I think there’s something wrong with me.
I feel like a toy in a glass box. Like no one wants to spend their real life with me, love on me till I become dog-eared, ripped at the seams from undying clots of affection. I don’t understand why the people I want don’t want me—and I mean all of me, the parts that can’t unlook things, the parts without lies. Anything less than that is not want; it’s incomplete, it’s conditional desire, alive only as long as everything stays easy. Superficial. When I say want, I mean showing up. I mean the kind of love that asks you every morning to be better; I mean saying yes to it every day, no matter how hard it feels. I would be so good, I would try my best, but no one wants me in their world. I don’t even mean in the hand-inside-chest way, but just sharing a home together or a thousand other possible things: flying to Vietnam and renting a house, staying in separate wings most of the time and making work; going to Sri Lanka again; doing quiet road trips in the desert, up a wooded coast. I’d take anything, but people only want to play with me sometimes, and then they put me back in the glass box and go back to their other lives, with the people who aren’t as terrifying as me, who don’t ask as much of them, who don’t expect them to make and bend and burn through worlds. The women they keep saying they’re unhappy with, but who will fuck them with misery seething under their beds and bear their children.
You and I know that there are millions of people who are easier than we are. In the dark of night, my demons don’t tell me I’m worthless. They tell me I am too powerful, that no one will ever want me for it, that I don’t deserve love or happy endings because I chose too much, I ate too much of the world, I refused to starve and as punishment, I will be starved.
I feel like an indulgence, a royal prisoner in a tower room, the one they dream with, their mouths on my skin as if my sweat is a drug and something in me is, isn’t it? Something in me is bright and brilliant enough that they want to plug their hands into it, like there’s a gash of blood and water in my side and they’re pushing their fingers into it, lances of flesh, vinegar dripping from my mouth. They bleed me of dreams, spinning worlds that float across my ceiling, and I am a fool, a little fool, never realizing until it’s too late that these dreams are just games to them. They are all very real to me; I would have made them all real. I would be so good; I would try my best. There is something bright and brilliant in me. It doesn’t make me feel special. It makes me terribly alone.
When they have played and dreamed and fucked enough—it usually takes two years, they can’t sustain illusions longer than that—they climb off my bed and put their pants on, tucking themselves in and zippering themselves up. They say things about what is impossible, what they cannot do, and leave me sobbing because I thought we were going to take the world and pour it behind our teeth, down our throats. I thought I wouldn’t be left alone. They step out of the tower room, through the glass they’ll never admit exists; they leave, and leave me alone. I am not real. It doesn’t matter what you do to something that isn’t real.
I know how to make the glass box pretty. I made it into a planet of a snow globe; I belong only in the worlds I create. My doctors say to give myself the things other people can’t, build a home no one wants to share with me, carve a life no one wants to walk next to me in. I wonder if they see how a place this alone is a cage, an isolation tent, quarantined godquarters. Everyone else gets to take off the hazmat suits and go back to their lives. No one wants to live with me. There’s a song by Massive Attack by that name, “Live with Me”; I used to listen to it on loop, imagining that someone who loved me was finally, finally saying these things to me. No one ever has.
I don’t know what I did to make people unwant me so.
My therapist reminds me that it can’t all be stories of what people did to me—that I was there, that I made choices, too. She’s right. I have chosen many things over being alone, things that were bad for me. Maybe I thought that was all I was worth. I think of dreams as drugs, myself as a drug, the reality shimmering around me as a high. I think about how they pretend that dreaming so carelessly with me isn’t violent, just because it feels so good to them. Bind tight rubber around your arm, push me into the crook of your elbow, and I stop becoming a person. I stop becoming something you can hurt. I am entirely a rush, an escape, and no one ever thinks that ecstasy has feelings of its own. Or, maybe they just don’t give a fuck. Nothing matters more than how we make them feel, right? Why did I stay?
In my last letter to you, I talked about unfurlings. I talked about becoming as big as we are, fuck the consequences. There are so many ways to be unseen. If we are as addictive as we are now, how much more desirable will we become as we expand? I don’t mean desirable in a good way, but rather, that devotion they ply us with, that attention that feels like it could be love, those arms reaching toward and through us in a flood of supplication, asking: Give us light, make us feel like we are gods, too, see the things in us that no one else believes in, make us believe they are real, see us, see the best of us, it is only in your light that we become holy. They are hungry and we are infinities of faith. I don’t know if we can stop giving, but maybe we should try. No one is going to abstain from us on their own. I do know that their hunger hurts us, and they don’t see any of this because everyone forgets that even the sun will die one day. It is dangerous to advertise the kind of power we have.
I didn’t even realize how much of it I was masking until I bought and bent the godhouse down in the swamp. When I threw myself into customizing it, that distracted me from how much of a beast the house was. It was brand new then, a blinding white with haint-blue touches, floor-to-ceiling marble, warm light flooding through south and west windows; it was intimidating even before I put my hands on it. Once I did, it flexed even harder: gold ceilings and fixtures, acacia wood and velvet couches, limewashed walls. Everyone who came there looked at the godhouse and then looked at me and asked what I did. How can you afford this, they meant, just you alone? I was overwhelmed.
The godhouse made me visible to strangers I would’ve hid from otherwise; I couldn’t pretend I was this little harmless person. They looked at the godhouse and they saw money, which meant power, amplified by me being a storyteller, because what kind of storyteller did you have to be to own a place like this. I was terrified. The house felt too big for me; it felt wrong, like I should have bought it years into my career, not thirteen months after my first book. For weeks, I didn’t sleep well there, worried that God would punish me for being so bold, for bending the world like this. It was Ann who talked me down, who told me that the house was oversized precisely so I could grow into it, so I could have the space to learn how to unfurl. I needed that much room, as vast as it felt. We never understand how vast we are. We may spend the rest of our lives finding out that we have no borders, no boundaries, pushing into greater sizes, being both terrified and delighted when we discover that there’s nothing there to stop us. I thought it was disrespectful to God that I was trying to live like a small god, fragments of teachings about humility and destroying the ego still fluttering around in my head. Ann laughed and asked me to consider the possibility of a God delighted at the idea of us trying to live like one, a fond and indulging God. That concept shifted so much for me and I have been tentatively allowing myself to be more and more daring, allowing that God is not punishing me for being as radiant as I was made to be, that I am, in fact, being obedient by living like this. So. I am ablaze and so is my world, so is my godhouse, so is my work. So is my heart, so are my hands when they touch the supplicant’s skin, so is my faith washing over them like a baptism. I burn so well that I don’t burn at all.
I confess, I have used this fire to call people to me. It’s not difficult; so many of them are cold and hungry, and we know how to feed them a world they can’t build when they’re by themselves. But I stopped, I swear I did. Summonings like that come with costs: you can “get” anyone you want, sure, but it won’t take long before you realize it’s not enough, or it doesn’t taste like you thought it would, and you’re left with a hunger they could never have enough meat for. I stopped, I tried to mind my own business, but a god on fire is a god on fire, so don’t think people won’t hunt it down.
I still haven’t figured out what balance could look like, how to cope with the way they curl away when I reach out—either because I put too much weight in a step the humans keep light, or because everyone else is playing a game I have no patience for, a coy dance of lies and masks, mapped out with inaccurate criteria for power. It feels almost impossible to connect with people, and I watch other people do it like it’s nothing, like it’s the easiest instinct in their bellies. It is wrenching for me; it takes stupendous amounts of effort, and it rarely goes well. I am not like the others; I cannot spread myself out in the open and take my chances.
Ann was the one who taught me that the word holy means to be set apart for a specific purpose. I remember, back when I started writing Freshwater, how my lovers were removed, one by one. I was furious, lonely and longing, and not allowed. The stricture was loud and clear, like God’s hand heavy and warning on my shoulder. I tried to ignore it; this had been one of my few small comforts through embodiment, how could it be taken away from me? I didn’t last very long. My body itself started to shut down, screaming in pain whenever my remaining lover tried to penetrate it. Eventually I just curled up in agony, laughing to myself at how brutal these instructions were. Soon, he was removed from my life completely.
Part of me wishes I could explain to them that it wasn’t personal, there are so many things I would have kept doing if God hadn’t stopped me by force.
Does anyone talk about how heartbreaking it is to be set apart? It doesn’t make me feel special. Or rather, I was raised being told I was special, so there’s nothing particularly special about that by now, you know? Special is a baseline. Special doesn’t always mean good things. It means you stand out; the rules may be bent for you somewhere, but they will be hammered harder against you somewhere else. Special can mean horrors that no one else will see or understand or believe. They say terrible things are done in darkness, but terrible things are also done in a light too blinding for anyone else to look at directly. Special can mean being an idol no one thinks can bleed, and even if you do, it doesn’t mean what it does for everyone else, it is a marvel, a thing to pray at, a thing to touch with reverence. No one really hears your screams if they are divine, you precious breathing relic.
Holy means your life is not yours. You are being wielded by something else, and I think it’s supposed to make us feel better that we are handled by God, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like enough. It feels like voids yawning through, dazzling with pain. It feels like madness and a cage made of iridescent glass. It feels like a century of reincarnated hearts breaking at the same time.
I don’t want to be alone. I would give up the rest of the world willingly if I was granted select respites. I would ask for a small circle of holy lovers, luminous dreamers with no need for my fire because they are burning just as much as I am, even just one, that we may be immolated in each other’s arms. Holy means you surrender to a will that is greater than yours. I kneel in the glass box as blood and water pour from my side. I pray not to be forsaken.
There is no lonely like a god’s lonely.