Sometimes the only thing between me and suicide is the fact that  I don’t want my parents or friends to come up here looking for me and see the squalor in which I’ve been living the past few weeks. Dirty clothes everywhere, mixed in with schoolwork and a travel mug and all sorts of shit. Sheets that haven’t been changed since late July with blood and marker stains.

Other times the only thing between me and suicide is sheer laziness: I am too lazy to go and get pills from other parts of the house or too lazy to cross the room and find sharps hard enough to dig in deep or too lazy to find a way to describe the particular dress in which I’d like to be buried.

Other times the only thing between me and suicide is vanity. I don’t want anyone to see my skin in its current state, and I doubt that it’s easy to put makeup on a corpse.

Other times the only thing between me and suicide is the fear of failure. I don’t want to go back to the hospital and if I do it wrong that’s where I’ll end up.

Very occasionally but honestly less often than all the above the only thing between me and suicide is the image of Leah or Emily crying, after. I can’t imagine Anna or Mary or my parents or sister, though. They’d all be fine eventually, anyway.

In class with boys I always end up staring. Their skin is different- a softer, doughier white, or a harder, drier deep-brown tan. Their fingers are thick and sturdy and I imagine putting them in my mouth, grasping one big solid brown hand with my two small white ones and slipping a finger or two between my lips, between my teeth and my tongue. I want to be explored and in my wooden chair I practically feel cool bitter-salty fingers probing the smoothness of my cheeks and the wetness of the bumpy soft flesh under my tongue. I want to draw them in till fingertips reach the back of my throat, tickle and force. I want to see the look in their eyes when I push their hands back out with my tongue and my lips. I want the stubbly scruff on their faces under my hands and my cheeks and I want to tangle my fingers in silky brown curls or grasp short dark hair. I want muscles covered in golden skin and hair surrounding me. I want fingers, tongues, penises in my mouth, muscles moving in their own ways, curling or thrusting or throbbing as I clench when he comes and I can feel the desperate pushing out into the dark deep parts of me.

This is what coeducation does to me – awakens this wild animal passion for what my body thinks I need but I don’t really want.

I am hopelessly lonely, and not in the usual way. I miss the days of the cherry bitch and her freshman devotee. I was sitting under the tree at school the other day, and I realized how strange it was to be a junior, and how new and naive and foreign and childlike the freshmen seemed.  My friends, a junior and a sophomore, both made it clear they wanted the freshmen to stay away from us. I told them I didn’t mind, but…they did. And I realized how strange it would be to develop a friendship or affection for one of these awkward childish beings in ill-fitting uniforms and clean shoes. And I wondered how that happened, and that pondering hasn’t left my mind since. How did that happen? I know, of course, exactly how that happened. But I wonder what possessed her to let me into her life, so much so that now we text everyday, sometimes talk, it’s been only two weeks or less and we’re crazy with missing each other.

Earlier this evening I was walking the dog down the street, and it was chilly and misty and the streetlights glowed yellow and the air was full of damp ghosts and memories.

I feel possessed by the past tonight.

Dry mouth, dry lips and the water seems to make me dryer. I don’t know what this is [panic anxiety depression] but I don’t like it. I’m riding it out with water and music but this is giving me a headache, sharp jabbing pains in the brain. I don’t know why she worries. She’s allowed to go off in an almost-panic with a simple “i need to go lie down and take deep breaths” but i’m not? Just because I almost killed myself once does not invalidate my needs to be by myself sometimes, semi-healthy needs. Sometimes I don’t feel well and even the woman I love is not what I need and she needs to deal with that. Love is no panacea. My eyes and legs are tired, my mouth and skin are dry. Everything is hot. Drink more water. It’s not cold enough but for really cold water I need to go downstairs, or have it be winter. It’s still summer, or at least the ground still holds the summer’s heat, and the pipes are still full of just-cool-not-cold water. “on the last day of jimi hendrix’s life he poured himself a glass of water. He put four ice cubes into the glass. There is nothing like cold water, there is nothing like cold water.”

My stomach is full of room-temperature water and I still feel dry and dull and a little bit– wrong. Talking would make me want to hurl [vomit, throw things] and so I am not talking. Input from the outside when I am in certain moods is always incorrect. I have to stay inside myself and my bubble. My music and my words and my body and my bed. My is a term I use loosely. I did not pay for these things or find them or make them (with the exception of the arrangement of the words) but they are mine nonetheless. “Something can be fact and be an absolute lie, and something can be made up and be truer than the truth.” So too with the concept of possesion, of ownership.

My eyes and legs are so tired. My words are so tired. The skin on my hands is oddly dry, a fact of which I become acutely aware when I bend them to type, especially my left hand. My teeth embed themselves in my lip when I write and because I am dry they stick when I open my mouth. I think at this point gallons of water could not cure me. I think I am a human desert – but the most beautiful thing about the desert, after all, is that somewhere, hidden in it, there is a well. Where’s the well?

I lick my lips and feel the split place they bled earlier (she was here, she was here!).  I shift my body and the residual moistness between my legs makes the fabric stick (she was there, too). My eyelids droop from waking up in the night and chomping as efficiently as possible on granola bars (shh, she’s here) and I think about koosh-ball trees and shallow clear cool oceans and old women wishing and little girls blowing bubbles and soft butterfly kisses on every inch of my skin (oh, oh, she’s here…).

Now I’m at my mother’s computer and my dog is snuffling for a walk and my sister is watching TV and she’s not here anymore.

Perseus

As people filter out of the apartment I drift slowly towards the door. Finally I leave my empty glass on a sideboard, call out a half-hearted goodbye, and let myself out on the tail of a large group. They cram into the elevator, leaving me no space, and apologize furiously and drunkenly as the door closes. I hit the down button and lean back against the wall. I would rather not be a sardine, but I am tired of the loud brightness that is the party, still attacking my ears and eyes from the open door a few feet away. I close my eyes and pass my hand over the stubble on my chin, sighing. I open my eyes. The woman in red with the paralyzing eyes is standing across from me, waiting for the elevator.

An hour before I saw her inside. Her hair was twisted and pinned, like a forties pin-up girl. Her dress too: red, to match her lipstick, with a pencil skirt and a high slit up the side. She held her drink with three fingers and somehow managed not to smear the perfect lip prints on the glass. Her black-framed cat eye glasses sat low on her nose, and, ignoring the woman talking to her, she glanced over them and scanned the room. The other woman stayed blissfully oblivious. The eyes of the woman in red slid and slid and rested suddenly on me. I was frozen. Her eyes were brown, ordinary brown, just like her hair. Her eyes seemed ordinary, her skin seemed ordinary, her features and body and dress fairly ordinary. But her glance fell on me, and she stared, and I was paralyzed. She smiled at me, a small but powerful smile. Invisible, unknowable steam rose from my skin.

In another hour the woman in red is no longer in red. She is Marigold and she is in her pale skin and her brown hair and that is all.

I saw her going into the subway, then again walking towards my building. I ran to catch up to her. She moved fast, despite the tight skirt. I tapped her on the shoulder. She whirled around, a fierce look on her face, her hair flying. “Excuse me,” I said. “Are you following me?”
“I believe you’re following me,” she said, and kept walking. I stumbled behind her trying to keep up.
“I just—I saw you at the party, then in the elevator, then in the subway…and I guess we took the same train…?”
“And?”
“I don’t know?” I said hopefully, realizing how stupid it seemed to conclude that she was following me by a series of coincidences.
“I can tell,” she said, smiling at me in her small, smirky way. Again the steam seemed to rise from my skin. She unlocked the door to my building- our building- and took my hand. I protested and she looked over her glasses with her brown eyes and her curls of hair falling around her face and I could not protest anymore.

Now we are sitting, breathing, on a twin-sized mattress on the floor, an island in a sea of boxes. I lie on my back, propped up on my elbows. She explains, her body folded around a pillow, that she moved in two days ago, that the hostess of the party was her childhood best friend and now a vapid whore. She looks earnest and childlike with her chin resting on the pillow, her glasses off, her makeup rubbed away. The words “whore” and “fuck me again” seem strange coming out of her mouth.

Half an hour before she had closed the door behind us and locked it. She pushed the boxes out of the way and me up against the wall. I smiled. “I’m taking that as a yes,” she said, and kissed me. “Okay?” I nodded. Clothes came off, bodies crashed together, the already-messy sheets on her makeshift bed got messier.

I stand by the door, about to leave. She is still wrapped in her sheet, curled on her bed. “I’ll call you,” I say. “I’m only upstairs if you need me.”
“Mhmm,” she says, rolling over, already drifting away.
I smile, still, watching her sleeping body and its tiny shifts of breath and dreams. I know I should leave but my feet don’t move. Her head turns and her curls of hair seem to writhe in the soft light. I turn out the light. “Goodnight, Marigold.”

The next morning I will wake feeling sick and tired and chalk it up to a hangover. I will sleep in and lie in bed staring at the ceiling. Marigold will still be on my mind. I will eat cereal out of a mixing bowl with a large spoon and then I will go back to bed.

The phone is ringing and ringing two days later. I still feel sick and have not yet gotten out of bed. I want to find out if she had the flu, but Marigold does not pick up. I call again a few hours earlier the next day. Marigold does not pick up.

A week will pass and so will the sickness. I will stand up again, go out and eat a large greasy diner sandwich. I will sit in the sun in the park and wonder why I stayed in for so long. I will finish a project and get paid and feel triumphant. Marigold’s face will spend less and less time projected on the ceiling above my bed.

I knock on Marigold’s door. I ring her bell. Finally I try the knob. It is unlocked, and I go in. The apartment is empty. Less than two weeks after moving in, Marigold is gone. I wander the room wondering what happened. In the corner of the room, where the mattress was, I find a tiny sculpture of gray stone. It is a nude man, lying on his back, propped up on his elbows. On the windowsill above, I find a Polaroid picture of the sculpture, but seated next to it is another, of a girl wrapped around a pillow. The girl has thick curls of hair coming out in all directions, bending like wires, like angry snakes, like an exaggeration of curls the morning after. Marigold is gone, but she has left this small stone man, this small stone version of myself. I put him in my pocket.

Marigold has gone. Marigold is gone. Marigold will be gone. It does not matter where, or why. She is gone and I am here. I sit on the windowsill and frown. I walk out of the apartment. It is for the best.

Scars and stretchmarks are made of the same thin skin, anomalies in the smooth soft surface of the body. The thin white-brown-purple skin is a synecdoche, a part of the physical surface standing in for that of the whole being. I have spots of thin skin, in lines I have made and that nature has made for me. I also do not have a thick skin. In the hospital and the doctor’s offices and at school they tell me to develop one, that my health is just a matter of the thickness of my skin. My skin, I want to scream, is thin; it is naturally that way, I like it that way, you can touch it and see it: the soft scar tissue and the veins that show through. Why should what I am make me suffer?

This thin skin, this two-part metaphor, all comes from the same place. It comes from too much, too fast. My stretch marks come from the skin of a child stretching over the body of a woman. My scars come from the mind of a child stretching to deal with the heart of a woman. This oldness within youngness leads to thin, thin skin, regardless of action: breaking or not breaking, the consequences are the same. White lines, pink lines, brown lines, variegations I can feel with my fingertips and see with eyes and know all the time. These things are insideness on the outside. These things are being old and young and wise and innocent all at the same time, being lost in a rush of too much too fast.

my computer just lost the post. i swear to god, the next thing is the last fucking straw. i am already breaking, broken. it’s just a matter of collapse.

I am so ready to slip out quietly, quietly, softer than a candle snuffed by two wet fingertips. Take all those pills and fizzle out, or dig a blade in deep. Really how deep would it have to be? not very. at the thin part, my wrists are little more than an inch thick, and arteries are buried in the middle. I held the knife I used to cut a mango with the tip to the skin over my heart. Juliet. Just held it there – no tremors, surprisingly enough. Then I held it to my neck- not the tip but the long sharp blade. The steel is so cold and so frightening.

Frightening.

I am too afraid. My fear is keeping me alive. Fear does that. It keeps us from going into bear caves and things like that. I hate that what keeps us alive is fear. Fear. In Donnie Darko their health teacher says that every emotion sits on a spectrum between fear and love. Shouldn’t love keep us alive, not fear? Although I suppose it does. Where does misery fall? Closer to fear than love, right? But misery doesn’t keep us alive. None of this makes any sense.

The steel is so cold.

ETA I think I am going out tonight, for a long walk in the dark wetness. The cold rain can only do me good. After my parents go to bed, I’ll go out. Maybe even to that post-post-prom. cold rain and friends…this is probably a good idea. i can sneak back in early, or not. wander home and get yelled at. either way i need out, so it doesn’t matter…

Today at therapy I cried. I told her about the hospital thing and she said it wasn’t a big deal, and I didn’t need to do anything rash, and though she wasn’t recommending it, if that was what I needed, well, it takes five minutes to get admitted to the hospital, and a few days can do so much good. Constant observation means everything happens faster- new meds, etc. You don’t have to be alone and you don’t have to agonize about hurting yourself, because you can’t. There’s still the pain of wanting to, but not the responsibility of guilting yourself into staying alive. And a break, from work and stress and parents and junk food and judgement.

It’s tempting.

For now, though, I am holding out. With a call to the school to keep them from breathing down my neck too much.

But if this keeps up…I’m giving in. Because sometimes I just don’t have the willpower to keep up this stupid war in my head, between the forces of sanity and the armies of my “genetic predisposition to depression.” Sanity knows I shouldn’t cut myself up or kill myself or sit around doing nothing. Depression wants me to do these things. And if it were just one it would be easy. But they’re both in there, duking it out. And they’re both me. And I always think there’s enough of me to go around…but maybe even though this is all happening in the compact space between my ears, I am being spread too thin.