trigger warning: suicide
There are words, dancing and slipping and twirling in my head. And they don't come out. They stay there, time and time again. Whether it is emails to Liv, or the Christmas card for Ben, or the letters to Jay, or the rainbows- the dancing glittering rainbows that don't really require words, but contain them anyway- for Cassie.
And then they are gone, and I try to recreate them, and I cannot.
Sometimes they are stories that will never get told and exist in something that was once my memory, but is now worse than Limbo, for it doesn't exist at all. Some of them are stories of my life, and some of them are just stories. And none of them exist any more.
I can feel the jumble of 26 characters drifting away, the passion, the love ebbing down and away, and it's not like the tide because I cannot feel it coming back at all. There is no nipping in the middle of the night of words that get pressed to paper, or pixels to screen. They stay, circling in my head until they are gone.
I am losing my words and I do not know how to find them.
If you asked me six months ago, I would have killed myself and left no words why. And now, now I don't want to die, but still there are no words. There is nothing like comfort, yet there is so much to say. There is the blank screen, and the empty page, and the pens scattered across the room, and a blinking cursor.
I have written my whole life- it is what I am and who I am. I wrote them when I was broken and they were a comfort. I called out to the empty universe and sometimes it wrote back. And now? Now am I not quite so broken in that same way, but the words have gone with the broken. It's a different sort of broken, and I don't know how to fix it.
I am losing my words and I do not know how to get them back.
Once, I thought if I only stopped taking the pills, maybe I would be terribly miserable and depressed, but I could have my words. It wasn't to be. I stopped cold turkey and had vertigo and headshocks and dug up that old razor blade that I sneaked back out of Liv's room after he took it from me. And it was then, when I had rivers of red and I realised what I was doing to myself, I went back on the pills, and the vertigo stopped, and my head stopped shocking, and I lost the desire to dance lines across my skin in some attempt to feel, to breathe, to love, to create. I always said I would trade anything to get my words back if I lost them. But not this. Turns out there was too high a price to pay- who knew?
And the words stayed dancing and twirling and skipping and slipping in my head. Nothing came to pass.
Maybe this is growing up. Maybe the fact that I've been far better at getting out and DOING things is the point.
I think of Andy and of Garrett and of standing up and using action, and it's wonderful, and a rush, but then I think 'wouldn't it be nice if all the words in my head could join it?' and they never can. And maybe that's growing up, and maybe that's how it's supposed to go. I don't know.
I use/d words as my escape, as my outlet, as my screaming at an unfair world. I took all the unfairness of Timothy's assault and made them beautiful words, dancing a story of two unlikely male lovers across the pages. They, those two fictional men that Jay got me to fall in love with, got me through the worst of it- they kept my sanity. And in high school, when I thought I couldn't bear to live any more, the words skittered across the pages in some sort of cliched, tragic, suburbian poetry that Jason could probably recognise if he saw it. But they kept my sanity.
Now, now something else doesn't keep my sanity- it regulates it so I don't feel as if I am losing it. There is nothing to calm from, there is nothing to keep, for I already have kept it, if that makes any sense at all.
My words have defined me for so long, and now I activist around the place, and I volunteer for politics and believe that my actions make a difference. My words saved me, but my actions are bigger than me. And maybe that's how it's supposed to be, phone calls to people sick of politics, trying to get them to care [oh, how I love the crotchety people- they make this humanity seem real. It's what my words used to do], or protests, or actions, or organising groups of people in a united effort. Maybe it's trying to end a war, or speaking out about why 17-year old girls are NOT like Hitler, not even a little bit. Maybe that's what this is, this life, and that's how this is supposed to go.
So words, whatever you were, and whatever you are, and whatever you will be. Maybe this is goodbye, and maybe this isn't.
Maybe I am just lonely and missing people and missing actions and phone calls and ending wars and tagboard with handwritten signs. Maybe I am missing them instead of words and they are the pieces of my identity now. I don't know.
And you know what?
There's something terrifying, yet brilliant about that.
