From the Latin pati, patior, passus sum, a deponent verb meaning, “to suffer.”
From the Latin pati, patior, passus sum, a deponent verb meaning, “to suffer.”
I do not want to let this go, so here it is as I cannot invest much of myself now because I do not have much of myself left. He took me back to his apartment. We watched Casablanca and I curled into myself. We sang along to First Day of My Life as he drove me home. He is everything I was ever promised and never given, everything that I have made excuses for the absence of, and now it is my own absence that plagues and betrays me. I do not want to hurt. I do not want to hurt him. I do not care about hurting myself but when Patricia is crying and my mother is crying and I wish I could cry and I don’t know where I am I do not want to hurt myself so badly. I do not want to talk because I do not have anything to say. I do not know where I am but I know that things hurt and yet when I am with him I am not afraid of myself.
fadetodust a demandé: Hello, I love your tumblr. You are an amazing writer. Would you like to say something about yourself? How old are you? Where are you from?
Thank you most kindly, cherie. I think I should like to say something about myself or on my behalf but I have nothing to say. Words never fail me, but I fail them. I am 18 years old and I am from the wilds of Connecticut, though I call Portland, Oregon home.
“Cura, curae; feminine noun, first declension; care, anxiety, grief; love.”
This is why I love Latin.
I laugh a lot in my classes now. I don’t laugh otherwise. People look at me oddly, they look me in the eyes and they will not let go. I am not used to being so held by gazes. They hold me in existence, they tether me to it and all I want is to sleep. We are reading the Aeneid in Latin, and experiencing that class, that text, makes me feel connected to the ages of human history. I brush up against Eliot, I squirm about with all of the men and women who have beheld this hero. The scansion makes my head spin, rotating on an axis of syllables divided neatly, extended or shortened as the meter permits- or, rather, as the poet dictates. I watch a movie every night and I would like to write an essay about film and vision but I am so blind that even sight is not seeing anymore. Kathleen wants to speak to me twice a week. Therapists speaking to you twice a week is never a good sign. Good, good; bad, bad. I thought I was a relativist but then I was an absolutist, and then an absolute absurdist but I still won’t eat. I like my order. My words are those of a 3rd grader. My mind is very slow. I am what they would call far, or sad. Or both. Who can describe sorrow, who can accurately pin my emotions in a shadowbox? It is the shadows I fear, after all. The interplay, the intercourse of light and dark within me overwhelms my senses. I sleep, I suppose. Dreaming is waking. Awake, I dream of sleeping. I am yet warm, cradled in my mother’s appropriated sweaters. Oh, I am so far. I am so far.
There are some, yes, some I have seen and heard murmured mention of, who sport their skin with delight. They are generous with their joy, effusive in their exuberance for life, for death, for anguish, for ecstasy. There are some, yes, one I fear I have become, who writhe within their flesh, enraptured in a perpetual tantrum against existence. I agonize over the most minute details and the most universal, brutal facts. I was a wellspring but ills can toss themselves about with just as much temerity, just as much force. I have been covered in sand. I have baptized myself with Portland rain. I am filthy with innocence, it sticks to my tongue and makes me so nauseous that the very thought of the skin of an eggplant repulses me. How do I eat, how do I eat? Futility! Futility! The battle cry of the bored valkryie! Can angels be felled by ennui? Perhaps that is why Rimbaud is such a terrible angel, perhaps that explains part of Patti Smith’s adulation of that curious character. Is one a character in or the author of one’s autobiography?
I am back at school. I do not know where I am, who I am, or why everything hurts as it does. My mother reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut or maybe J. D. Salinger. I want to see Nick today but I don’t want to see anyone else. I have to get through 6 weeks and then I can go back to my other cocoon. I don’t know how I will do this.
No, I never wanted to die. I just didn’t want to be alive.
My mind protests; my body groans. I am, I am, shaken, shaking. Blessé, blessed.
(Source : soletudier)
Levi, my friend, you modern Menelaus, you are dead. You fell while hiking, you snapped your fibula the way I used to snap twigs in the back country of Colorado, the way my mother snapped her fingers in church, the way these flimsy strands of habit made of spun sugar and glass (melted sugar, melted sand, it all tastes the same) just… snap. You were alone. You were alone. Alone. I am sorry that you were alone. You died. You, who were so warm, to die in the cold; the world steals warmth the way Jean Valjean stole bread, in innocence and desperation. I remember your voice and the way you let Johnny Cash sing through you while I screamed, “Brutus is an honorable man!” and Salish and Antonio discussed Devendra Banhart. You died of exposure, true exposure, not the metaphoric exposure we all die of eventually. Wintry weather, they called it. Eventually the blows of the wind beat out your heart. I hope you did not suffer. I hope you dozed, dazzled and dazed by endorphins and hypothermic tenderness, I hope you slipped away. I hope you did not know you were dying. We are all dying. We all die alone. You died alone. Levi, you are dead. I did not allow you to die. I feel betrayed by the universe.
