Yet still, all is well.

heaven for many tortured minds.

Two nights ago I slept with someone, and for the first time in a long while, I didn’t feel like I’d been hurt afterwards.

She held me for what seemed like an eternity when we were finished, and for the first time in even longer, it wasn’t painful, and I didn’t feel desperate to escape, and with a long exhale, she’s brought me back to me again.

Sometimes it’s as though I’m the godhead itself, other times as if I’m a penant soul drowning in the styx. Even the psychopomp looks upon me, a pitiful thing.

With abject horror I watch as a razor blade glides down a vertical path burning my wrist, with maudlin resignation I see my fist break through the wall, my voice has lowered several octaves, I can’t identify what my father’s face conveys. This isn’t me.

Where I’m from, demons are to blame for everything. The only time I found solace in the bible was when I was forced to read Mark chapter 5 and stumbled upon verses such as:

And always,night and day,he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying and cutting himself with stones.

For he said onto him, come out of the man, thou unclean spirit.

And he asked him, what is thy name? and he answered saying, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

I’m not always myself, and It’s been my deepest shame.

My therapist tells me it’s normal, that most people with severe trauma are like this, that they’re fractured into parts but it’s not a bad thing. She prescribes a book, and as I’m reading all these accounts of people facing what seem to be similar demons as I, I’m elated.

It’s 2am and I’m making blueberry scones,suddenly the lyrics to a song I’ve heard ten thousand times before take on new meaning

Baby I got a plan, run away as fast as you can

Could never take the intimacy

and I know it did damage

cus the look in your eyes is killing me

I think “man, every nigga that fumbled a good wife listening to this dyin rn huh?”

I’m that scum bag, that asshole.

It sounds so much different now than all those other times I’ve listened to it.

Something actually is different this time though, he’s changed the lyrics to the ending.

Now he says

I need you to run right back to me

more specifically, Kimberly

my heart aches in recognition.

How many regretful playlists and poems and songs hm?

Every time he lost himself in mania, I saw myself in him, and all the other black men I watched on tv or the internet suffer the same fate.

I’ll be alone on christmas, and so will she, so we’ll spend it together.

It’s endlessly frustrating to me that this is the way of things. That humans are so dependent on this mechanic.

I want to be alone!

Why does it hurt so much to be then?

I shouldn’t care about the people that deprived and hurt me so badly that all I know how to do now is deprive and hurt myself in the same ways. That violence feels like home.

I miss them dearly.

I day dream about going back to them one day when I’m pretty and rich and famous, and I hope they’ll have missed me long enough that they can finally accept me.

I know what will happen though, my mother will curse and spit at me.

But all is well. I write to tell you that I’m alive, that I’m tending to many wounds, that maybe our wounds are similar even, that I hope you can find some solace in the fact.

And that I will persevere, and that I hope you do too.

and that I miss you

and that I love you