Dir ist vergeben, ich liebe dich immer noch.

 

EXCERPTS FROM THE FOUND JOURNAL OF ANTHONY BUNTING, A LETTER ADDRESSED TO VICTORIA RINALDI:

Every day for nearly an entire year has been exactly the same. Wake up and stay paralyzed in the hauntingly empty embrace of my bed as I wait for the lingering effects of the previous night’s sporadically nightmarish, trauma-fueled, and all-too-realistic bout of dreams to loosen its hold on me. The outside world, even the cramped confines of my dimly lit, unwanted memory-infested room, bears no meaning whatsoever; only existing in a strange twilight state of uncanniness with every single aspect of human life just barely out of my reach. It’s all untethered from my limited scope of consciousness as I force down the incessantly nagging and agonizingly persistent feelings of rejection, loss, and profound self-hatred. It surges through my freshly opened veins and the squelching leech-like keloids wrapping around my left arm as if I’ve been connected to an invisible system of barbed IVs transfusing a dull aching flame into my circulatory system. After enough time has slipped past me, escaped behind me, and entered into the collective nothingness, the hungry monster of wasted time, I finally manage to get my numbed limbs to work. I sloppily toil my way out of bed and fall into the reality of your absence that spreads its inky, spiked tendrils through every facet of my new unwanted world. Another day searching through the void. Another day of feeble little distractions desperately strung together so as not to think, not to feel, not to dwell on the past year of interpersonal torment you’ve uncaringly thrown me in. Going about my anemic days of meaningless work, attempts at productivity, meager, futile, and always forced degrees of socialization, all the while the entire fabric of the cosmos and all the dreams brewing above my skull looks down at me and laughs. 

Even when distraction is successful and my mind has managed to be cast off in some other nonsense, sidereal direction, there isn’t a single moment, no matter how brief, where I did not wish I were dead and long forgotten. And the ultimate irony then lashes its ugly claws at my already scarred face; for the one person I never wanted to lose, never wanted to exist without, has most likely been working tirelessly to forget me altogether. I may want to be dead and thrown to the vultures no matter whose company I’m with, no matter what distraction has managed to hold my interest, but I promise you this…It wasn’t like this with you. 

Whether you want to believe that or not, it’s true. Even during the difficult and stressful moments in our shared life when everything rapidly compiled on top of each other ad nauseam and it all became all too much for me to possibly handle in any sort of remotely healthy way, even when I’d lose myself to the void of my disease and let something else entirely take hold of me, even when I’d spew toxic and admittedly concerning nonsense about how much I despised the world, humanity and, more importantly, myself, my primary concern was of you. Always of you at the center of it all. I was in a period of my life where I’d do anything to NOT die - to instead find a way to conversely live forever and create a sustainable and healthy life for not only myself and, much more so, the person I loved more than anyone or anything else in my entire existence. But you didn’t see that clearly underneath the weight of it all. Whether it was the weight of your own years of unattended suffering, the rising difficulties of managing your disease, and the unbounded stress of an unknown future, or if it was that plus me and the stress I carried - I understand why you couldn’t see it that way. I understand why you turned, why you lashed out at me, and why I became a lightning rod for all things wrong and uncertain in your life. It was bound to happen. I just could not bear to even begin to imagine such an obvious possibility when I was in the immutable throes of overwhelming love for you. 

So, after all was said and done, after you forced your swollen hands into my ribcage and ripped out, degloved, and discarded my all too fragile and malleable heart that was tethered so irrevocably to you, after you made the rash decision to unplug my life support systems and cast aside the freshly deceased corpse of the life we had, I still only tried to do what would make you happy - as I always tried (and sometimes failed) to do. And, perhaps worse and most foolish of all…I forgave you. 

I still forgive you.

I still understand. 

I still feel your pain

                        and all your stress. 

Day after day, everything growing colder with each agonizingly slow hour, something will somehow remind me of you once again and I’ll be thrown back into it all - reliving it, going under the churning, sharpened blades of memories, struggling greatly to let it all go and release myself from the impossibly enormous hold you still possess over me. What was it today? Something trivial and ridiculous. A trip I took to bring my grandma to the doctor. The facility in question were these horribly ugly, oblong buildings unevenly spread apart in a dire-looking parking lot in the middle of nowhere suburbia. The surrounding trees all long dead, the wind freezing and blowing fragments of yesterday’s tar-covered snow across the relentlessly gray sky. It made me think of England. It made me think of all the trips I took with you to accompany you to the doctor’s, to specialists, to get blood tests, to get prescriptions, that one truly awful and traumatic affair at the ER (or A&E) where we had to get you an emergency blood test to see if anything was further wrong with you after you were badly ill for too long of a time. I remembered walking the hospital grounds with you, the small cemetery on the other side of the road, sometimes leaving the hospital with a newfound optimism about your condition possibly getting better - or maybe the news of not needing any more of those dreadful injections that stockpiled our flat like toxic headstones, other times we would leave in stifled silence or unbearable frustration at the gross incompetence of the so-called medical professionals. Whatever the case may be, it was strange to me that this frivolous trip to my grandmother’s doctor brought back such salient memories of mostly stressful events that I somehow missed and looked back on with fondness and overwhelming grief. Do I miss going to the hospital with you? No, not exactly. But I miss being there. I miss being the person to take you. I miss being the person to care. I hope you have someone now to do these things, to potentially ease these unnecessarily difficult tasks and push you forward towards better managing all that you unfairly deal with. I’d still be that person if I could. For whatever reason…even if I know it’s irrational and wholly unfair to myself and my well-being, I still worry about you - even though I know all too well that you, at a certain point in time and possibly even now, did not care if I was alive or dead. I still remember reading the words you wrote…that you knowing that it wouldn’t be your fault if I killed myself was a comfort to you. How I can forgive that, I don’t know. It doesn’t make me angry, it never did, it only makes me feel deeply, inconsolably sad, and betrayed. But never mad. 

There was no closure, there was no apology, everything I came to love and hold so dearly in this nonsensical, disgusting, rapidly disintegrating world simply just…stopped. And I’ve been overburdened by the rigor mortis remains ever since. All wrapped tightly around my brainstem and weighing down each and every thought, every moment, and every movement I’ve attempted to make to get away from all of this. Despite the unbearable and constantly nagging urge to reach out to you, to try to talk with you again, to see how you’re coping with life and what you are up to, what music you’re listening to, what movies have you become obsessed with, if you have been continuing to write or not, how your family is doing, how you’re dealing with your illness, and, simply, just to interact with you and possibly hear your voice and make you laugh again…I will continue to leave you alone simply because it will likely make things easier for you. Because that’s all that still matters to me. Somehow I still care and will never feel any anger or semblance of ill-will towards you, despite all that you did. 

And the only reason I can think of why this is all the way it is, why I still care and worry and think so highly of you and the time we got to spend together is because you managed to do what few ever managed to do; the impossible, the totally and completely inconceivable…

You 

Made

Me 

Happy. 

-