Bitterthorn

Loneliness can be something other people do to us, and something we do to ourselves.

She hadn't been perfect. She hadn't even been easy. But she had been mine.

The hurtful truth of death was that it was as mundane as a meal uneaten, a cup knocked over.

I had sown the seeds of love in grave dirt; who could say what monstrous bloom would grow?

I don't understand love,' I said, submerging the cloth in the water. 'I don't know how it works or what it is for. I've read poetry and novels and listened to music and viewed art all about love but it was like another language. I thought it must be something that wasn't meant for me. Until I met you.

I caught sight of myself in a mirror as I went downstairs and my heart sank. A beautiful dress on an ugly woman still made an ugly woman.

Misery was a creeping thing, like the dew settling on grass or the cold fingers of frost meeting me in my bed at night and crackling the insides of my windows. I had longed to be left alone, to escape the lie of my family, only to discover this was different kind of poison. Slow acting, but lethal. At first it numbed me, pleasure leaching from my days like a summer leaf draining of sap to greet the autumn. Then loneliness came, a creeping oily stain that stopped me from enjoying it at all.

She was lost to me in a hundred little griefs I found anew each year

I was everything and nothing. Everywhere and nowhere. I felt myself light, like a cloud, like the vaporous mist from a kettle, or a hunt’s kill in winter, side ripped open and organs steaming against the snow. I was light, and darkness, tomorrow and yesterday, never, and always.

If you are a monster it is only because they have made you one.

I kneeled in a graveyard and told myself it was paradise.

Loneliness had lost its power over me, and all that was left, was love.

Desire was falling off a cliff, and trusting you would not die. Desire was walking through fire and being reborn. Desire was an undoing. I was undone.

My mother was tidied away into her grave and my stepmother unpacked her things into her place. I found myself far from home without having travelled a metre.

Death is an undoing. It unravels reality, unpicking the stitches of a lifetime of relationships, and leaving something unmade, something alien and ugly.

You made all that fight worth it. You, who are so clever I want to read through every night to catch up. You, who are kind in the most unsuspecting ways. You, who are the most brave and selfless and resourceful and steel-spined person I have ever known. I am in awe of you. I don't understand love. I don't know what is means, but I think it means some of this, at least. So: I love you.

I hated you because you meant I wasn't alone.

I felt power in my independence: far, far safer to be alone than to want and be unwanted.

Every child is beholden to the gods of their parents, and I augured their meanings from careless words and gestures, made rituals to fit around their whims, and inscribed into my heart the rules they unwittingly handed down.

That loneliness I feared, the meaninglessness, the unwantedness, it had already happened. I could try to fight and hold it away forever, or I could grieve what my life had been, see it for what it was, and stop being controlled by the fear of it.

It makes me feel better to remember that time is so much bigger and older than I am. I am not alone because I am part of it.

The air between us was too thin, I felt every prickle of her gaze on me, I could feel the warmth of her body, the beat of her heart like it was mine.

Other people are the most difficult thing in this world; they think and do things you have no control over, want things you can't understand. But other people can also be salvation.