Coup de Grâce

My life has been incredibly good, I have people in it and happiness, and some days I feel resolute, but let’s be honest: if at its best it’s not enough, then what can save me?

Yet, despite all that, I sometimes relapse into hope. Just as Orpheus, just as Lot’s wife, at times I turn, as a result of sudden, mad temptation for the lust of life, of love, of remembering, and look back upon living with fondness, and embrace uncertainty.

And if it’s not me, it’s someone else. There are a million ways in which the body is stolen from us—debt and interest and data and labour and literal tissue and blood that can be harvested, and affective, sexual, and emotional energy. Capitalists, which clutch and pry and feed, dreaming up ways in which they can make your body not your own, and when the last drop of blood is exhausted they’ll have the audacity to bill you for it.

Kids or no kids, loneliness lives in our bodies more than ourselves.

Replete is the body which holds for us these sublime ecstasies, replete with sanctity and graces, all of it so briefly; it glitters wondrously on the ground, then extinguishes like a flame.

Here, do me a favour. To sharpen your understanding, try this: well all the spit inside your mouth—now swallow. Now do it again. Now, again—don’t waste time, just swallow whatever saliva is in there. Four, five times is kind of annoying, but regulate that to a hundred—a thousand? For days on end—weeks, months? Now can you see exactly what I mean when I say the body doesn’t need much to simultaneously turn itself into your oppressor— into the site of your oppression?

Trauma does not always carry big battle wounds. Sometimes it appears in the broad daylight of cold wars fought in silence.

Isn’t that what sickness is? A violence, in need of direction, channeled inward?

I have no idea what to believe I’ll find in here anymore. You could park a Costco in one of these rooms and I’d just nod along once I found it, like, Uh-huh. Okay, sure. Of course.

Medical specialists flinging procedures and prescriptions at you—betahistines and SSRIs, SNRIs, benzos and CNS depressants, DNRIs, rTMS, ECT, CBT, DBT—if the list seems inexhaustive, it’s because it is, all sorts of fancy-colour pills that nuke your libido and make your limbs tense up with a writhing athetosis. Besieged by waves of nausea, I have never wanted to kill myself more than when I was on sertraline.

The withering ember of dreams. Finances. Aging parents. The future. We are promised the world, but by the time we hit thirty, life knocks us over the head with a baseball bat like we’re a fucking piñata at a gender reveal party and we’re struck by the futility of it all: our finances are indelibly fucked, our dreams are scattered ash and the future has been salted.

It was all so beautiful. And, you know, years have passed since then. I still miss my mom. I still miss the stars. I don’t want to die in a place with no stars. Grief bubbles in me like a trapped body of air. The stupid thoughts spill out convulsively. It doesn’t matter. For any of it to ever work, I’d have to get rid of this. And I’ve been dead for so long, I don’t know if I can come alive again.

There is a stillness here, though not in the way that a church is still, or a meadow, or a shore. It is a place that has intention – an interior built for humans, wholly unoccupied by them. A place that has been here a long time. Big, with function, for people, but devoid of any life and imbuing the space with a mild perception of wrongness.

She seems to be mourning her body’s betrayal like a crushing bereavement. Trapped in a liminal state before her mind adjust like a tuning fork to its new reality.

I know how trauma can greedily accelerate our capacity for intimacy.