Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation

It is through living, then dying, and living to die again that we discover what being alive is supposed to mean at all.

Nobody has to care about what hurts you because that's not their job. It's not the world's job to understand you, it's your job to understand the world. And the more you understand it, the more you learn how to get around it. The more you understand it, the more you understand who you can trust and how far you can stretch. You cannot wait for them to understand you, or they will kill you. You have to do it.

Time is an anarchy. There are whole sections of years that have, in my mind, disappeared, time revealing its tricks to me like a cocky necromantic. The gaps are caverns of absence, temporal wormholes, where all I can recall is the sensation of being stretched between many different dimensions of crisis at once.

Everyone needed a granular level of detail that I hadn't yet collected prior to their asking, so every conversation was a violent unearthing, an ongoing pluck, and a prodding at the thin, wearying skin of my psyche.

Math is a form of faith, a faith of its own dynamic and complex language system, and to speak it is to agree to its principles: Input begets output. One becomes the other. One variable is subject to the mechanics of the others. You give what you get. You get what you are prepared to receive

Pythagoreans believed that there are three ways humanity improves, one of which is dying. Death is biological, but where it is also metaphysical is where I find delight.

God, through him I learned the most convincing love, the most prosperous, the Christmas tree stacked with our cheap mementos, our affection a sweaty fruit -- but what I craved more than anything was the ability to see myself in perpetuity, continuity without burden, the satisfaction of never encountering an empty draft.

Look at how I count the truth, and change my mind.

I loved myself so hard I brought her back.

I loved a man so hard it made me sick.

When you're healed you tell the story differently.

Sometimes a benign heartbreak is meaningful. Sometimes it sums up to nothing. Who's to know? And does it matter? It's the abacus of your growth, how many inches up from the ground you've been charted.

Things are going to be hard for you because your brain works differently from other people's. Know that now. There's nothing wrong with you. Smoothing happened to you that changed your chemistry and now your brain is different. Do you understand what I mean? [...] I'm sorry, but you have to show the work, she says. You have to do it yourself. Do you understand me? she asks.

[...] to live out my own violence on the bodies of the people I want desperately to love and be loved by, to live it out and to fail, so radically, so dangerously, with so much harm around me, not having known that I put myself miles away from the love I desperately want and need, with my inability to see how zero is indivisible, how you welcome in the negatives when you try to give from a well where the water never was and will never be again. I couldn't live this way anymore. So I died.

I'm crying at how easy it always was, how it feels to fly, when it means to be your own tutor and teach yourself a new beginning.

Because every time I wanted to get naked, I was sharing the soft part of my trauma with people I'd never remember, and I hated the way they'd run the pads of their fingers over the keloids, kissing at them as if just then, in the blissful fog of lust, they could heal me. I couldn't stand the pretense of it all, the role I'd let them play--me the damsel, them the mare--it made me too vulnerable, too available, too likely to be exploited.

Mom chose to wean me off the Ritalin, inspired none by the lack of general information provided to her about the drug itself or how it might affect me long-term. I came back to the living world more irritable and angsty than I'd been before, more skeptical too, offended that I seemed to be the only one who knew that I had physically and spiritually lost time.

I'm eight and already on drugs. It's an irony we couldn't anticipate, my mother humming through the cool grays of the morning as she works the pills down my through, holding back her own sick.

The need to storytell is compulsive and agnostic; unfortunately everything I need to know about my self becomes document.

(...) and I realized the blood was the fault of my own cutting, and couldn't imagine continuing to live this way; to live out my own violence on the bodies of the people I want desperately to love and be loved by (...)

At nineteen, I could have wanted for nothing more pure than this - a juvenile love cultivated by the very fact of my new adult autonomy and my contradicting need to be owned