"If one woman were to tell the truth about her life ... the world would split open."

I nearly died a few times this year.

Every morning I get up and light myself on fire. My flesh burns as I stumble in to take a piss. At the coffee machine I start to melt down to the bones. My boys play and fight on the floor and I tell them to get dressed as I burn and burn my motherfucking self to the ground before I hope in the car and take them to school. I meant to write "hop" just then but I'll leave it as hope. I hope in the car and hope at the shops and hope at home. Sometimes it's all I have. I look in the mirror and see ashes and a broken spirit and smoking flesh. This is a good thing.

Every morning I must do this. So every morning I do this. I'm not who I was yesterday and neither are you. Tomorrow I will be different again. As soon as these words are written I'm different. I'm never who I was.

I'm always fucking running. That shadow ... some days it's as big as the world I'm trying to change in me.

My stakes are higher than ever now. I get asked what it feels like. Snakes in my veins. Rats in my belly, restless and hungry. Insatiable. Yet I know I can have nothing - not a sip, a bit, a taste, a line. Nothing. My edges cannot be taken off. I'm very edgy and it's very, very hard.  Some days I dream of running far away and doing dreadful things. Absolving myself of all responsibility of any goddamn thing. I think of my dad and the genes he shared and how easy it would be to fall over and give up.

I give up in different ways, to survive. My head is a roaming beast that's hard to sit with. Surrender to win, they say.

Not too long ago I lay down in my bed and sleep would not come. I had poisoned myself. God set up screens for me, my own show. All weekend I watched the worst parts of humanity played out. Dead people and babies and killers and demons and bloody bloody hate. People jumping from towers. I went classically insane. This is not a metaphor. I begged and bargained as this went on for four nights straight and just when I thought I was trapped forever it all left and my eyes looked like mine again.

I'm a soldier.

When I was a kid we lived in Fiji and had this catamaran. I remember the sound of the sail unfurling, the sharp noise as the wind suddenly caught it. I kept hearing that sound in my psychosis, over and over. It was a set of Angels wings, unfurling and unfolding and protecting.

How cool it would be if those wings were mine. Metaphorically. If I had finally earned them. Maybe they are .. maybe I have triumphed and won.

Until the next day, when I must get up and set fire to myself again. Kill myself over and over again, in order to live.



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