Immolation

I do not know.  I never have.  And while I lounge indolently about in college establishments making idle conversation with bashful baristas, my thoughts never completely divorce themselves from the reality: anchorless.  Listless and foundering; who I am, what I am, and every little thing I predicate echoes more and more hollowly the closer I listen.  I do not like how I feel right now; I waffle in abject uncertainty, unable to confidently choose between enraged determination and poisonous self-pity.

They met at the wharfs, their combined chatter mingling with the cries of seagulls and the crashing of the surf.  No ribbons, no ladies waving hankerchiefs or blowing kisses, no foreign dignitaries from distant port of calls with official letters wishing me well.  Just a general, unspoken acknowledgment that I’m not coming back.  They didn’t proffer any help, really, but a young boy pulled the knife from my back and cut the mooring lines, and his older brother shoved me face down on to the deck.  The white flag on the foremast fluttered dejectedly in the unfavorable wind.

I am miserable tonight.  I’ve read old reaffirmations; extant records of ancient promises whose stipulations I’ve bent so much, they can no longer break.  A notion I formulated in the dim hours in an urban tenement: Divinity is an unfulfilled promise.  My fingers are fractured and my knuckles are raw, but still I punch away at a reflection constantly shifting shape; I clack away at worn letters on black keys pressed into dirty blue.  My flammable ideas race from neuron to neuron, and my eyes are signal-fires in the streetlamp-lit snowy nimbus of night.  My brain has burned to dust and other minor details.

There hasn’t been a decent wind in weeks, I thought, as I admitted defeat and furled the sails.  I took a tired seat and grabbed firm hold of an oar.  The sun beat upon my naked back, and the sky manifested neither cloud nor pity.  I tasted salt; I wiped my brow, my hands, and my eyes.  Breathing deeply, I pulled evenly and insistently upon my paddle, grunting in effort.  The rewards were minimal, and I didn’t even bother to think–with one oar, I would only travel in lazy circles.

Something wound me a little too tight, and now the spool inside can’t manage a deep breath.  Every irrelevant event in my unsteady existence is a personal rebuke from the universe; every unsolicitied, instantaneous glance on the street delivers an unflattering judgement.  But I know it’s a mean spell my mind conjured; a bit of chicanery perpetrated upon me by some wayward impulses and untethered neuroses.  So I clench my fist furiously, well aware that I’m holding on to a bit of permanent hope that is terribly important to me, a modicum of humanity that windblown streets and nights like snowbanks–dangerously cold and frighteninly immobile–can only dream of freezing.  Forward, I direct my gaze.

I wrapped my emaciated body in a white canvas sail and toss myself into the serene sea.  I know that the currents will caress my chrysalis unraveling.

Patience.

 And hope.  Always hope.  Because something wonderful must be coming.  I’m due.

[Edit]

I remember telling her.  We sat beneath the overpass, cloaked in the quiet night, swaddled in our teenaged ambivalence and nearly indifferent to everything but each other.  And I ran my hand over the curve of her jaw, and I breathed in the sweet, natural scent of her flaxen hair, and I cautiously, delicately put my lips over hers, first gentle, then passionate.  I’d said it.  I’d said it with only a single crack in the bulwark of my resolve.

Her affection was an avalanche, really, and it nearly buried me, overwhelmed me in its shocking hunger.  I’d never met someone so starved.  I had told her I was a boulder on a mountain, sitting, waiting, promising; one delicate nudge and…well, we all know.

One night.  In reverie, in transition, in between astral stations.  I met her in a dream that I could not remember, I bid her farewell in a nightmare that I can not forget.  I finally managed to meet my own gaze in that vestigial furnishing man calls mirror; I  saw myself, respected myself, and felt some spark of love for myself.  What foolish girl could ever turn this down?

I’m fucking determined.