I thought I could do something and now I’m beginning to fear that I cannot. I thought I could manage. This is a serious fear, this is what you were terrified of when you were four in the dark. I didn’t know until the second time I began crying. There was no spark, only my every day I call normal. For two contiguous days this week, I didn’t leave the house, only sent out calls and letters, trying to find some reason to step out from my door. No answer. I’m not strong enough to treat the train station like an airport every day. There are no luminous letters on the inside of my skull, only gray like a latent Vancouver day crying out for harsher light. I’m so good at justice, I’m queen pragmatic, but I’m slipping. Looking at my needs out of the corner of my eye has been dangerous, it’s getting harder to hold myself at arms length. Dots are connecting, tracing a picture which can only be described as impractical. An image full of unforgivable insurmountable fact. Finally when I’m not being punished from without, I’m castigating myself. There is no wall to throw myself against, my nails have already been broken. That’s my trick, you see, to never feeling anger, instead refashioning it into sharp sadness, to aim inward. Too much I feel like knives. Enough is red shifting, moving faster into something I can’t reach. Enough procreating, enough losing patience with quiescence, enough infatuated with being unable to be found. If I wore make-up, I could create a mask, but there’s nothing to hide now. I still live as an aside. It was self betrayal to ask for time. Suspension, disbelief, until everything, and crash. I can’t explain how silence is killing me.
I’ve started the steps required to leave the country. A letter is being sent to my grandmother for her marriage certificate, my passport is to be re-issued.
I can’t breathe intermission. I need to be real.