raze it all, sweet man; you do love fire so.
To Mom, To Dad, To Emma, To Hayley, To Me,
I love you.
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.
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.
16 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.
17 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.
depths title
18 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.
i wish we had talked more.
after her funeral, we never spoke to aunt wendy again.
i hope she knew who i was and loved me all the same (god i fear she wouldn’t)
we never spoke to papa rudy again. (i miss him the most)
i’ve become so loud, and you got so quiet i love you. i always will. 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 promised.
19 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 noCould you have stopped this? Were you supposed to? Are you to blame? Oh no.
20 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
to better yourself.
& tangled enacts numerous terrors
Because we once had control
to the body.
our biology has cursed us; burned by our stagnancy.
Like powerlines, it entraps us with guilt, sadness, love-
So we cope, carry on
moments when you are
with monsters on our backs
vulnerable, weak.
until, one day, like a gift
It settles in like a plague,
the powerlines turn off.
like a sick, foul sludge fills you up-up-up, until
However; if, and only if
it drains
the life you live leaves you
you
a husk
out.
dry and empty you become hallowed
Then you are hollowwithout purpose or desire
ground.
21 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.
Addendum. An addendum may explain inconsistencies or expand the existing work or otherwise explain or update the information found in the main work, especially if any such problems were detected too late to correct the main work. It cannot, however, replace what has already been established by the initial author. The original thought, idea, pain, languishing, or apathy remain as the foundation. No matter how busted or broken the stone beneath you appears, it is yours and yours alone. There is no way to white out and fix what damage has already been done, and to insist on erasing all first edition processes is pretty fucking stupid. However, you can build upon the foundation you laid, no matter how shaky and flawed and crumbling. You can set the base straight and fill the cracks as best you can. There is a good fight to be had in battling forward despite the shaking of your feet. Why not push on? Why not build your castle
with reckless abandon, with stone quarried from the pit in your stomach and the dull ache in your head? Fill it with works that scream who you are to your guests and to the world, to all who lay eyes upon it. Make it crooked, make it sharp, make it screech and howl when the wind passes through its nooks and crannies. Build out from your broken foundation and seek others who share your weight.
it whittles away at you until you see no other option.
Who are you to bend to the whims of some imaginary bullshit that demands you perfection? You owe the world everything and nothing. It can go fuck itself.
But it doesn’t fucking matter.
When all is said and done, yes, I do wish I had handled my problems with more grace and strength than I did. I let myself slip into a fog with no clear direction of how to escape it. Despite that, I also don’t fault myself for giving in where I did; the brain enacts numerous terrors on the body, and the slow, earthy, dragging pit that took root in my base is no pleasure. I don’t know how to shut it off or how to reason with something that eats away at everything you cling to. How can you fight back when you can’t even see the point of opening your eyes again? Depression hacks at you with two blades. One slices away at the parts of you that keep you complex and full, while the other is laid at your feet. Glistening, sharp, waiting for you to grasp it. It is a coward, for it won’t even do the final blow itself. Instead,
This isn’t to say that depression is all the same. Most days I spent in these fogs were more akin to numbness and lethargy. All the things that gave you the inertia to keep hacking away all felt empty and dry. I didn’t want to laugh, eat, sit up, shower, anything. Those were the worst days.
It doesn’t fucking matter. It doesn’t fucking matter. It doesn’t fucking matter. It doesn’t fucking matter. I’m going to fix it. I’m going to take every drug until I find the one that sets the chemicals back into their respective orbits and leaves me balanced once again. I want to feel the range of emotions I was born with, not dull echoes and manic extremes. And if medicine doesn’t work, I’ll beat it out of my skull with whatever I have on hand: books, pencils, screams, fists, friends, family, my future. I will surgically pick through the wires and connections and fix what has been sautered together in the wrong places by genetics and biological failure. Mental illness is an invader, and no amount of me will be a home for it to roost. It will leave, or I will beat it into submission. My only real regret is the people I have failed in these past five years of combat. I know I should not blame
myself for becoming consumed by the black tar that dribbled out of my medulla, but it is hard. I could have reached out sooner. I should have made the time to get medicated. I should have stood my ground and taken my semester off earlier. So many shoulds, so many woulds, but not enough time to fix a foundation that has already been laid and set. I hope the road I’ve paved is kind to me. I hope it leads to boulevards and highways and interstates, full of twists and detours that are sure to come with the territory. But I wish for no more traffic. I’m done with apathy and all of its bullshit. When I see it on the horizon, I will take the paths around instead of forging through in the hopes of staying the course. I owe it to myself to live for myself again and to pour all I am into the things I deem worthy. Depression can get fucked.
22 After-after the fire, you must heal. it’s time to let it all go. it will hurt. you will feel brittle & tired. maybe even sad, and lonely, too. you’ve been staring down at the embers for so, so long now. it may take years, but you will have learned. after the fire, you will have to rebuild. the charred beams will breakso make new ones. recreate the things you lost. soon, you will look back and it will be After-after the fire.
Cameron was born in Pisces season in New Jersey and was raised in the growing suburbia of Spring Hill, Tennessee since he was four. He is an illustrator, comic artist, and enamel pin enthusiast with a love for ceramics and book binding (that is, when he finds the time). When he’s not drawing, he’s trying to figure out how to relax like a regular person again. One day, he’d like to own fifty dogs. Maybe not all at once.
You can find him on Twitter and Instagram. (@boycameron and @mancameron respectively) www.mancameron.com