the same bad dream every night. I don’t want to watch a city burn because I was there.”

— ‘The Agony of Intimacy,’ Jeanette Winterson

I have a lot to say about this but it won’t fit in a reblog. I’ll post it separately.

Just… this is a knife to the chest. A red-hot, tear-marred knife plunged right into my heart, buried to the hilt.

Poetry hits the hardest, always.

 

Dear God, there is too much old trauma staring me in the face with this; how can I truly let go? How can I honestly heal? How can I move on properly?

I’m so terrified to love anything now because I remember that burning city. I remember the blood and fire, the despair, the death… but I also must remember the impossibly bright hope that bloomed in the ashes of its terror, like lilies flourishing in the forgiving snow, pure and holy despite all that came before.

Love has to be done differently, now. What I once labeled as love was not love. The southern bedrooms were not love. The cold floors and cramped closets were not love. The burning attics and locked bathrooms and rotting forests were not love. And I have to do it differently now. No running water, no string lights, no computer screens, no closed doors, no parroted phrases, no annihilation of self. No hell masquerading as heaven. No messiah complexes. No moral relativism. No compromises. No exceptions.

I want to be able to love as my own person.

But what does that even mean?

I feel so filthy, so dirty, so wrong and evil and twisted corrupted broken, like something that would maim and poison you if you touched it, that I am too ashamed to pray, I am too disgusted to try. I want to love but it feels ugly coming from me. I want to be loving but it feels abusive and fake coming from me. What does real love look like, apart from you? Can it even exist in me? Right now I doubt it, and I weep with miserable despair over it. You deserve all the love I could ever hope to feel or give, and infinitely more. But if I’m the one giving it, it’s ruined. It becomes empty, false, fake. I don’t think I can feel love without doing it wrong somehow. And that terrifies me to the point where I just… shut off my heart. I become numb and hollow and empty so that at least there’s no toxic garbage getting anywhere near you, or anyone else.

I want to be able to look into your eyes without wanting to gouge my own out, tearful and enraged at my unworthiness and sin, afraid that it’s all clear as day in my gaze, turning even a glance from me into a garish revelation of degeneracy and scandal. How could I lie enough to look at you– you, with your heartwrenching eyes of spotless love and honest compassion!– how could I meet those eyes with my own, knowing how monstrous I am in comparison? The gall of the very thought is choking. I cannot look at you without wanting to die– without desperately wishing I could self-destruct, to relieve the world of my sinful existence in a conflagration of cleansing fire, to leave it safe with you, who would never have to risk your achingly beautiful eyes in looking upon my walking corpse ever again.

How could anyone see what I am and not instinctively want to crush me underfoot like a venomous snake? Things like me invoke an innate revulsion, a knee-jerk survival response of protective violence, lashing out to snap my neck or spine, to destroy the object of horror before them. Even you, I’m sure, even you would want to see me gone if you knew what a danger I was to mankind, to you, to the health and safety of all good hearts. I’m something that should be stepped on until it snaps. I know this better than anyone, and it wrecks me utterly.

I’m tired of hiding in the mangled woods like a wild animal. I’m tired of the unending trauma nightmares and flashbacks and blackouts. I don’t want any more God-forsaken cities to burn down to the splinters because I was there.

Intimacy is only agonizing because it includes me.