raze it all, sweet man; you do love fire so.
A mancameron publication.
22 & Alone © 2018 Cameron Lucente.
Edits by Lauren Lowen and MJ Nader.
Names may be omitted and/or changed for the purpose of privacy.
Self-published. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without express permission from the author, except for small excerpts for purposes of review.
Visit www.mancameron.com for contact information.
First Printing, March 2018. Printed through CreateSpace.
To Mom, To Dad, To Emma, To Hayley, To Me,
I love you.
Foreward:
This book contains graphic depictions of self harm, and deals with mental illness, medication, body image issues, and loss. My path and handling of my mental health are my own, and no one book can express the breadth of terrors it can appear as. I encourage those who struggle with any of these issues to seek help in the ways they can; therapy, diagnoses, medication, anything and everything. Talk to the loved ones in your life. Talk to helplines. This life that we are given is precious.
You deserve to see it.
open up the window. it’s time
pour out the bile breathe in, breathe in, breathe in open up the window.
open up the window, open another, and a thirdstop shuttering your light. let the world live in you for a while.
open up the fucking window. how sweet it is how full it is how odd it is
there’s that summer air, at the tip of your tongue again
god, how sweet it is how full it is how odd it is
open up the window.
why do you dream of fresh lumber & places that will never exist?
let go, let go
set the manuscript on fire.
smash the ashes against the floorboards as you scream and howl, raw throated
simmer in the splinters
rip the godforsaken words out letter by letter from your teeth, do it, do it
good god, let them go, please, ego, id- supernova.
end it bright.
This will pass.
You know it will pass. It will pass.
Life goes on and I will wake up tomorrow, more or less ready to start again. The fog and the sludge will still be there in the gutters, but this is better. I know this is better.
I’d rather take the lows than suffer the numbness. I want to feel raw and the pain than feel nothing at all.
Now, go to bed. Shut off your head and silence what you can. Sink to the bottom of the depths; you can use the floor to push yourself back up to the surface.
I don’t know where to begin. No one ever sits you down and tells you that your brain can just, one day, start beating the shit out of itself. I don’t know when exactly it started, when it slowly started to smudge and burn the fabric of every interaction with friends and family, the little conversations, the rattling thoughts. One day everything just started to fucking tear along the edges, and then all of a sudden my life was in a constant five-alarm freak out.
I never wanted any of this.
I can only say that I noticed it late junior year, that spring before the summer storms and scorched grass. Things just changed. My friends felt further away, like they were trying to keep out of sight (they weren’t). There was a feeling of conversation behind me, almost daily, hourly, even while I slept (there wasn’t). I would constantly think about them, what they were doing, what they were
saying, what they could be saying about me while I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there. Was I ever there? So this is your worst?
There’s gotta be a fix. My thoughts circle this damn idea near nightly, searching and searching as if I can solve all this with the right amount of suffering. I know the problem lies in the chemical imbalances and the biology and the tiny textbook diagrams that lay there and mock you. The instruction manual has long since been lost in the shuffle of paranoia and memory; but, why couldn’t I just reach in and flick a neuron or two back into sync, rewire the system and rip out the shit that keeps tripping the alarms? Medication seemed to work but that only brought so much relief and at the cost of so much time. I’m not a surgeon- I don’t have the hands for it, but I have hands.
Sometimes I wonder if I smashed my head enough, it would all finally fall back into place, like an etch-a-sketch being shaken in reverse. The image becomes clear again.
Everything is okay again.
the day i lost my grandmother, i cried for five minutes
she died of cancer, so it was a long way coming. and, in the end, she was suffering.
she must’ve been so tired.
i think a lot about her, (that is, when she comes to mind)
i admit i tend to hyperfocus on what she meant to me, what she taught me, what parts of herself she left behind.
i wonder if she was sad, or happy, that we weren’t there
my sisters and i did not see her pass, + i’m glad we didn’t, to be honest.
i’m still mad at myself though, to be honest. to be honest, she probably couldn’t have realized between the morphine and the cancer
to be honest.
would she have wanted us there anyway? did she want her other grandchildren there either?
they were six, or seven. very young. i hope they forget in time.
after her funeral, we never spoke to aunt wendy again.
we never spoke to papa rudy again. (i miss him the most)
how do you come to terms with your own death?
how has it only been five years? five minutes, a whole sixty seconds for every year, each year an eternity, i swear all those lighthouses.
i wish we had talked more.
i hope she knew who i was and loved me all the same
(god i fear she wouldn’t)
i’ve become so loud, and you got so quiet
i love you. i always will.
i promised.
i whisper it to every moth that visits me
Oh no.
Oh, oh no.
Something has stopped working. Something has broken and it’s too late to set the break and now the damage is done and oh god, oh no-
Could you have stopped this? Were you supposed to?
Are you to blame?
Oh no.
All of my thoughts begin with I.
Well, most do. It’s hard to break out of The same old habit
Of watching & never saying.
I want to start speaking. I want to be confrontational, To startle people With just how much of me
Is bubbling at the surface.
I want to burn And for someone to care enough To put out the flames.
The brain, criss-crossed & tangled enacts numerous terrors to the body.
Like powerlines, it entraps us with guilt, sadness, lovemoments when you are vulnerable, weak. It settles in like a plague, like a sick, foul sludge fills you up-up-up, until it drains you out.
Then you are hollowwithout purpose or desire
to better yourself.
Because we once had control our biology has cursed us; burned by our stagnancy.
So we cope, carry on with monsters on our backs until, one day, like a gift the powerlines turn off.
However; if, and only if the life you live leaves you a husk dry and empty you become hallowed ground.
your hand is moving but you’ve sliced through the tendon
months ago, years ago
you stitched it back with old thread & frustration, with tears.
is it the bones rattling in your ribcage or the loneliness that is burning you softly?
ever so slowly, the movements creaking less and less
stop hiding it under your bedyour skull, cracked open like a lid.
you’re good at masking it, dressing it up, you know, you know how to make it pretty.
glitter, paper, plastic.
