viii.

i am going to make it through this year if it kills me [the mountain goats]

this week i started easy. i wrote in my baby blue planner, under goals, don’t cry.

then i tackled monday, which is a civic holiday here, which means i woke up at 10 in the morning, cursed myself out for still being asleep, and took a shower. the first thing in my planner for today was get out of bed: done. staying in bed all day is all very well and good until your brain starts trying to eat itself with regret. which i don’t approve of, since it is contrary to the goal of not crying for a calendar week. my planner acts a bit like a diary since i write down things i have done in a day and occasionally how i feel about them and for two years i wrote in a diary every day but now i think if i do i’ll have to start screaming. i won’t have anyone to write about.

this is not a very good newsletter.

i don’t know what i was expecting to write.

my pointer finger, which as a poet should be fierce and aimed at the entire world, has been magnetized to loop around and point at my chest. there is an enormous hole there and i keep passing people on the street saying do you see it can you help me there is a giant hole in my chest how can i fix it and they just keep walking. fair enough. sometimes i wish i could turn back time to when i still had a heart to lose but things happen for a reason and better left in your hometown than at the altar and besides i never knew how to love someone i wasn’t expecting to be heartbroken by. really. i cut my losses, i burn my bridges, but my arms are twisted behind my back. do you think i’m vile and poisonous and vindictive? you might be right, but look what made me.

this is the kind of thing that keeps me up until two in the morning. hopefully you get the picture.

it’s hard to be heartbroken over the life you could have lived when most things are going your way. i have a research internship. i’m starting my second year at a very good university in a month. i’m going on a trip to vancouver. i have so much going right for me that it feels selfish and repugnant to be sad all the time. i would like to submit, however, that no matter how professionally fulfilled you are if you feel like your life is devoid of close interpersonal relationships you’re always going to be sad. or maybe that’s just me, someone whose words reach thousands of people a day and are published in a slew of magazines, and who will never have the opportunity to tell the people the poems are about that i’m sorry. and i wish they would come back.

no one hears me.

my mom thinks i should write a letter.

i think i should move on, but it’s hard to move on in a city that feels like it’s been breathing down my neck since the day we got here. no one knows me anymore and i don’t think i want them to, i don’t think i could survive another person loving and leaving me. i can’t remember the last year i had without feeling phenomenally depressed but i also can’t remember the feeling ever lasting this long or being this heavy. it feels immovable. there is a man sitting on my chest and he has his hands around my neck and i don’t know whether to let him win.

i want to be beholden to someone.

i’d never use it, i don’t think, but i wish there were someone i could call and say i don’t think i am going to make it through the night and they would drop everything to drive over. i used to have a lot of people like that. there used to be a lot of people i would drop everything to get to if they told me they didn’t think they were going to make it through the night.

there’s a lot of pain summed up in the past tense. which i have been obsessed with for a while now. i looked at a thing still living and anticipated it would die. i expected every close relationship i had to crumble, and it did, and i don’t deserve your pity, because it was my fault. because i had everything and didn’t even know it—shiny perfect golden beloved—i didn’t even turn around. i screwed up my entire life and i don’t know what the point of continuing to live it is but i know i don’t have anything left to lose that matters. i think this might be melodramatic. i think if you have read this far, or this long, that you are aware that i’m melodramatic by nature.

melodramatic, on my last year of being a teenager, and just a little too sad. my bones don’t fit into each other correctly. two weeks ago i listened to the prophecy by taylor swift thirty times in a row and sobbed so hard the rest of the subway car went quiet, bore witness, didn’t complain. this is why i’m telling myself i need to get a grip. i don’t want to inspire strangers on one of the most consistently unpleasant transport systems in the world to feel sorry for me. my loneliness is my fault. my loneliness is everyone else’s fault. any part of my heart that might have worked is going to massachusetts and i can never get it back. i still can’t spell the state name. it was never going to work.

do you think i will ever love someone again? i don’t. i think i might as well keep giving my heart to men i don’t care about and begging people to go get coffee with me just to be a little less alone and playing fifty-two hours of music away so i don’t have to be alone with my own thoughts. this is the kind of sequence of thoughts that makes me shake my head and reach for the hope i jammed into a drawer and hold onto it, firm although it has been beaten and bruised by my melancholia, and hope. and get out of bed, thinking that there is a future version of me looking back and thanking me for holding on. thinking that i have at least another decade before i can decide that love is lost to me forever. thinking that things fall apart but maybe i don’t have to.

i hope one day i’ll laugh at this.

for now, i think i’ll just try not to cry this week.

all my love,
arden