The Border of Paradise

don’t want to cry again. I am so tired of my own pain.

in my look I’m now stronger than I’ve ever been before because I am a part of something bigger than myself. I am the whole world stuffed into one girl’s body. I have oceans for blood and skies for eyes.

Eventually I was functioning again, but what had happened to my mind left me hobbled, as if I’d been hit by a car instead, and with poor healing to show for it.

not telling someone that you’ve got vitaphobia is like telling someone that you’re not covered in blood when you are—it doesn’t work, and you look the worse for denying it.

This unnameable thing I eventually called “vitaphobia” as a feeble attempt to get at the nastiness that was neurosis turned inside out—the fear of everything else turned into the fear of actually being alive

I know that such inclinations and incidents may not seem like much, and that they are not my fault, but the fault of circumstances beyond my control. But to this day, I suspect that I planted the seeds of my own suffering without having any notion of consequence.

God never gives a person more than he can handle—but what about despair? For so many years I have thought I ought to be able to handle this, and the only refrain that returned to me was I’m in pain, I’m in pain, I’m in pain.