I feel like an empty husk, like a shell of my former self.

Every day I force myself to continue.  But I must soon force myself to exist and live and not just exist for the sake of existing.

clean

I cleaned a lot today.

At various points during this, I stopped to smile.  I really do enjoy cleaning and it relaxes me a lot to be able to enjoy my tidied, clean space afterward.

I apologize for acting like it was a chore or unpleasant.  It is truly something I take satisfaction in doing, and it is also something I excel at doing.  It makes me feel good during the process, not just at the end.

I spend a lot of time in my head thinking negative thoughts about myself.  But today I looked around at my tiny apartment, and I marveled at my ability to put this space together.  It really is pretty and peaceful and it brings me a lot of joy to come home to this space.

I am also enjoying cuddle time with Sammie this weekend.  I know it is pretty irrational, but the thought of him being intubated and put underneath anesthetic makes me feel nauseous.  I was so worried about him on Friday.  But Dr. Katie and her staff took excellent care of him as always and after twenty-four hours he was back to his hilarious, sweet self. 

I am grateful for all that I have in my life.  I love Samson, I love my mom and my aunts and my other blood family, I love my job, I love my coworkers and other friends.  I love Brooklyn, I love New York.  I am so blessed with all that I have.

And I still love you.  For the years that I had with you, I am grateful.  I accept that I can do nothing to change the past, but I am hopeful for the future.  I love you always.

my phantom limb

I know that I need to be okay without you.  

I feel the throb of you, my phantom limb.  Even after amputation, even after you left me for someone else, I can see shadows of you as I drift through the days.  There you are at the kitchen sink, washing your hands.  And there, asleep on the sofa, your mouth open slightly and your hands heavy across your chest.  Your shadow is present in every part of my day.  The stump of me without you hums dully until there is a crescendo of grief and loss: it is me alone walking the dog, you are absent.  It is me alone in the bed at night, no sound of your heavy breath breaking through the traffic of city nights.  

It seems reasonable then to continue the torture.  The phantom limb needs memory to come to life.  So I think back to first seeing you that summer of 2003, my eyes shying from your gaze.  The quickening of my pulse when I saw you in the cafeteria or in lecture.  The nights I was lonely and only wanted you to see me, getting drunk with my girlfriends instead.  Kissing a stranger instead.  Waking up more alone than ever.  But you were with someone else, and I loved you.  It was so painful to hear you speak of someone else.  It was more painful to hear me speak to you and convince you to be kind to her and make up with her, when I really just wanted to be selfish and shout for you to notice what was in front of you the whole time.

And so this is familiar territory.  We have come full circle.  I am once more living in agony.  I am eleven stories up and all I want is to run down to you and hold you.  But I know you want something else, someone else.  And all I want is to see your beautiful eyes light up with joy.

So I stay eleven stories up.  With surgical precision I amputate myself from you.  I see your wounds have cauterized and watch as you balance without me.  I will tell you you are nothing.  I will tell you to divorce yourself from me.  And it will make it easier for you.  It will help you run.

I love you.  Three words.  So trite and overused in everyday language.  Overused by me on a regular basis.  But I love you with the strength of one thousand waves, with the fire of a thousand suns.  I know no other way to tell you this.  

I love you so much that I know I have to let you go.  Even if it kills me.  

Hans Christian Andersen, did you feel the same loss?  To write so beautifully and painfully of this in The Little Mermaid?

I am not alone.  What I feel is something that has been felt by one million people before me.  It is the cruelest thing, to love someone and not be loved in return.  But like one million did before me, I will continue.  I will place one foot in front of the other.  At least I knew your kiss for some time, at least I had the chance to make you happy for a time.  It was not quite unrequited.  And for that I am grateful.  

Is it possible to vanish?  It seems like it would hurt less if I became a phantom and joined my phantom limb.  I remember years ago, taking solace in other worlds through books.  I moved so much and became so painfully shy and guarded, so protected that I didn't really exist as myself in the world.  I loved the world of reading, being surrounded by something beautiful and feeling someone else's delight and sorrow and fear.  It was so much better than feeling anything myself.  

I feel lost.

I have no idea where you are going and who you have become.  You are a stranger.

I spend the day turning your words around in my head.
You are so close, you are in the next room. But you are a thousand clouds away from here, you are running in the sky and I am down here. There are no ladders tall enough, there are no ropes long enough to lasso you down with.  The absence of escalators and elevators and stairs is heavy on my heart.
You are in the next room, but you may as well be in Siberia or else Beijing or Reykjavik. You are gone, you are running to someplace unknown to me.

We are puzzle pieces that do not fit, I say to glowing hazel eyes in the mirror.  You are the puzzle piece that does not fit, I see the girl before me say with determination.

I am looking down at all this mess, and cutting the vessels from my heart so as to staunch the poison from spreading. You see hands that grasp and falter, you see legs that bend and stutter.  You see anguish between the brows. Cutting down the vessels, cauterizing arteries and veins and soon there is no remembrance of love in those hands and legs and brows. There is emptiness, there is nothing.

Soon you are reunited with your body once more and there is nothing.  You breathe without remembering, you do not feel. There is nothing, there is only walking and breathing and blinking.

There is no blood in these veins, there is only the numb that cold brings.

You do not love me. That is all and that is everything.

The Emptiness of Thought

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BY JAMES K. ZIMMERMAN

this morning I felt my life

if you were dead

the expansiveness of the bed

the birds still singing

the remnants of the smell

of coffee in the morning

the emptiness of thought

the deafening silence of my heart

I love you more than anyone on this Earth.  I adore you.

I am sorry.

we even flew a little

A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention

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BY YEHUDA AMICHAI

TRANSLATED BY ASSIA GUTMANN

They amputated

Your thighs off my hips.

As far as I'm concerned

They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantle us

Each from the other.

As far as I'm concerned

They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good

And loving invention.

An aeroplane made from a man and wife.

Wings and everything.

We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.

Yehuda Amichai, "A Pity, We Were Such A Good Invention" from The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Copyright © 2015 by Yehuda Amichai.  Reprinted by permission of Hana Amichai.

Source: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015)

If  you took my writing alone as the inner workings of my mind it would lack complexity.  

I know he wants attention, he wants to feel wanted.  

I wish he didn't have to play games to be able to elicit that sense that he thrives upon.  

I love you.  I feel sorry for you.  

Definition of the Soul

The attempt to separate my soul from yours
is like wringing out a handkerchief
wet from something spilled.

I remember the burned-down house
where a wreath still hung on the door,
a wreath, stone-white to our surprise,
useless, forlorn, like a life preserver
nailed to the shore's churning rubble.

You said the flames went off somewhere,
strengthened, more vile than ever,
perhaps seeking a child's crib.

When speeding tires lofted street water
onto your dress, I admired how you....

And afterward, I brushed your hair,
as you lay dozing on the couch,
your lower lip, a perfect, promising V.

The attempt to separate my soul from yours
is like the creaking of a lamppost
against a sapling in the wind.
Soon someone will come
and hack through the more fragile one.

JOHN SKOYLES

Suddenly It's Evening: Selected Poems
Carnegie Mellon University Press

ablating the vessels

He says it's not about someone else but we both know it's not true.  Instead of working on our relationship he's in his head with someone else.  And she's invited herself into the recesses of my mind, too, edging her way into nightmares and restless sleep.
But fuck him for using her to destroy our memories.  Fuck him for making her into something she's not instead of seeing me and letting me be the person I am in daily life, the person that draws other people in and radiates light.  He's turning me into a monster, something ugly, so he can pull away and make his fantasy that much more erotic.

And yet still he is the only one, my sun and my moon, my best friend and confidant.  He is both the creator and the destroyer, ablating the vessels flowing from my heart one by one until my heart can no longer flow to any place.

into the abyss

It always seems easier this way.
To go from intensity of feeling that scares me in its depth, to the inability to comprehend anything, let alone feelings--sitting in front of a canyon of nothingness, dropping stones that never sound.
Then it cycles back, and it's all a rush.  I want to smoke a million cigarettes and feel the smooth black squares beneath my fingers as they sail over top.  I want to feel vodka burn my throat and step over the yellow line waiting for the A train.  I want to taste your rejection and wear it like a cloak of bruises around my throat.
Then again into the abyss.  Waves of emptiness crashing into nothing.  I am so barren I never knew the feeling of fullness.
And so it oscillates, the blind man becomes the sniper, the perfect shot becomes the glossy-eyed cataracts receiving all and comprehending nothing.
The tune varies, yes, but the madness is always lying in wait beneath. 
Come to me, the voices say, come and know no torment such as this.

every Morrissey song I know

Jean Rhys

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BY E. R. KENNEDY

I'm preparing myself for an extended period of loneliness

That will begin very soon I think

I've illegally downloaded two new depressing songs

I've placed a copy of Good Morning, Midnight under my pillow for easy reference

I've printed out the tablature for every Morrissey song I know so I can sing them to myself

Alone in my room

Just a few things are needed really

To make me calm

While I figure out a simple, clean, and effective way to kill myself,

With minimal stress for the person who has to find and dispose of my body

But I'll probably never think of a way

Because I'll probably never kill myself

I'll just lie in my bed suffocating myself with my pillows

While listening to the four songs you said were your favorite

And maybe burn myself a little with the iron

On special occasions

And the next time I'm in a subway station,

I'll stand a little further on the yellow line

Or maybe the next I'm at your apartment

I'll try a little harder

Ellen Kennedy, "Jean Rhys" from Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs. Copyright © 2009 by Ellen Kennedy.  Reprinted by permission of Muumuu House.

Source: Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (Muumuu House, 2009)

only me and the two telephones

The Breather

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BY BILLY COLLINS

Just as in the horror movies 

when someone discovers that the phone calls 

are coming from inside the house 

so too, I realized 

that our tender overlapping 

has been taking place only inside me. 

All that sweetness, the love and desire— 

it’s just been me dialing myself 

then following the ringing to another room 

to find no one on the line, 

well, sometimes a little breathing 

but more often than not, nothing. 

To think that all this time— 

which would include the boat rides, 

the airport embraces, and all the drinks— 

it’s been only me and the two telephones, 

the one on the wall in the kitchen 

and the extension in the darkened guest room upstairs.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2008)