The other day the therapist was really making it a point about how I wasn’t contemptible, using my thoughts and feelings as examples, and the next day, when I was pretty much determined to blow the session, he said to me, “u know, I’ve been thinking of another word to describe how u are feeling that isn’t broken or damaged.”
“Lost”, he says, “You are lost.”
Although he is right, it’s nothing new. And just like someone lost in the woods or a city, they try one direction for a few steps or even miles, then head back and start again, or abruptly pitch off into another angle. They end up in circles, grope for what’s familiar or, in turn, embrace desperately something new. But in the end, lost is lost, and I have no direction to follow, I have no guide, no one to rest on, to carry any of this for me. And I am tired. I am tired of being this way, of being this flawed, of beating myself up and feeling much too much to the point where I am defeated and numb. I am tired. I am sick of the sight of me, I am tired of the stench.

after every utterance, you see a contemptable person would be like this or that but not like you. and i get it, he’s trying to alleviate the guilt, the “intense” guilt and regret i feel, that i feel intensely, and he wonders aloud if the running i do, where i tap into it, this fucking sea of sadness, if i’m also literally running away, and i say no, i say it in my heart, i say no, i have never run away, i have always walked away or turned away, after all these years i have found myself having gone nowhere, i have always been right where i started and the bones have calcified, all these years and i haven’t taken any steps towards anything at all.

I am desperate for change, there is no poetry about it. Some drastic measure, sell everything off, looking at apartment in park slope, in astoria: all of it atrocious but better than this. Surely better than this.

He says to me, we have a lot of work here: we need to get you off this cross you’ve put and nailed yourself upon. This cross that you’ve also built.
And I laugh again inappropriately because the image fits: I’ve trapped myself, this is all my doing. But the image is wrong as well: I am no martyr, just the torturer and the tortured, the instrument and the pain.

He leaves me rattling: the difference between can’t and won’t. He asks me specifically, why not this, why not finish your dissertation? I volunteer the connection to my father, my propensity to abandon things I’ve started. He circles back again: can’t or won’t? He tells me of how he too didn’t finish his dissertation at first but found something that pushed him on, an approach, a field, but he finished and was outraged when he was questioned during his orals. He points out it might never be too late. And I find it difficult to wrap my mind around it, it’s been well over seven years, the field has changed. Besides I am this now, their lives depend on me being this now. He leaves me with can’t or won’t, sounds to me like you’re just bored.

Extraction requires excavation, a digging through the flesh to come up with bones. It’s a mess in there. The little one says, I want us to put up halloween decorations like a family. She asks, are we irreparable? My son struggles against my touch. My mother hounds me about my isolation. My father tries. And I am left feeling selfish and alone, gripping the steering wheel through one song after another, charging into the night, heaving and sobbing and barely able to see.

No one will tell me what I already don’t now: I’ve heard it all before, it’s run through my mind a million times. Every angle, every tangent, well worn and dull: I am an animal, I am wounded, I am broken, I do not know how to heal, I’ve never known how to be. Mr self destruct, mr incomplete, mr apathy, jigsaw and irregular, spend hours and nothing fits. I cannot cope, I cannot believe, and I need an end that no one can provide, there is no miracle drug, there is no right word, no password to crack this code, no peace that is real. It is all in the imagination, it’s all been laid out and explained and found lacking.

Truest alone happiest alone at peace alone scotch and ginger ale square in front of me all that I am all that I could be within that amber breath in the bubbles within the chill of the ice the warmth in the gullet as I swallow this is all that you were meant to be not poet not writer not philosopher not father not lover not husband not real-just a man lost in the glass in front of him, just the drink that barely keeps up with an unquenchable thirst

She cuddles up to me in the night, the first time in days and whispers, but I want more. My daughter asks me to keep her warm and I bundle her up, tuck the blanket beneath her feet, hold her tightly while my son all of one stumbles about the house, plops his head on my belly. He then goes bumbling off again. When does it end? When does sorrow and remorse give way to mercy and grace? When does despair finally, resolutely dissolve before faith?

Asking for permission, permission to breathe, permission to weep, permission to love, permission to beg, permission to forgive. Of all the crimes and sins, perhaps the most sacrilegious request of all: to forgive and to be forgiven. No solace, only long empty days and terrible nights. I find myself aching, bent over double but I will not kneel to him, I cannot forgive him, he is everything wrong with this life, just the simple fact that he still lives.