they ask what she remembers.
she tries and she can remember trees.

the dogwood tree,
she remembers driving back to that old house and
that tree being gone.

she remembers roofs. black tarred shingles.
she remembers how the leaves looked from above.
the overwhelming urge to jump to, slip off the edge.

she remembers wondering what would happen when her body hit the ground.
the insatiable length of space between gutter and grass,
that drop, she remembered the pull.
it led her up the stairs and over the ledge, out the window.

the crack of collarbone, snap of spine. she remembers
imagining herself light as air, floating down, parachute-like.

she remembers her baby brother crying,
her father's strong grip on her arm,
yanking her from the fall.

they ask her what she remembers.
all she says is,
it's never about death.

"we are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves." - nietzsche

winter mornings, the ambiguity of winter cheeks, a cold space i can't fill up. my head feels like a vast expanse of empty space, paralyzed by my past. by this cold. my fingers are numb, my thought processes slowed to match the frozen scenery outside. my fingers are too numb to button the buttons, zip the zippers. i tie a bathrobe swiftly and run outside to greet the snow. chainsmoke, two cigarettes, shivering. it's a good day if he's not the first thought on my mind. it's a bad day if i obsess over whether or not we're still friends. it feels like that hold is so loose and intangible, not the way i feel with other friends. glued and safe.

another cigarette, my body convulsing by now. my heart feels raw. my heart feels too much. the world is spinning, my thoughts are racing, my only placation via hand to mouth to hand to mouth. smoke in tendrils, cloud bursts. i feel too much or i feel too little. balancing between euphoria and deep, dark depression. it feels like there's so little in the interim. no relief. i bounce obsessively, a vain attempt at staying warm. when i find myself back inside, i have little to distract.

the precipice between warmth and cold, light and dark, euphoria and dysphoria...all these ineffable, intangible dotted lines. i feel old. i feel like i've been running through this cycle for decades, for hundreds of years. it makes me weary, it's exhausting being so emotional, feeling. i feel by force, these chemicals in my brain flipping me around. maybe it is only now, because i see no color, because my bones feel ancient. he's right when he says i've lost hope, but i don't know if he's correct when i say i'm irrevocably broken and he denies my ability to be so. i am in such a state that i cry for no reason, numb myself as much as possible, tuck my heart back in my chest and hold on for dear life.

tap. tap. tap. my fingers beat against the hard wood as mania sets in. my mind buzzes and the world goes white in stages. i close my eyes and the sky opens up.

i walk into a doorway. i find myself acting as a bridge between darkness and light. i feel like purgatory. the brightness blinds me and i begin to slip. i want to pray but i can't remember how. i can't move my hands. my eyes dart around, futile in every direction. toward both heaven and hell. i will not remember any of this.

my eyes open. my pupils feel dilated, out of my control. my body aches a dull, heavy, relieving ache, as if bricks that had lain on top of me for the last ten years are now just now lifted off. i feel lighter than the air that surrounds me. i wonder what is keeping me grounded. body weight is a foreign concept. i recognize the walls around me but they are uncomfortable. i think about eternity.

the next few hours are filled with searching. i have lost a sense of placement. i have lost the entire night. it has disappeared into the cracks in the floor.

i walk into the bathroom and rinse my face, the cold sweat, the only remaining evidence of the night before. my memory is washed. i look into the mirror and see myself. i come to a realization.

i do not know where i am going. and for the first, last, thousandth time in my life, i am scared.

I think the reason I stopped bingeing and purging had less to do with feeling emotionally better, and more to do with the fact it made me feel dirty. Bulimia is a ridiculously dirty and gross disease. It is a disease of want and desire. You constantly crave food, think about food, plan when you're going to eat next, what you're going to eat, when you're going to throw it up, how you're going to get rid of it, how you're going to hide it. It's sneaky, underhanded. My anorexic periods preceding and after lasted far longer. It's a disease that has always been glorified. It is ultimately a prolonged exercise in self-control, will. Women are told not to want, not to desire, there is some sense of holiness or cleanliness. The high I got from going a day off half a banana was beyond anything I can equal now. If I could just explain the dynamics between that bulimic urge to consume everything, to make everything a part of you, and the anorexic denial of bodily needs...I think that's probably a major pattern in my everyday life. I battle with that each and every time I walk to the kitchen to get something to eat. Every time I look at a menu. Every time I smell something cooking. I still stand there, paralyzed momentarily by the question of, "Should I to eat or not?"

after the incident, i had no reason to trust anyone. underneath my clothes, the skin was completely destroyed. run over with razors and scalpels and rubbed raw from rough fingers and palms.

between my legs, there was fire. it was a burning that never stopped, a burning much stronger than what i felt when i made the marks on my hands and wrists with cigarettes. his hands must have had gasoline on them. because that night, the space ignited. and after that night, it never went away.

every day i sing the same song. the middle of the night, i wake up with that burning. it's short-lived, a few seconds, sometimes i think it's a dream. it happens the same way each time: the burning starts while i'm still asleep. i have no recollection of how long it occurs before i wake up. i think i wake up as soon as it starts. it happens, and it's quick but the span of time between waking and when it releases its grip on me seems long. it hurts because of the flashbacks: a slap of palm against thigh, leaving a welt, i feel it all. when it's not happening i am reminded of lighting yourself on fire, how it only burns for a few seconds but those seconds are months, years, lifetimes. pain transcends the human construct of time. it stops hurting but i know it's still burning. lines of an anne sexton poem rings in my head. darling, the composer has stepped into fire.

falling back to sleep is hard after this. some nights i can lay in bed, alone with my thoughts, until i fall asleep. tonight is not one of those nights. after the pain my body is buzzing, tingling, requiring movement. i get up. my eyes itch with sleep. the sting of cold air slips over my skin like torturous silk.

i wish it would all just scab over sometimes. my skin turn pink and ridged with scar tissue. then i wouldn't feel anymore.

the times are engraved in you.
eleven. four. eight.
then eleven. eight.
then sometimes eight.
then rarely.
next never.

he'll seem jovial, close enough to his old self, but you know there's a wall now. a wall even a close friendship can't break through, climb over. all you've ever wanted was to be close to him. even now. just 10 minutes a day of laughing or sarcasm would fill the void he left behind. but maybe now he feels some moral obligation to cut you out, to leave you with less than even a friendship. his voice still makes you calm, centered, but he's taken even that away.

so you take the pills they tell you to take, and you wait for his memory to fade. wait for the pills to wipe your slate clean, wait for them to make you calm instead.

eight in the morning.
two in the afternoon.
four in the evening.
ten at night.

24 multi-colored capsules and tablets, designed to fix your broken brain. but they can't fix some things, they can't fix a gaping wound where a friend ought to reside.

so what do you turn to? calories? numbers? miles run? they can all be neatly sorted out, like time or pills. the impossible becomes possible, until you're running on empty. running from the truth to create your own. to recreate yourself.

you despise the person you were with him. the person who pushed him away somehow. made him shelter himself against you.

and the person you are now is steadily shrinking. taking away the bad parts and replacing them with emptiness for someone else to fill up. that's what you do, you consume and consume enough of a person until there's nothing left to do but walk away.

(you dont feel anything if you drink enough.)

this is not about counting down from ten, because we both know that doesn't help. inhaling deeply through your mouth, exhaling from your nose, slowly. it's all pointless, because after finally crossing over, after you've straddled that damn line for that long, you can't turn back. it's not about the pills, which you take obediently, religiously every morning. the closest thing you've come to unconditional love. they think that will put you in the clear, in the green area, but the thing is -- the thing they don't know because they don't experience it -- that the colors are not red and green. they are black and white, which technically aren't colors at all. so that medication, for doctors would be brown, but for me and you it's grey, your legs are spread, one in black and one in white. your axis is on that line. sometimes it's more blurred than others.
so what is it about? fuck if i know. i guess it's about running away from knowing that she lives some other life now. well, i run away from that -- she's running away from knowing that every thread of my skin has touched hers. i'm completely aware that she thinks she's replaced me, but i know she still feels me.

i replace the knowing too, but at least i know i still feel her. this is how that replacement happens: it starts very quietly. no one listens, but everyone hears it. i listen. it's not a voice i recognize. i like it. that's the reason no one else listens, because it's unfamiliar. see, i crave unfamiliar. i crave foreign. i crave her now, but it's all replaced with unfamiliar. foreign. so i let it speak. the voice gets louder the more i allow it to speak. i'm not explaining this well. the voice is not really a voice. it's not something you can hear inside you, it's not something you can blame after all of this catches up with you and people ask why. they always ask why. and you can't say, because i was told to do it, because that's not true. and even though you've gotten very, very good at lying, this lie won't work.

this voice has been in my head for nine years. hers spoke over it for a while. but i still strained to listen. she asked why, and i told her the truth. i told her, it's because every part of me aches with hatred for every part of me. my body is a constant war zone, but i am no soldier. this is like being in bed with her, except the fight was for us, not against. i also told her i knew what i was doing. saying the opposite is yet another lie that doesn't work. believe me when i say: i knew exactly what i was doing. you know exactly what you are doing.

okay, so set a number. this is a number that will be so engrained in your bones, you'll dream about it in your sleep. that number means everything. it's more important than relationships, than friends, family, girlfriends like her. it's more important than living, which is the key. that's the crossover. you will weigh, count, calculate and make sure that you follow that number's set of laws. and god help you if you happen to overstep a boundary.

i don't ever remember her being on top of me. i didn't mind, because the fact that she wanted me there made me feel light. i liked her weight on me, though. i wonder if she noticed that my fingers moved the way i count calories. meticulously, specifically thought-out, but it's all instantaneous. maybe it only felt that way because time is a human construct, and time didn't exist with her.
time didn't exist until she had to leave.

time definitely exists when the food is gone. when you've simply, efficiently removed that small blip in your radar, washed your hands of it. things will be easier without it, you promise yourself. but when your body is eating itself and you can feel it, every minute is another lifetime. it gets easier, though. that's more than i can say for being alone. being without her. see, every day is not easier. time does not make things easier. time makes it all hurt more. time makes your throat sore, your chest tighter, your sobs louder and more uncontrollable.

it's funny, because we've completely made up this thing called time. and here we are, letting it direct us, letting it run our lives. we are not people anymore. we are not beings.
we are just slaves.