Old Poem Found About Birth + A Nonsense Confessional About Nothing Important At All

 

  

    I don’t do well in warm weather. I don’t do well in excessive sunshine. I don’t do well being exposed to the outside world for too long of a time during any time of the year, really. But it is especially difficult during the arduous and disgusting months of late spring and summer. Months where I have to ditch the long sleeves, jackets, etc. and have more of my loathsome, uncanny, discolored flesh be exposed. What makes it even more horrifying is lacking the comfort of covering the scars that run vertically down my upper arm, tragically right below where the sleeves of any of the short-sleeved shirts I own ends. Some horizontal cuts further up my arm can be seen on occasion, (one recently just scabbed and reopened, so even though it has been a while since I’ve cut it looks like there’s a fresh one right there for the world to see), but luckily most people are utterly oblivious and trapped in their own tiny egotistical skulls to the point where they wouldn’t ever notice these handmade defects in my skin. The ones that do notice and are strangers to me wouldn’t dare say a thing, that goes against the unwritten social rule of breaching a delicate and uncomfortable subject about one’s mental wellbeing and safety when they are strangers to you. And while I find the apparent lack of empathy in your average human being these days, and the fright involved in reaching out or communicating with anyone at all, completely contemptible and depressing, it does work out in my favor in this regard. However, it doesn’t stop me from feeling their eyes on my scars. I notice the way they look at me afterward, a palpable sense of pity mixed with confusion mixed with just the slightest bit of some sort of fear; if I am able to do that to myself, what am I capable of subjecting on to someone else? Or maybe I am looking far too into this and a lot of these feelings I am gleaming off these people are merely manifestations of my paranoid and misanthropic head. Maybe most of them simply just feel bad and don’t know what to say, I don’t know. I didn’t even mean to talk about any of this, it feels like needless complaining at this point, publicly digging down further in an inescapable grave of flagellating self-pity.

All that said, this is something I am positive far too many people can easily relate to. Unfortunately, there are a significant amount of people out there who self-harm and do so to a far more drastic degree than I ever have and then have to no doubt live in fear and shame for the times of the year when they are not as covered and need to face others noticing their scars. Shame is a common feeling in this scenario, and it’s only natural to feel such shame when there exists a staggering amount of human beings out there who still do not understand such issues and look down upon anyone who possesses these self-inflicted scars. Seeing them as psychos, weirdos, dramatics, whatever. A cry for help. Of course it’s a cry for help, these people are in crisis and for some ungodly reason, a cry for help is seen as weak, melodramatic, and immature. To allow people like that to make you feel shame for anything revolving around your own personal struggles and the hell you’re going through is completely undeserved. Quite frankly, fuck those people. I still feel that very same shame, but I have tried extremely hard to sort of train myself to move past it and force myself to not care. The opinion of someone who fails to be even the slightest bit empathetic or understanding of your struggles isn’t worth any more than the rotten sewage water that they deserve to drown in. 

Regardless, that is all to say that, for several reasons, I absolutely hate warm weather and I absolutely hate the fact that it will soon be summer and will continue to be summer for far too long of a time. Nowadays, the summer months inescapably puts me right back into a certain summer nearly three years ago when I quit my job and spent most of my time preparing to move to a different country come September and entwine my life with the person I loved the absolute most. A person who, I thought, would change my life forever and make it so the country I was moving to would become my home for the foreseeable future. A person who had quite possibly the most tremendous and dramatic effect on me in both the most positive and amazing way possible, and also, unexpectedly, the worst most damning way possible. That summer I spent a significant amount of time helping out my grandmother, and one salient memory I have from that period of time is sitting in her living room, on my phone, listening to music, and texting the person whom I loved. I remember, specifically, listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees and hearing the song Dazzle. I remember becoming overwhelmed with emotion as I listened to this song within the new context of having this new love in my life. I reached out to her and told her that this song was the one I wanted to get married to, and she was the person I was to marry. I think she then listened to the song, but I can’t seem to remember what her response was. It probably wasn’t much. But I do remember that at one point, she too foresaw us getting married at some point in the future. A hopeless and naive delusion on both of our parts. 

The summer months also remind me of the one summer nearly two years ago when I took this person back to my hometown in the States and spent the following two weeks with little to no stress, enjoying each other’s company and our explorations of the city, upstate, driving in torrential thunderstorms, enduring horrid humidity to walk around my favorite cemetery, and stayed inside some days to simply exist with each other and lazily waste away the days. I believe those two weeks were when this person and myself were the most inseparable and the most intensely in love. I remember one summer night with the window open, Coil’s Musick to Play in the Dark playing from my record player, and the two of us on the floor lovingly and ferociously entangled in each other. It’s easy to stop right now and say that all of that was for nothing and it’s all meaningless now that this person has since obliterated my heart and is completely out of my life beyond my control…forever. But I don’t see it that way anymore. Because those moments in time are stationary and exist within the bubble of that summer unperturbed by more recent events. And I’m beyond grateful for those moments, for those months where someone in my life made me want to live, to experience life, to exist forever in an immense love and connection with the only other living soul on this planet that I felt was my definitive counterpart, and me hers. As much as these moments exist in my memory palace as painful reminders of what I have lost, as much as I would love to be right back in that place in my life, as much as just the mere thought or flashback of this person brings me into a state of totally inconsolable hysterics, panic, pain, and exaggerated desires for death, I will still forever be grateful for those moments. 

A few months after that particular summer, things began to go downhill fast. First without me really realizing at all, or perhaps choosing not to realize what was going on, and then, it all exploded and died horrifically. But before that, perhaps at the beginning of the autumn when she entered what should have been her last year of University, I joined her in attending a creative writer’s meeting at her school. This was something I was very encouraging of her to go to and hoped it would work out for her, but she stopped going fairly quickly. But the first meeting seemed to go well enough, although I didn’t remember any of this until just tonight when I stumbled upon a folded-up piece of paper with a haphazardly written poem on it that I remember writing without much thought at all in the span of perhaps 15 to 20 minutes at the most. A drawing of a river otter’s face on one of the margins; no doubt drawn from her. At the top of the page is the following unrelated sentence; “I was born with several vestigial eyes inside my brain.” Then, under that, the poem starts. I titled it “Uncertainty” and, now that I’ve found it and it has flooded my mind with these thoughts and memories, I thought it would be a good idea to share it, type it out here, and get rid of it and get it out of my sight for good. Unsurprisingly, the poem has to do with birth. I won’t edit or change anything I previously wrote and will be rereading it for the first time as I type it here, it’s probably not very good.  It goes as follows; 

Uncertainty

The lights are flooding in

My once sealed eyes pried open to a world I didn’t ask for

I get pulled through a torrent of blood and unfamiliar screams

My bubble bursts

I’m in the air, I’m levitating in the horrid, despicable light

And the screaming won’t stop - is it coming from me now?

A sterile void, the routine of silence and security broken 

And my little brain doing all it can to

Black all of this out. 

I’m swaddled, rinsed and wrapped up, but the light won’t let up

Something is cut - a fleshy connection snapped away

By gnashing, crooked teeth.

It just won’t end. When will this end?

I’m back in the air, I’m sailing downward towards an unsettling

Cacophony of screeches

Into spindly, sweaty arms that wrap around me all wrong. 

My eyes peel back open - the light tunneling towards

The fuzzy image of my beholder 

I look up at this malicious form in the white, sterile void

Locked eyes with the bringer of my confusion

My newfound, nonsensical state in a new world,

The maker of my flesh - and watch as

Her eyes widen in fright…

My screams never stopped. 

-

And that’s what I wrote sitting next to my then-love at this unfamiliar and uncomfortable creative writer’s meeting. I believe I shared it as well, but I can not remember what this group thought of it. These disgusting words came from the mouth of someone who was clearly an outsider, clearly a foreigner, and wasn’t even a student at their university. Oh well. It’s not a great poem, anyway. It’s a very safe poem for me to write. The disgusting horrors of birth and existence are commonplace themes for me at this point, so this was me easily operating in my comfort zone with little to no effort to write anything at all of substance. But that doesn’t matter. Here it is for anyone else to see. It’s a part of my “journey” as a writer. I hate saying that. 

Another reason I thought it would be worth sharing this is due to the irony of reading something like this nowadays. While I still heavily view birth and existence as a human being as one of the most horrifying, nonsensical, disgusting affairs possible, the only real joy in my life for the past few months has been a direct result of this carnival of selfish terrors that is producing a new human life. It’s not something I would ever willingly want to happen, and a new human being in this world sharing my DNA is just about the most terrifying thought I can ever muster. But, my little niece was brought into this world towards the end of December of 2023. The end of a year that was undoubtedly one of the most difficult and awful years of my life. A year that was marked with trauma, heartbreak, moving back home, my life ruptured irrevocably apart, and my near hospitalization as my suicidal desires exploded to dangerous levels. The year wasn’t all horrible, though, and there was another person who made my time on this earth worthwhile for the time being, but that too I ruined. 

 Regardless, as much as I still want to end my life and as much as each and every day is still an absolute dirge to get through, and as much as I still miss, still dream of, and still have crippling flashbacks to my time in England with the person that gifted me so much joy and such intense heartbreak and pain, having this tiny new life in my world has made everything all the more easier. And I don’t think I will ever be able to properly express my gratitude or have this tiny being ever understand just how crucial they are to my survival in this horrid existence. I fear I won’t be a part of their life for long as the call to the void continues to be just as strong as it ever was, and I know sooner or later I am going to have to answer to it. But, I hope when I’m gone and my niece grows up and possibly stumbles upon my work, she understands that my view of birth and human reproduction is in complete antithesis to her existence. Birth might be selfish and overly detrimental to the entire globe, and I hate the idea of bringing new human beings into this world beyond their consent just to leave them to a series of undetermined sufferings, which will only get worse and more prevalent the longer we remain as a species on this doomed rock, BUT I truly am extraordinarily grateful for her existence and I only wish I could forever protect her from growing up and experiencing all the horrors this world has to offer. I hope she’ll be okay after I’m gone, and I hope she understands the rare positive impact she had on me. 

And that’s all.

I’m not sure why I wrote any of this. I suppose it is merely a series of stirring thoughts in my sleepless, unwell head that beckoned to be set loose onto the eyes and minds of anyone who even cares to read anything I write. Here it is for the world, a document hopefully still in existence after I’m long gone. 

To end this exercise in nonsense regurgitation, here’s a picture of me and my niece in the void. She always loves it when my eyes uncontrollably gush bright red blood.