Carapace
Honest thoughts on safety in closeness, and despair in being alone
Corner me in the bedroom, remove any ability to escape, and suddenly the anxiety goes away — I’m temporarily at peace. The ceiling fan blows, but the wind it creates cannot be felt. Hours go by; analog_mannequin’s “i still dream about you” plays on a loop; the window is broken, so it cannot be cracked open. But here I am, breathing like a small proof, learning—awkwardly, unevenly—to function. I think I’ve been confused my whole life: that I might be free, that I might venture into the world alone, that I might need no one, and that I would surely find my peace therein. What I often find is terror. The closer you come, the safer this obscurely visceral life feels to me.
The rain pours outside. Sometimes I move from the bedroom to the kitchen for a stimulant. I pour scalding water over the granules of helpless instant coffee. It sizzles and becomes indistinct from the water. Next: organic maple syrup, half-and-half, Vietnamese cinnamon. Stir. Sink inside. Absorb. I come alive — something else spawns into existence with it: my mortal being, my timid mentor, anxiety as a poltergeist. I hold his hand, and we write; we decapitate thought and connect the nerves to something much larger: a city floating above the ocean — towers filled entirely with hard drives, towers dedicated to memory.
I am vapid and misunderstood and disposed of, but that is the world — and that is the existentialism. I belong in containment. I belong to you.
Louise Glück said:
Are you healed or do you only think you are healed?
I told myself
from nothing
nothing could be taken away.
but can you love anyone yet?
when I feel safe, I can love.
but will you touch anyone
Clarice Lispector said:
I was alone, and I wanted to ask for help against my first dehumanization.
Dehumanization is as painful as losing everything, as losing everything, my love. I was opening and closing my mouth to ask for help but I couldn't and didn't know how to articulate it.
Because I had nothing more to articulate. My agony was like wanting to speak before dying. I knew I was forever bidding farewell to something, something was going to die, and I wanted to articulate the word that at least summed up whatever was dying.
I am not whole. I have been alone. I know dissociation and a certain, daily dehumanization have become DNA — not accidents, but the way I keep moving. And yet the arithmetic of that truth is not simple: solitude does not equal safety; freedom does not equal relief. Left to myself, I am not improved; alone, I am not less dead. To be singular is not to be spared; it is to be a wanderer who arrives at darkness precisely because there is nowhere else to go.
Close.
Closer.
Skin as shell, clamp me in.
Carapace, your hard hush—
the math of us stuttering, breath to breath,
counting down to zero.
Dig it out.
The pit, the box, the cut-out hole you made,
small enough to choke,
small enough to keep.