I want to do it again

Sometimes I am on a long walk. I am walking through a park in the city. I am on my own and in my thoughts and it is a day in late July or August and the air is humming with heat and perforating cracking restlessness. I am too composed for this chaos. I spend too much time fighting the confusion inside me. It is pulling me apart from reality at the seams. I want my life to look like other peoples lives and I want to be happy and I can be and I am. 

But sometimes I only feel alive when I'm suffering. I only feel high when I feel pain. I am walking through the park or I am lying on the grass, or I am walking along the train tracks behind the house. I am in small towns and dim sketchy neighborhoods or abandoned industrial parks, littered with discarded cigarettes and something unknown or unknowable. 

I am in these places. I know I don't take enough risk with my life. The thing is, I only feel alive when I know I am dying. In the everyday, it is as easy to forget as breathing is easy to forget. 

I'm walking and I see a young girl. A young girl walking along the curb alone. She is probably only three years younger than me. She is surveying the sidewalk, picking at things along the ground, sometimes picking them up and tossing them again. I see her other hand clutching something. It's a lighter. I suddenly look again after blinking and I am there in her place. It is something I have only heard of. A myth to me, a dream of white trash and of small town teenagehood. Of being troubled but interesting. Of dying and chasing death and chasing feeling alive. 

My teenagehood was robbed of me. I was consumed in starving it away. Nullifying myself. Dying but never living. It was wrong, and it was miserable. This girl, maybe she's 17, is emaciated, and I know she is fighting just as much as I was. But there is an air of coolness about her that I envy in a sick way. By seeing her I only wish I had risked more, wish I had found more ways to slowly kill myself than one. Just to see what dying any other way would feel like. I spent three useless years going one way and it was fixed (luckily) in a summer. The highs were high but it felt stagnant at the end. I felt I had ruined my chances of fucking up my life any way I could before growing up. 

So, yes, I have regrets. I envy her a lot. I watch her sort through cigarette butts to find a good one. She tries lighting a few and the paper doesn't take the flame and she throws it away again. I stand there and wonder if she's tried Red Bull at 8am on a school day in a gas station store, or if she's shared a joint with a friend under the bleachers, or in the school bathroom stalls, or leaning against the wall of an abandoned warehouse at midnight, or on a park bench. I wonder how long she has been smoking cigarettes, and whether she learned it from her mother, and how she learned to roll a cigarette, or knew where to buy the papers or filters, and how comfortable she feels walking into grubby vape stores with a fake ID. I wonder how many times she has dyed her hair before this, and how it feels to be tattooed, or whether it was painful to have her septum pierced, or her belly button, or if she did it herself. 

I sometimes wish I had had a bad influence to teach me these things, to show me the delicacy, the ecstasy of deaths gentle, enticing breath. I felt it many times, but had no guidance, and was too terrified to do more, to go further, to really push my limits. Even though I almost died, it felt euphoric and I wanted more. 

A car passes and tosses a butt out the window. She waits till they're gone and picks it up. It's barely used, it could even still be burning. She lights it and grey smoke leaves her mouth and she sighs. I wonder how it feels to smoke a cigarette. I wish I had thought to pick up the cigarette butts on the curb and light them when I was her age. I once was exploring a beach with my parents and discovered a half-full pack of cigarettes on a rock and was naively convinced to leave it, but should have kept it and tried one. I stayed at a friends place in Marseille, France, for five weeks and went to school with him and his friends and never once tried a cigarette. 

After taking a couple drags of the butt, it dies again and she keeps searching. I feel like a ghost. I feel like I am watching a version of myself, the me that could have been. To me, she is fresh and raw and tempting. She is tempting me to regress again and chase death. I am existentially, vicariously living through her because as an adult I am not afforded this messy chaos without ripples in consequence. I have other people to impress now, not just myself. I have chosen a different, more polished life. 

I don't want to die anymore, and I recovered from anorexia. But sometimes I miss the feeling of chasing death, just because to feel like you are dying is evidence that you are alive. I want to do it again, but different. I am grabbed at the throat by one thing. She is as thin as I was at my lowest. I wonder how she got so thin, and whether I could do that again. To be honest, I probably could if I was truly alone and set my mind to it. But I cannot live my life on the edge like she can. I will never be able to again, it was far too terrible. I couldn't endure it again. 

I look up to women who seem this free. Troubled but free of expectations. I used to wish for parents that didn't constantly want to know where I was and what I was doing, that didn't care as much as they did about me, because that is an uncomfortable privilege for a teen. What she has is a kind of rambunctious, anxious freedom I have only experienced a few times, mostly while living alone. The only freedom you can feel when drinking alone, or from no one knowing where you are, or reading fucked up comics as a child. Disobedient secrecy. 

The freedom of no expectations is that you don't have to sharpen up for university. This girl can find eternal teenagehood and work at the gas station cornerstore all her life and not feel that she has ever disappointed anyone, or gone in a direction she shouldn't go. She has no framework for who she should be or how she should live her life. She takes a coin wallet from the pocket of her baggy pants and tosses the next butt in. 

She looks around and then catches my eye. Her hair is choppy, and was once strawberry blonde. The roots are growing back. The ends are a fading pink, and there's some bleach white in there. She is like a mirage, a sallow sunset. Her eyes are hollow black pits, but she sparkles. I wonder if I can only see her because I have been her, and only girls that have been her can truly notice her existence. Or her essence, as in what she truly means to us by existing and doing the things she does. I can tell why she does them, because I once did them too, and maybe she can see it in my eyes. 

I am a sun-licked spark of life and chasing death and destruction, and she can see it in me, but doesn't understand why I would want it like she does, because suffering isn't a competition to her, something to make you human. There is true suffering in her face. She has a certain way of hunching over. I can see she is dying slowly and I envy her. The thing is I never sought immediate death because I don't want to die, and didn't even when I did. I enjoyed only the feeling of falling softly into it. It was like a gentle embrace, a pillow of leaves caressing you, falling through the tender sheaves of reality itself. 

I wonder if I would have been different had I taken more risks. I wonder if I would have survived. Teenagehood is like a filter, and some can't make it through. But I wish I had tried Red Bulls or Monster. I wish I had smoked cigarettes with my friends. I wish I had gone to more parties, and I wish I had gotten lost more. I wish I had gone outside at New Years to sit on the deck in the dead of winter to pass around a joint instead of watching curiously from inside. 

I feel like I didn't let anything out that I should have. I feel like I'm not done yet but I'm being pushed out the door. I can't move on with my life, I've been too good, too law-abiding, too honest, too well-behaved, too ready to please anyone. I even struggled to be a good anorexic until after I moved out. 

I wish I had dyed my hair at least once in high school. I wish I had gotten piercings. I have never even gotten my ears pierced. I wish I had been taught how to do makeup when I was young so that I could've been the alternative baddie I was meant to be. So I could have been her across the street. I wish I had done edibles in my teens, I wish I had made bad decisions, I wish I had scared people in more ways than simply by how skinny I was. Beyond that I was boring. I never stole, never had sex, had never even kissed anyone of the opposite sex. I had never gone where my parents couldn't find me, never gotten into trouble, never skipped a class for no reason. Anorexia shut me away from all of that exploration. I cheated myself. I know that now. 

I want to be messy again, at least before it's too late. Deep down I want to be emaciated again, but not by starving myself. Not through a concerted effort. Not through a constant, unrelenting battle with my mind. I just want it to come with everything else. But I still desire it deep within me. It will never leave. But I also know that I can't fuck up my life too bad anymore, not like you can when you're a teenager. If I fuck up too much, I know my life will change for the worse. That's a fact. 

And I have it good. I know this. It's all so good that I start to reminisce for when it was bad. It doesn't feel real, and sometimes I don't feel real or know who I am. The only time I feel real is when I know I'm dying. 

The cicadas sing in the trees and thick heat rises from the pavement. She turns away and walks off the sidewalk into a sparse forest down the ravine, silently inviting me into her world. I follow her. She is sitting on a large storm drain at the bottom of the ravine. She is very small now, and she looks up at me. But I can't go down there now; we are too different. And as much I feel like I love her, and I have a tender affection for her because we are the same, I can tell that she is also dangerous, and I can no longer afford to chase danger like she does. It is the unspoken horror of growing older. 

She pulls one of the butts from her pocket and lights it. I turn away from her back to the road and start looking for my own.