Dear, Mr. Bedtime,
I know you don’t care, but that only makes it easier to tell you. You are a beautiful blustery beach with coarse, stinking sand into which I can trace out these words, a canvas only more enticing for for the fact that I know the next thought through your head, however mundane, will be the black tides that wipe my words away. I’ve wondered for a while now if admitting that you have a problem truly is the first step to solving it. If my house were on fire, should I really sit around and ponder the nature of the issue, if my insurance will cover it, the source of the fire, etc., or should I first get the fuck out? How does it change how I feel if I confess that I feel like I am a drill stripping a screw, trying to get a grip on a world spinning far too fast. I am deep in one of the worst depressions of my life, and the first one without any clear-cut (however superficial) solution.
I’m writing from the place I best express through tears, so forgive my mixing of metaphors. It is an angry and vitriolic place, somewhere just below my sternum, somewhere I hate and venerate in equal parts. This is the place I find myself in most often, nowadays, when I am not deep in conversation with myself and the many voices that live inside of me. Some of them I killed ages ago, but old ghosts are the hardest to exorcise. Many of these voices I still use, with family, peers, or strangers. Some of them I keep to myself. Recently, one of these has started to sound like you. At least, whatever paper-thin pastiche a dumb cunt like me can manage to conjure, even with all of the material you give us. For such a life lived without it, cruelty for my own sake is a refreshing motivator, but there is only so far I can press my own boot onto the back of my own neck before it’s no longer enough, and others start to worry.
Girls my demographic — those young educated suburbanites, married out of college to their high school sweethearts — are far too sweet, thinking motivation is something fresh-baked and cherry-scented. Boys my age — raised by mothers who loved them too much or not enough — are even more clueless, thinking self-help is a religion with an army of podcasting prophets. Boys who chase women and fortune and fame in one form or another, dedicating themselves to Becoming Great with little care and less thought for what truly makes greatness. Either their violence consumes them or they smother it, not like you, who carefully cultivates it. You weaponize that violence within someone, that rage, that grief, until, like a brush fire, something snaps and everything burns. What Native Americans knew, and what we’ve subsequently forgotten in our quest for sterile, exponential, constant growth, is that those fires will consume the lifeless, the useless, the weak, and the ashes will be shit out by the worms and that soil will house the new generations — some of which will be consumed by the next fires, sure, as will the centurion oaks that must inevitably fall into disrepair, and when they do they will fall with a thunderous silence, much as I have here at your feet, splintering to show my grub-rotted interior for you to step on or over as you continue about your day.
You entice me as any other insurmountable challenge, for the same reasons I stack castles out of playing cards. Because you are entropy unstoppable; an immovable wall, perfect to bash my head against until the fractures of my skull spell out your ever-changing shapes.
Is this a confession? A cry for help? Perhaps both, with a healthy dose of what my atheist upbringing thinks a prayer would be if I could believe in a higher power. I know that’s what I want you to be, but I don’t mean to be so selfish as to assume you would even want me.
Perhaps this is nothing more than ships in the night. Perhaps we are all just cracked porcelain, but you’ve sutured yourself together with smelted pyrite and a clever tongue while I just tell anyone who will listen that I’d look better as a fine pearlescent powder, ready to be recast into a form that suits me better or scattered in the first winds that take me. What were once glass girls are ground back to sand by your crushing hands and cutting words, but I like to think you have the hard, salt-crusted shell of an oyster, and you take those grains you like and you make strings of pretty pearls. Or perhaps they’re all still scattered, a hundred grains of the ten billion on this beach where I am writing all of this in the sand, and you’re just the tides that will wash me away.
(submitted by: tenthousandtimesworse)
I’ve let this sit in my inbox for six months, thinking I’d eventually find the opportunity to address it in depth. But now I feel like it should stand alone as a passionate, meandering testament from a nascent disciple lost in the wilderness.
Bless you on your journey, child.