Abandon Me: Memoirs

It was the first time I thought, I will do anything. Her withdrawal opened a chasm in me, and I would do anything to fill it.

I spent so many waking hours in stories that when I lifted my gaze the rooms of our house blurred, furniture and faces floating by me detached from context, like characters in a film whose plot I’d half forgotten.

For a long time, I cherished my ability to conceal my trouble. Later on, my brother’s inability to hide his own seemed a much more valuable gift.

And the letter B on the back of my hip is proof that I have been in love. That what feels permanent rarely is.

Maybe every desire is the desire to give ourselves away to some perfect keeper, to be known perfectly, as only a creator could know us.

Is our puritan history so strong in us that to acknowledge touch for pleasure’s sake is vulgar?

Abandonment. What did that really mean? That I was left? That I had learned to leave my self. That I would retell the story until I found a different ending. Until I learned to stay.

My brother can be described as bipolar the same way he can be described as artist, Gemini, introvert, brother. To limit him to any one of these contextual references erases him.

their textures—delicate as sloughed sheaths of faith—were enough to convince me that books were once bodies, that the bestial and the divine can reside in the same place.