it felt like heaven to hate her

content warning; substance abuse, self harm, memory loss

It seems up to this point I have been the only one truly present in my writing. I have 19 of these letters left that I promised myself I would write. When lovers exist here they’re painted as a silhouette, a starless sky, a negative before it’s developed. I tell myself I like the negative space. I crosshatch the people I don’t want to talk about with the stroke of a calligraphers pen, loops and loops and spirals thickening with pressure and releasing before the advent of the next letter on the page. I’m the only thing made of flesh here, sending you solipsistic kiss marked envelopes. That’s not out of love, that’s out of fear.

You’re not meant to talk to strangers on the internet this intimately. First I wanted to write about sex. I wanted to write letters like I used to write for him, but the ink flows different when it’s a scream into the void. “A professional secret keeper doesn’t make a very good writer” whispers something in my head. I don’t want to listen to it.

I don’t want to talk about her, or them, or that place at all, but it keeps showing up, and the negative space consumes the page until it’s just empty, blinking at me, waiting.

My first piece of writing on here is about drinking. There’s tipsy. Then there’s that place. The event horizon. Hungering to fuck up in a way that means someone will treat you tender tomorrow. The threshold beyond a black hole. Drunk.

Yeah, thats it. I write about being drunk. L’appel du vide. I write about dive bars and strange pubs and beer gardens and rolling on my back in the grass, my mouth sick with peach schnapps under a july thunderstorm crackling past the garden fence.

A black hole. Have you ever lost all your memories? Do you remember what it felt like? (The irony). The blank page. The negative space. The simplicity of existing without knowing, the relief that comes with your own personal apocalypse. The epistemological madness of it all.

I don’t want to talk about her.

This is a nice neighbourhood. This is meant to be the good part. Existing feels tidy, smooth like an opal. There’s no danger, chemically induced or otherwise. There are lost house keys pinned to the community board at the laundromat. This is not a place for beads of blood rolling down my thighs, or learning what a cigarette tastes like just because that girl is so goddamn beautiful.

It felt like heaven to hate her.

I am so grateful now I promise! But I secretly miss the wreckage. I clench a fistful of dirt. My fingers are soaked in fertiliser, wrinkled from all this nurturing. I want to try everything, I want to fly burning, I already know I have a taste for the sun.

I think I might be the black hole.
I’m thinking about starting a garden.