To “heal” one’s trauma is an erasure of their dimensional gensis. It is a polite execution of the self nurtured in the aftermath. What is called recovery and repair is but merely a return to the dull shape of the acceptable and mundane. Something harmless to the environment and to the peace of others. Pain forgotten and hearts stripped of the hard earned honorary badges, and buried instead under the shallow soil of what is called normal and healthy.

Every scar is an untranslatable sentence in the private language of your survival. To mend it away is to declare your own history obscene. You do not repair a heart by stitching the cracks that let the light in. You do not dismantle your kingdom to make it easier on the preying eyes of the enemy known as others.

If my suffering has made me a monster, then let me remain so. I'm all the less prettier, perhaps, but infinitely more true. I don't want to regrow my amputated limbs, it's enough to lick my wounds whenever they bleed out.

The point of literature, at least to me, is the simple, staggering recognition that before me there were Others. Souls just as alienated and just as estranged who saw the same cracks in the walls of existence and felt the same cold breeze through them. In their words I recognize a secret fraternity of the displaced, a lineage of the misfit. It is my one unshakable solace to know I am not the only human conscious of the calamity of being, nor the only one capable of looking into it in spite of trembling lips.

When the world around collapses into a mess of farce and noise, I retreat into this knowledge like a stillborn crawling back into the womb. Each page is a corridor in which I walk without having to 'justify my existence.' and to 'act accordingly.'

I do not have to perform humanness here, nor sand down my edges to fit the dull geometry of polite life. In these dead, and growingly forgotten voices I find my only form of welcome.

This world, and all worlds preceding it and the ones after it, are not for me. The streets, the politics, the little rituals of 'belonging' all feel like stages upon which I was never meant to step. I'm not born in the wrong era for no prior era could tolerate me, and I don't care for eternity or fame or even to be remembered in the next hundred years. My place is not in this theater but in an oddly detached, lonesome chamber within the passage of human consciousness; a side room where those who saw what I saw gather in silence, separated by centuries yet bound by a shared gaze. They looked upon life and found it wanting, lacking.

I am among them only as a witness, half in reverence, half in resentment. Resentment that they saw the truth, survived it long enough to write it down, and send their journals tied to a lovable, voluable raven to nag me to death. This is the last remaining territory where my existence is not treated as a trespass against the laws of the masses. My only protection against complete, literal insanity.