mechanisms

i return to you when i am sad. it’s been habitual for so long, i don’t know different anymore. it used to be all crying, yelling that i couldn’t deal with this anymore, you couldn’t just expect me to cope with all this shit. and then my all-consuming sadness, because the only thing worse than loving you was not loving you. and i’d show up at your window, 2am, drunk and crying. you’d let me in and wrap your warmth around me, encasing me in some false offering of safety.

your window is too far for me to make the walk now, and i got tired of calling. i quit drinking, because it always ended leading straight to you.

i got new meds, and didn’t think about the heartache anymore. less often, anyway.

this returning is of a different sort. it’s the newest trend in the long long list of coping mechanisms. in the early days, back when i was fourteen and stood in the setting sun, dramatic, surrounded by soil and sand and miles of heather, i would cut myself when everything was just too much. then there was the eating disorder, the obsession and the counting and the starving myself so entirely numb to any feeling that wasn’t hunger.

that one’s had some decent longevity. long after rehab and doctors’ appointments and my period returning, i come back to the restriction. a way to exercise ultimate control, when you feel out of control. i’ve been in therapy since i was fourteen, i can analyse myself, don’t you worry.

i am articulately self-aware in my destruction.

it’s never been bad like that again, like when they had to send me to a treatment centre (and then another one) and they watched me like a hawk ensuring that i ate up every crumb.

i just dabble, now and then, to get my head straight. that’s not something you can explain to people very easily – no, no i know that it’s not normal to eat half a meal a day, it’s just temporary, it’s a strategy, yes i know it’s not a healthy one.

there’s been smoking, and drinking, and the self-imposed insomnia, and the actual insomnia, and then there was you.

you make the sadness in my bones feel like home.

and so, when the sadness in my bones does not feel like home, i find myself wandering through our graveyard in my mind. there’s the park where you held my hair back while i vomited. and further along, same park, different night, where you fucked me in the cold damp grass and we laughed and held hands all the way home.

there’s the street corner where you tugged your hand away from me and asked me why i had to insist on this bullshit, we don’t need to be touching all the time. i never held your hand after that, and you didn’t try to take mine. there’s the room where i fell in love with you. there’s the streetlamp i almost fell asleep under, just outside your house, sick to death of loving you. there’s a million screaming matches, all about the same thing. over and over and over again. 

when the sadness does not feel like home, i think about how i cried myself to sleep, choking on sobs, for so many weeks. indulging in the anger and the pain that i could never be enough for you, bending over backwards to try and mould myself into something you could love but never quite succeeding. i think about how everything was my fault, think about the awful awful things i did while loving you.

you brought out the worst in me, and i brought out the best in you. that’s what made it so hard for you to let me go, isn’t it? and i needed you to let me go, i didn’t have the strength to wrench myself away all by my own self-will. 

until i could. until i did. until i fell away, and changed the way i love you without even realising. i return to you when i am sad because you made my sadness comfortable. i didn’t notice i was dying. in the passing months, the air felt cold and thrilling as it rushed to my lungs. the light has come back to my eyes. i wear my hair long, and the fact i grew it out for you doesn’t enter my mind. you let me go. i felt the shift, i felt the earth shift and breathed a sigh of relief. i thought it would be hard. i hated the thought that one day i would not be in love with you. but now it’s here.

and while the falling leaves of autumn are a death outside my window, i am bursting into life.