He wanted every day of his to be free of worries and obligations and responsibilities—even if that worry and obligation and responsibility was him.

he doesn’t want to be confronted with his image; he doesn’t want to see his body, his face staring back at him.

he literally doesn’t have the language to do so. His past, his fears, what was done to him, what he has done to himself—they are subjects that can only be discussed in tongues he doesn’t speak.

His silence had begun as something protective, but over the years it has transformed into something near oppressive, something that manages him rather than the other way around. Now he cannot find a way out of it, even when he wants to. He imagines he is floating in a small bubble of water, encased on all sides by walls and ceilings and floors of ice, all many feet thick. He knows there is a way out, but he is unequipped; he has no tools to begin his work, and his hands scrabble uselessly against the ice’s slick.

He had thought that by not saying who he was, he was making himself more palatable, less strange. But now, what he doesn’t say makes him stranger, an object of pity and even suspicion

"I’m lonely,” he says aloud, and the silence of the apartment absorbs the words like blood soaking into cotton.
This loneliness, it's a recent discovery.

He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest. He cannot unlearn the feeling. People make it sound so easy, as if the decision to want it is the most difficult part of the process. But he knows better: being in a relationship would mean exposing himself to someone, which he has still never done to anyone.

he reminds himself, loneliness is not hunger, or deprivation, or illness: it is not fatal. Its eradication is not owed him. He has a better life than so many people, a better life than he had ever thought he would have. To wish for companionship along with everything else he has seems a kind of greed, a gross entitlement.

But what is he willing to do to feel less alone? Could he destroy everything he’s built and protected so diligently for intimacy? How much humiliation is he ready to endure? He doesn’t know; he is afraid of discovering the answer.
But increasingly, he is even more afraid that he will never have the chance to discover it at all.

Inside him, the creature hesitates, perching on its hind legs, pawing the air as if feeling for answers.
Don’t do it, don’t fool yourself, no matter what you tell yourself, you know what you are, says one voice.
This may never happen again, the voice adds, and this stops him.
It will end badly.

all along, he had been waiting for some sort of punishment for his arrogance, for thinking he could have what everyone else has, and here—at last—it was. This is what you get, said the voice inside his head. This is what you get for pretending to be someone you know you’re not, for thinking you’re as good as other people.

he had understood his fear, how he had understood how you could get trapped by another human being, how what seemed so easy—the act of walking away from them—could feel so difficult. he had placed such hopes, someone he hoped could save him. But even when it became clear that they would not, even when his hopes turned rancid, he was unable to disentangle himself from them, he was unable to leave.

His beautiful apartment, he thinks, where he has always been safe. This is happening to him in his beautiful apartment, surrounded by his beautiful things, things that have been given to him in friendship, things that he has bought with money he has earned. His beautiful apartment, with its doors that lock, where he was meant to be protected from broken elevators and the degradation of pulling himself upstairs on his arms, where he was meant to always feel human and whole.

—A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara.

Artwork by Donato Giancola.

I barely need to breathe
for you to spread your fingers over my chest
and count my ribs
the way a child would count stars.
But of course,
you're no longer here, are you?
 
I am one to know that life isn't fair,
evidence carefully labeled and marked,
ready to be cross-examined at first command.
 
Exhibit one: the jaws of the past.
Exhibit two: the ghosting pain.
Exhibit three: the traitor of a body.
Exhibit four: you, gone.
Exhibit five: everything and everything.
 
In this house that we built together,
I was an empty room that your name filled up,
and living felt so much less like a sin.
Eyes closed I can almost hear you say again, Five minutes,
and I open my mouth to reply as always, Five,
only to choke and claw on barren dirt.
Every night is a funeral in which I survive,
and you die again and again.
 
I will not lie and say I do not miss
the press of a blade against my skin.
Because I do—
you know I do.
But every time I breathe
is a different kind of bruising,
bleeding.
If I wanted pain, I would call your name instead:
Willem,
Willem.
What's more painful than knowing that you won't come to me?
 
But I will allow myself other lies,
like this green sweater I still wrap myself with
for the memory of your arms around me,
for the ghost of your touch.
And I want you to see,
as much as I would hate for you to see,
that I want so much to be haunted.
 
I pretend you will come back,
and I write to you the way we always did—
Dear comrade;
Dear comrade—
messages turning into birds that always know their way home.
And I wait for the door to creak open,
wait for you to smile at me again,
and I'll tell you how much I missed you.
Oh, I miss you.

Grant me this lie.
I beg you.

—JUDE WAITING TO TELL WILLEM A STORY, FREYA L.

"Maybe he is that flower that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist. It isn’t only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him."

the absence echoes throughout this
self-inflicted desert, a wasteland of
every imaginary conservation
starring you and i, where i casted
as the leads in a couple that finds
love again. i can never write a
script believable enough to
fix what was done –

instead, i wallow here,
in what could have been.

No hero
Should run and hide
When the villain
Becomes their shadow
But engage
Those reflected demons
To translate fear
Into hope
As they shape
What legends believe
All worthy change
Isn’t judgment
When mirrors break
Throwing punches
Likes stones we cast
Fighting back -
Each shattered piece
Cutting deep
So every scar
Provides reasons
For claiming hate
Without purpose  
Or drawing lines
Between friends,
Worried peace
Means dreaming alone
While surrounded now
By accusers
Whose obvious threat
Peddles justice
Through riotous words
Left unchecked.