KARI

i used to believe that eternity meant having to choose between my love for a boy and my love for the world. so i chose the world.  i was young, then i am older, now or at least, old enough to understand that this time i chose the man i love not in spite of my love for the world, but because of it.

i know it’s hard to remember when we’re separated by so many miles... but i see the universe in your eyes. my heart lives in your voice. my soul is etched in your skin. i’ve whispered hundreds of promises into your lips; felt a thousand stars burst under the touch of your hands. you are my faith, and the fact that you are possible makes me wonder if anything isn’t.  there is the time that passes, and then there’s the time that you feel. loving you is an infinity that cannot be measured by atoms or clocks. loving you is more than enough and yet never enough. loving you is luck. loving you is fate. loving you is a lifetime of words chipping away at eternity, centuries of story and song. i am blessed beyond comprehension to be human. to be here. i am yours in life and death, and somehow more my own than ever. 

when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you and you can let it swallow you whole, or you can look at it and laugh and say i know you are a part of me, but you are not ALL of me and today is not your day. and you can lift your head and square your shoulders and you can walk away.

don’t be so arrogant... don’t assume that the people around you won’t understand. he was right. she bit her lip, looked out into the streets. obscured as they were by the blinds, she could still see lights flickering in the cracks between each shutter. where was velaris in this world? in her mind - and in that of the prince she had chosen. you want to find the city you dream of? build it, then. with your own two hands.  you don’t even have to do it alone. he’d reminded her of this. he was perceptive. more importantly, he was true; true to her, and to her honor. he told her where she needed to look, to whom she needed to look, and it hadn’t been him. in that moment she knew she’d carry his friendship to the grave if he’d allow it. you need to tell him what you’re feeling and ask him to figure it out with you. tell him that you need a partner in this. “i know,” she sighed. and she had known, she was just too isolated to be thinking it so explicitly. hearing it from someone else’s lips was an entirely different ballpark. as much as i want to be there for you, sometimes it’s just not my place. indeed it wasn’t. not at the apex of the world she dreamed of breathing into life. but at her court... there would be a place for him, always. whenever he might choose to visit, whenever he might need a place to feel safe and understood. the same thing he’d once done for her. the same thing she knew he would still find a way to offer her now without crossing any boundaries - she had only to ask. he couldn’t possibly have given her a home when he was so far gone from finding his own. but an escape, a sanctuary? yes. time and time again. she wasn’t sure how on earth she’d earned his loyalty, nor what she had done to deserve it. it felt like she’d taken a lot more than he ever allowed her to give. fortunately, she still had time to turn it around. so she would. he never asked for her help. but if the day ever came... she swore to herself that she would live up to it. 

talking to someone you once knew is like staring into a time capsule. she couldn’t look him in the eyes for very long - not for any specific reason, really, it’s just hard to look directly at anyone’s eyes these days, especially if you feel like they might be observant and clever and interested enough to actually see the hollow demons that have set up shop in yours - but she knew him well enough to know that he was paying attention to her, curious as they had always been about each other. she thought about how she must’ve looked; skittish, scared, sad, a shadow of her former self. she couldn’t fake her way through the trauma anymore, which is why she didn’t risk having to see anyone for too long.  but there was enough of her left to text someone a hard question when it occurred to her, and just, just enough of her left to say yes when asked to go for a walk in the middle of the night. it wasn’t a reckless misadventure, just a careful, shivering stroll down streets that served as the literal lanes of her memories. she didn’t mince words about who she’d become. if he judged her for it, he was careful not to let it show.  it felt good to focus on something, on another mind besides her own. the only sign that minutes were passing came in the form of the sun beginning to shed some light onto the sky. when she walked away, taking deep, shuddering breaths and feeling quietly relieved at having survived, she realized that she’d done something that scared her for the first time in a while. she’d recognized her fear, and pushed herself to go out and meet it. it wasn’t velaris. it wasn’t anything close. but it was a reminder. a reminder that there was something within her that still remembered how to live. “you can talk to whoever you want, you know.” she’d given her the keys and shoved her towards the door. “go. use the silver key first, and the gold key second.” he’d reminded her (a different he, mind you) of the same thing mere hours before that. “there are a lot of people that would jump at the chance to help you find your way again.” she thought the word jump was an exaggeration. but she knew she didn’t have to be alone if she didn’t want to be. there wasn’t much time left, but she thought that she could manage at least a few more walks. within them, perhaps, she’d find a vestige of the girl that she’d once been -- and in their aftermath, if she was lucky, revive a memory that would become a friend.  she wondered what he saw in her last spring, when he was really looking. she wondered what he saw now. i’ll ask him next time, she decided. friends... guardians of the pieces of herself she’d given them over the years. she turned the silver key, then the gold. her best friend slept peacefully, right where she’d left her. with a flicker of hope in her freezing heart, she crawled in next to her and closed her eyes.

Her breaths came shallow and fast against her chest. The world around her felt unbearable, a cage of inevitable doom; as if it whatever she needed could not be found within it. For the first time in many years, she shivered as serpentine tendrils of fear threaded thin, sharp vines into her blood. Fear, the same fear that had once driven her reckless, hell-bent wanderlust. Fear that there was more, and that she’d die if she could not find it. Fear of the hunger that churned within her. Fear that she would never know how to satisfy it. Fear that she would burn herself alive - for nothing. I am not numb. I am not hollow. I am not empty. But I need more, and I don’t know where to look. She closed her eyes, the lids heavy with fear. Her heart thudded in her ears, a frightened bird beating its desperate wings against her skin.  Maybe that’s why she was afraid of the drugs. Afraid that where they once inspired wonder, they would instead bring dread. Afraid that the things she touched would taste bland not because she lacked the capacity to carry emotion, but rather the capacity to feel it for this earth. What would she marvel at now? Was there anything left that did not tire her at the mere thought of it? “There was a time when all I wanted was enough money to keep me and my family fed so that I could spend my days painting. That was all I wanted. Ever.” “And now?” “Now I don’t know what I want. I can’t paint anymore.” People who find purpose have a vision. She could not remember her vision. She knew that everything was about to change; she knew that she needed to give that change a chance. But the hunger... the hunger and her fearful, dying heart, panicking to the sounds of sand slipping through an hourglass. They doubted her. They doubted the path that she was about to take, and doubted its ability to reveal the answers she so desperately sought, haunted as she was by the spectre of death that chased her.  You just have to wait, she reminded herself. You just have to wait, and hope, and pray that Lady Luck still loves you. Pray that she has taken enough of a tithe to give you a little more time.  But how much more? And what if this world is all wrong? What if there is nothing for me here, after all? Love and marriage were important, but contrary to what the patriarchy would have her believe, she knew that they were not the only things she had been born for. She’d written 76 pages to the contrary, grown exponentially more certain with every passing paragraph. There was more. There had to be. She gripped the edge of the table. Her knuckles were white, and her fingers ached. Where can I find Velaris? To what end would I build a court? Where in this world are my people, and where in this world is my home? 

The book taught her two things. Two, and she hadn’t even finished it. We all have the same burden to bear. She thought of the fae huntress scrubbing her hands under the water, thought of how mortal her guilt-ridden skin must have felt despite the knowledge that she could no longer die. She thought of her own eyes, haunted in the reflection of various bathroom mirrors, thought of how easy it was to retch with discomfort. Why, really, why did she hate nausea so much? Perhaps because it was the only consistent sensation that had dogged her relentlessly that night. Perhaps because the smell of death conjured an endless horde of demons to march upon her waking dreams. The huntress had post-traumatic stress disorder. She’d known it as surely as she’d known it in herself, remembering the way her lungs had stitched into tight and agonized knots at the slightest hint of doubt in the faces of her charges. She could hear the prince’s voice in her mind’s ear, quiet with truth. “You will feel that way every day for the rest of your life,” he’d said. The huntress knew it, too. Even retribution will not fix it. What retribution was there to enact? She had no one to blame but herself, no peace left to make but her own. “You can either let it wreck you, let it get you killed... or you can learn to live with it.” Live, as she so desperately wanted to do, as she so desperately tried to do despite the death tattooed on the backs of her eyelids. She had more in common with the huntress than she’d originally thought. More in common, in our broken souls, our rasping wit, our fear, our trauma, our tempers, our volatile visions of blood and murder... more in common at this moment than she felt with the princess, or even the lady knight of her childhood. How? How do you make peace with a death that lined your very bones with the memory of your role in it? How do you forgive yourself for failing?  The second thing the book taught her answered a question she’d harbored within her for years. It wasn’t that she was made of the darkness, or that she had no light. Darkness was neither bad nor good, and she had only to tip her head back underneath the heat of the sun to know that a part of her would always feel inspired by its glowing rays. But she could not erase the memory of what she’d done, could not wash the nightmares out of her slender, trembling fingers. She could not forget the shining golden girl that she once was, but neither could she disavow the brooding young woman she’d long since been forced to become.  I need, she realized, someone who understands that darkness. There were hundreds, thousands, millions of golden boys in summer courts who would be breathlessly easy to love. She needn’t have worried about finding them. But to live in a place where everything was always gold... She could’ve grown accustomed to it once, satisfied with the simple pleasures of music and story and song. But not anymore. She needed someone who knew the darkness too, who had seen it for himself and breathed its twisted scent as it threatened to drag him under with his soul as certain forfeit. She needed someone who knew what it was like to feel the jagged ache that haunted her heart. Someone who had stared into the abyss long enough for the abyss to stare back... and survived. Lived, even. Someone who would not pity her, or coddle her, but rather compel her to get on her feet. Someone who would know that the best way to protect her was by putting a sword in her hands. Someone who infuriated her, because anything was better than the hollow throb of stagnation. Who could taunt her into a rage, because anything was better than going numb... Someone who might give her courage, and someone who she could in turn remind to be brave.  Cradled on all sides by windows, she stared at the tendrils of dawn curling into the sky. At last, she knew that the darkness did not make her any less alive. It never robbed her of her vivacity; couldn’t, really, unless she allowed it. Unless she gave herself over completely. And she knew then that she wouldn’t. Because she felt a deep, human yearning in her bones, a trembling drive for the fury of life. Because she craved color the way only someone who has bathed in darkness can. Because, she realized, shaking with pain and hope, those who harbored darkness in their hearts and learned to bear it lived more wildly and fiercely than any sweet and simple creature. It was a price she would have never chosen to pay, but she’d paid it, and when she imagined the city of starlight glimmering in her aching head she could not bring herself to regret how beautiful she found it. 

I am tired. But I will not complain. Because I can still breathe, because I can still live. Because until proven otherwise, tomorrow still comes. Because the women I admire face their fates in proud silence. Vulnerability is not a state of being but rather a choice - one that should be made, yes, but rarely, and only to those who have earned it. Read the hearts of others, but do not wear your own on your sleeve. Wear armor. Armor that can be taken off, but wear it. I want to protect the people that I love, and the only way to prove that is to do it. I won’t need to tell them that if they already know. So, tired. But today, I am stubborn; perhaps someday, I will be strong.

it was becoming familiar enough that she didn’t really know how it made her feel. it used to make her feel scared. really scared, actually. the first time she was truly confronted with it, a handful of her closest friends nearly died. she couldn’t remember if she’d been fourteen or fifteen. it hardly mattered. in that moment, she’d felt twelve. almost always, the poison settled in like a haze. slowly but surely raking at your insides, making your own organs feel nauseating in your abdomen. she could no longer count on her fingers the number of times someone had blinked at her through that thick, reeking cloud and smiled in vacuous recognition. i love you. her heart always did a little twist when she heard those words from someone who had gone under. she didn’t know what to make of it. it’s not that the words sounded insincere. they just sounded like they were coming from a stranger; a stranger familiar enough that she should have remembered who they were. similar enough to be eerie, different enough to be disturbing.  she loved them back, which is why she sat by them, palms caressing the smalls of their backs, fingers gently combing through matted strands of hair. she loved them back, which is why she always checked to see if they made it home, or took them with her. by then, she’d memorized the procedure. water. repository. tissues. a phone. close proximity to someone who had remembered to utter the countercurse at the last minute - or just never dared to go near dark magic at all. in the death throes of what she hoped would be the final four-year division in her life, she faltered once. but only because it was the one person whose pain she felt more acutely than her own. only because poisoning him poisoned her, except she more slowly, she more aware. only because, as unhealthy as it might have been, she knew some cold corner of her heart believed that his recognition of her validated her right to live. the icy pit of terror that lunged at the walls of her chest in his absence kept her from seeing herself clearly. suddenly she couldn’t remember anything at all. fortunately, so fortunately, as with all the closest calls in her life, someone picked up the phone.  he got through that night and so did she, shivering herself into a sick slumber under the sleeping bag over the couch. now, months later, confronted with another dying boy, a different boy, but smiling and retching and dying all the same, she found that she remembered. she did not think she would ever forget again. so she tucked the pillow underneath his head, spoke soothingly, showed no anger or fear. she didn’t think she was hiding any. the last time she drank poison herself, she recalled staring at a faint blue ceiling with eyes that shed peaceful tears in a steady campaign to expel it from her frozen veins. he spit into the plastic, propped up by his palms, head dangling between his knees. he could barely sit straight. she knew why. she knew what it was. she rubbed his shoulders and despite her sobriety her eyes glazed over. at last, her revulsion had been numbed by habit. 

times like these, trying to regulate emotions (or, on occasion, even having any of them) feels like throwing darts against a steel wall. it’s not a dartboard. it can’t hold darts. it doesn’t matter if you aim like a double o and/or tipped the damn thing with poison. nothing sticks. nothing lives. nothing dies.

2AM and i’ve been pushing another paper back, the most important one i’ve ever written, in favor of this new album. this is gonna be a banner year for music. actually, i stand corrected; it already is.  i remember the first time i heard a drake song. i don’t mean like heard on the radio, or while daydreaming at the window displays in QC mall. i mean like, really heard. listened. absorbed. it was some sunny afternoon. i was sleeping because i couldn’t get the motivation to write. i had my headphones in because i was too scared to sleep and i needed my music to remember how to breathe, how to inhale and exhale. i woke up and a song was playing that i had never heard before. my ex, now a good friend, put that shit on my iPod. it was the song fear, off so far gone, now so long ago but iconic enough that i remember every beat like he dropped it yesterday. i didn’t get out of bed until i heard the song all the way through at least three times. from that moment on i was a convert.  drake is really good at being drake, and people like that. i like that, my man likes that. my boys like that. my girls like that. there’s nothing wrong with that. there’s nothing wrong with liking something a lot of other people like. this is an important lesson that i have been lucky to learn: there’s nothing wrong with feeling like The Song of the Summer can be your song of the summer too. there’s nothing wrong with anything on principle. there’s no way to have to be. a lot of unstructured time coming up, a lot of unstructured identity. i was sixteen when thank me later dropped. that album was everything to me, and to the boy that put so far gone on my iPod. i spent the last unstructured summer lying on rooftops in new york listening to take care, playing over my dead body under a cloudless sky and wondering where my life was taking me next. the answer was chicago. the first time i listened to nothing was the same i was on a plane back to that windswept city, about to start my second year of college, skidding slowly but surely towards rock bottom. i made it out. i realized how much people cared about if you’re reading this it’s too late during my last summer in chicago. domo played it at a tyler the creator concert and the whole building shook with the energy that energy made every single person feel. no one was embarrassed to like drake anymore. it’s gotta mean something when you remember where you were every time an artist drops new music. when you remember your favorite tracks off the mixtapes, before he even found 40. i’m not saying they were good. some of them were pretty bad, actually. but i remember them. i’m not here saying drake is the best rapper alive or nothing, but he’s one of the greatest artists i’ve ever heard, and the word “great” - the word “drake” - can mean whatever you want it to. that’s why he’s got this website. drake is comfortable enough with drake that he doesn’t care if you put his face on top of a... whatever. so if a canadian jewish child actor can become one of the most prolific entertainers of his generation and feel pretty good about it, i’m going to admit that i’m inspired. and when i’m listening to this album on some rooftop somewhere this summer i’m going to wonder again where my life is going. and i’m going to be scared. but i’m also going to remind myself that fear was only the beginning. 

there is something on the other side, i know I see it in the reflection of my love upon your face. i see it in the birds i hear when i am still awake i see it in my hands, soft with hope and worn with age there is something just beyond this turn, i feel i hear it in the haze of pain interred within my dreams i hear it in the footsteps i still take when i am tired i hear it in the voices of the people i have loved there is something out there left to find, i hope i feel it in the sound of silence when i think i’m safe i feel it in the living breathing warmth of your embrace i feel it in the risks that we’re still brave enough to take and so i pray that there is more and so i dream that there is more and so i know there must be more  beyond the fork in this here road beyond the worlds we’ve dared to know more places still for us to go more lessons still for us to grow.

being with you was like looking at a picture in which everything else out of focus. i didn’t even have to be looking. i could feel the photograph around me; it lived and breathed, shutter speeds ever-shifting. yet you never blurred, even when my eyes were closed. my heartbeat was a radar hammering hopelessly in my ears. no matter how close or how far, i always knew where you were.  my vision did not clear when we were apart. where you should have been there lay a still-smoking silhouette, as if someone had taken a blowtorch to the image i held in my shaking hands. everything else remained a haze. small wonder i couldn’t think to save my life. in the madness of self-imposed obscurity, what was i supposed to see? what other truth could i be forced to speak when there was only one that i knew how to feel?  it has been nearly a year. i can make sense of my words these days. the original photograph has evolved into an album, and not every image is shrouded in fog. but sometimes i still look back. i think about the torturous glory of meeting someone who made you want to drown the whole world. i remember what it was like not to care about anything else i saw; i remember how it felt to hunt for shooting stars that raced each other well above the earth. as time passes and memory fades, know that i would sacrifice a lifetime of clarity at the altar for the pleasure of finding you all over again.

many months later her fingers on the windowpanes looked foreign to her. was she really so pale? had she always been? was it just a trick of the light? she tried to think. her head felt heavy. it could be the light. moonlight is typically white, isn’t it? silver? which? and the sun is warm and gold... if only i could remember... what time of day it is. but she couldn’t. she couldn’t decide for the life of her whether it was day or night, and nothing about the way the glow hit her icy fingers felt distinctive enough to decide what was up in the sky. the room felt so small. she remembered thinking when she was first thrown in that it wasn’t so bad, that there was more than enough space for her to bide her time for a while, but she must’ve been thinking a little less than straight, must’ve been wandering sideways with her thoughts because it felt oppressively suffocating to her now. she wondered if the walls crept a little closer together every day. that’s how it felt. how was she to know? she wrenched her hands away from the window and dropped to her knees, feeling the stone underneath her palms and sneezing as the dust rose to cloud her senses. maybe if i measure it with my hands. she crawled to one side of the room, too distressed at the prospect of a shrinking prison to notice when her faded dress tore against the jagged walls. she pressed her nails to the wall. one, she counted. clumsily she lay the other hand adjacent to it. two. slowly she crawled, slowly she counted. her head was throbbing. she thought she could hear her blood in her ears. at some point between 45 and 57 she lost track. what came after 5, anyway?  she dragged herself back to the beginning. her skin was so parched it needled her. she ignored it. she had to count. she had to know. if this room could get smaller it would eat her alive. she couldn’t die here. she had to at least die somewhere she could see the sun, or moon, at least. somewhere she could figure out what kind of light it was that bathed her broken soul before she died.

teach me a lesson in how to feel less. in how to care less how to “not overthink” how to forget the blood that dogs my churning veins and the stories i dreamt one page turn at a time teach me to be calm when i watched mama die you ask why does every word have to matter? why does every choice count? why is there a galaxy embedded in each note that lives inside my dying body? standing shaken before yours and i tell you that where you see hourglass sand i see time, that where you feel warmth i feel the scorch of mortality; that where you hear ticks i hear bullets and that where you see love i feel the spectre of loss. and as you were just beginning to touch the miracle of life i was, as ever, drowning in death. i cannot feel less or be less. you don’t have to stay, but don’t ask me to change in this way because i have only ever drawn breath against the iron of the gun in my bleeding, mortal mouth. i will write as many pages as i need to, i will live to feel what i want however much i can bear, and much more that i can’t.

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