Once, I dreamt I was an exile, or woke to find I was one. I was on a pale brick broad road, by a Moore engorged with mist. I think I’m an exiled partisan, or some convict sent away only never to come back, like those October prisoners, refusing to walk through the open exit to society. I think I am both. I’m leaving and remaining. My skin is a septic bandage that itches to shed but hangs stubbornly on my nerve endings. The manged dog of my present, but abstract, self walks onwards. The infected skin lets go of rusty clockwork pieces which fall out of me. I’ve been staring at my feet, my head weighed down from my heavy breathing. I look up and I’m at the entrance of a forest. The trees twist in spiral motions into nothingness. I don’t know where the paths lead. Their bark is gnarled and burnt and has many lines in it. Blood pours out from them, oozing slowly like sap. I look closer; the tree is alive. Every tree is the same, stretching out into that cloud-like mist. A dense forest of people-trees. My memory searches for some half-forgotten reference, and then it hits me like a spasm. I am in the forest of self-murderers. I see the blood spurting slowly out like sap where bark has been torn away. And I see the person is caught halfway between being in the tree and being it. Like they were fitted themselves into the trunk and were absorbed into it, like they were always part of it. There are rows and rows of them, like fever dream dryads dissolving into the green-grey of some forests imaginary. Conjured harpies sit on brooking branches and dig their talons in.
I see in a small young tree trunk a groove. It is a groove in my shape. It has not been carved out or crafted, it was always there. It’s mine, it was made for me. I stare at it longingly for what seems like forever. My body, which had seemed so fleshy and doughy before, becomes tight and taught to match the lines of the bark.
I think if I stayed I’d join those spiral paths, stretching out over the years. Maybe I should stay. I wonder if I am the maker of the groove, if every step, and thought, and breath was slowly carving it in, a compilation of small scars on the bark. Pointillist pain. I would very much like to never leave. To remain forever.
But I don’t. Self-punishment does not exist within Eternity, but within the singularity of an agony that you refuse to move on from. I don’t know if that means anything. Beneath the aching need for punishment, a splinter of freedom remains within me. I am an exile, but the exile is mine. It is me. And the shell of my pain is finally broken. The point in the process of understanding is finally reached.
I crawl away, and then pull myself to my feet. The bandages fall away. My arms are worn, chipped metal, but the edges of me are still sharp. Perhaps they will wear down with time.
I trudge forward. There is somewhere else I am going, untouched by cycles of harm. It is an unthinkable place. But I follow the direction in my chest. And I walk away from the wood of suicides.
