The Fine Art of Burying Yourself

He said he was going to kill me. One has to wonder, with the benefit of hindsight, how much he meant it, how much of it was simply hyperbole in the moment. If the idea of killing me was real, or if it was just something titilating, something to turn him on. It doesn’t matter in the end, the outcome was the same.

He made a good go of it, the killing me part, so perhaps he’d been serious after all. He’d carved me up like a Christmas ham, left bloody handprints all over my body, around my throat where his nails had dug in. After, he left me in the bedroom while he went to get ready for work. At some point he mentioned breakfast. At some point, he turned on the coffee maker. At some point, he told me to put the sheets in the garbage because they were ruined, as though it was my fault I’d bled on them, that I hadn’t been neater when I’d struggled, more ladylike.

As soon as I heard the shower turn on I left.

I stumbled out of the apartment (his girlfriend’s I would later learn) and onto a rain-slick street in a part of the city I didn’t know. It was maybe six in the morning, sky grey with dawn. My eyes wouldn’t focus and my mouth tasted like the rum I’d been drinking all night; cloying sweetness and decay at the back of my throat. I was bleeding profusely, still, though it hadn’t had time to hurt yet; my body in too much shock to feel much of anything at all.

It was only once I made it to the metro station that I let myself feel any of it, let myself think about it, try to sort through it. I stood, unsteady on my feet, clutching the straps of my bag with white-knuckled hands, breathing through my nose as though I’d just run for miles, and I tried to think. That was what killed me, trying to think about it.

It was a quiet death. She simply sloughed off of me like a shell, like a blanket, an old coat, something silky and well-loved falling from my body. She crumpled and I went down with her because we were the same thing, just that one of us was dead. After a long time spent lying there listening to trains pass and stop and pass again I was able to get my feet under me, to stand, to walk away. She stayed there, hunched on the concrete; cream colored sweater and grey wool coat, black eye blooming. It felt wrong to leave her there, a tripping hazard, an impediment to the morning commute, so I picked myself up and carried her home with me.

I sat vigil by my own bedside for three days and waited for myself to wake. I imagined I watched my own skin peel back from my bones, my own eyes sink in. At night I imagined that the mice that lived beneath my sink would take away my hair, would build nests with it, unraveling my body stitch by stitch like an old sweater until there was nothing left. I waited until I was staring down the empty eye sockets of my own skull. I waited until my friend finally came knocking at my door, worried about my absence and radio silence. I waited until I realized that I — who I was before — was gone for good.

I made it to the hospital eventually, feverish and nearly septic, the knife wounds in my body pulpy with infection. The doctors asked me why I hadn’t come in sooner, why I’d waited so long, why I’d endangered my life like this. “I was too busy being dead” seemed like a stupid thing to say, truthful, but stupid. I just shrugged. I never went to the police.

The next couple of weeks were spent drifting in a codeine haze. I was Eurydice lost in the grey-shrouded ghostliness of the underworld trying to remember which way was up. Hades, it turns out, is a very boring place to be. But I went grocery shopping, started going back to class, started going out with friends again, trailing the deadweight of my own corpse behind me. I couldn’t let go, couldn’t set myself down. I nearly broke beneath the weight of it, this cold, awful dead thing that I cradled close to me as though to protect it. I halfway wanted someone to ask about it — the dark circles under my eyes, the out-of-the-blue weight loss, the overwhelming silence. “Can’t you see it?!” I wanted to shout “Can’t you see this corpse I’m carrying? Can’t you see the dead body in my arms?!”

This isn’t about how I overcame, how I learned to bury my grief, or how I learned to mourn myself in healthy ways. There was no show of overwhelming emotional strength as I finally accepted what had happened and let go of it for good. It wasn’t like the movies or the books or anything any psychiatrist will tell you is healthy. The truth is I clung to myself, dragged her around behind me like a security blanket. I dragged her cross country, internationally, curled up and slept next to her like a loyal dog. I would have done anything to get her back, to get myself back, to go back to a world where it all made sense. I thought it would never change, this burden, this grief-stricken period of mourning for the person I had been.

I clung tightly to her until she started turning to dust in my hands and then I held her tighter still. I lost bits of her in coffee shops, on the platforms of train stations, in my childhood bedroom when I went home for Christmas and spent two weeks crying hysterically into a pillow that smelled like being loved. It hurt to loose her even as each loss lifted the burden a little.

Bruises heal, wounds fade to scars and unless I force myself I can’t even remember the feeling of his hands on me. I’m separated from what was and what is by years and experience and the seemingly endless process of becoming. I still carry her though, like one carries a familial trait; a nose or a chin or a way of standing. We’re related, she and I, but that is all. Sometimes I’ll look in the mirror and see her instead, like catching a glimpse of yourself and mistaking it for your mother. Sometimes my boyfriend touches me and she flinches. But she’s mostly quiet now, a minor haunting, more wind than ghost. I wonder if she haunts other people like she haunts me. If she’s still standing, swaying, in the entrance of the metro station still bleeding and trying to figure out why. I wonder if she’s something you catch out of the corner of your eye, a restless spirit never given true closure.

Before I sat down to write this I’d never laid this out for myself in this way, never truly told myself the whole story from beginning to end. It feels a bit like burying an empty casket, a symbol more than anything of substance, too late to do any good. But funerals have never been for the dead and I find myself ready, finally, to put it to rest, to stick a marker over this mound of dirt and leave it in the rearview for good.

This, then, is a eulogy for myself.

I wonder how often we hold funerals for ourselves, how many people have secret graves scattered around their lives, places where they’d laid themselves to rest in order to go on. I wonder if dying gets any easier the more you do it.

Sometimes I’ll pass someone in the street and I’ll recognize that tight-fisted shoulder-slump, that desperate clinging to something long gone. Sometimes they’ll recognize me too and we’ll nod to each other; co-practitioners of this same kind of self-necromancy, dragging the corpses of our past selves along behind us as though they’ll blink back to life, as though we can go back to who we were before, to a world where things still made sense. We nod at each other, heft our corpses higher and carry on.

“Where are you?” I want to ask them “Where is your body buried?”

Related posts:

As artificial intelligence advances, it reveals countless opportunities for retailers and customers to make positive steps towards creating a sustainable industry. Here's how...

2. I think that speech should definetly be counted as crime. Michelle knew what she was doing. In a situation like Conrad was in, words are just as hurtful as actual weapons. I personally think the…

Being a deep thinker and feeler is a gift, but it presents some unique challenges to our relationships If you’re someone who thinks and feels deeply, then you’ve probably heard one or two of these…