Signed in Blood
Part IV
>>From: Belacqua
>>To: Perdita
>>Subject: trashed with bite marks
>>Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001
I have fucking chewed my hand to pieces. I'm feeling so fucked up right now that I don't know what the fuck I'm doing or who the fuck I am or what in the world is real or anything at all. I took my neighbors out to dinner tonight because I wanted to go out and I didn't feel like going by myself, so they bought me a liter of my old faithful whiskey and I drank half of that shit tonight and I'm fucked out of my goddamn mind and I'm looking down at my hand and seeing my own teeth marks on it because I'm fucking collapsing right now and crying without tears and I'm so close to tearing all the hair off my head and it just fucking HURTS and there isn't a goddamn thing in the world I can do right now to make it fucking stop.
I checked my e-mail before I started drinking and the last line of your e-mail was echoing in my head all night long, making me feel so right and...I don't know what, but there was this feeling in my chest of fullness and completeness and worth that I've never experienced in my entire life. And assuming there was any doubt in my mind at all (which there wasn't) about leaving and spending whatever time we have left on this fucking mudhole of an earth with you, it has been totally fucking demolished because I love you so much that words are almost embarrassing to try and express it and it's tearing through my body like a razorblade whirlwind right now and I'm writing in the sublime ecstasies of feeling that are so intense I think they’re going to rip me in half and leave me in trembling halves that are stuttering out your name.
The dedication to The Snarling Muse is as follows:
for Perdita
mon semblance
with all my love and
magno cum dolores
The last line is Latin for "with great sadness." The second line is a variation on part of Baudelaire's invocation to the reader in Fleurs de Mal. It means "my double."
Joseph Conrad, in a letter, said, "I know I never will be anything. I would rather grasp the solid satisfaction of my wrong-headedness and shake my fist at the idiotic mystery of Heaven...." He also said, "To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears, doubts -- all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully."
I'm bent over double in a ball of agony because I can't stand the thought of not being with you for the next second. I'm so fucking pissed that I got back on that plane last week. I want to go tomorrow and just fucking get away from here and collapse into you because you are the only thing left in the world that gives me a non-chemical-induced sense of satisfaction and belonging....
I want to dissolve into a puddle for the last line of your last e-mail. The thought that I could be anyone's reason for living is so incredible to me, and for it to come from the person I care about more than myself and the rest of the fucking world put together is so strange and amazing and wonderful. I can picture that final moment, when for the last time, our chests shudder and cease moving, and it's the most beautiful thing I can possibly imagine. Leonardo himself couldn't have created a moment of more pure beauty and finality than that, even if he had lived until the present day.
I love you so much, Perdita, and knowing the wild, unbordered frontiers of your feelings for me still makes my breath stop in my throat and gives me just enough strength and power to get through the next day until we decide it's time to tell the world we've had enough and we're going to finally fucking die. I haven’t even seen the screen while I've been typing this because I've been writhing in an exultant state of agony with my eyes clenched shut and my face frozen in a mask of horror and anticipation that I know only you can understand.
I love you, Perdita. You are the only thing that matters to me at all.
Belacqua
>From: Perdita
>To: Belacqua
>Subject: Re: trashed with bite marks
>Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001
Belacqua,
Your e-mail sounds so similar to how I've felt the past two nights. I swear to you, last night I was sitting in my room, smoking, with my brain turning over and over again the simple realization that's become all too familiar: "I'm useless." Again and again and again, all I can think is that I'm done with trying to prolong an existence that's just becoming more miserable with every second, even through something as wonderfully spectacular as our connection with one another.
God, I miss you so intensely. I want SO BADLY to be with you all the time. Even the shortest amount of time away from you seems like a lifetime, and it's even worse than it was before because now that I know you're out there going through what I'm going through, I can't seem to live without you. It's frightening and strange, but it's also that amazing sense of miraculousness that only you and I seem to be able to comprehend. I'm so glad I can be here for you , and I'm so glad you're fighting off the urges to kill yourself until we can succumb to them together. Belacqua, there's nothing I'm more certain about than the fact that you and I deserve the opportunity to spend a little bit of time with each other before we die. We'll get that chance, and then, our torturous lives will drastically improve to the point of torture in togetherness, and when we’ve had enough, we’ll die in each other’s arms.
You were the only thing that kept me from slitting my wrists last night. I hate to even think about what my death will do to my family, but I know that the power of the self-contempt I feel regarding my resignation to the miseries of the normal world would be enough to make me progressively more miserable in a continued existence of struggling to remain alive for their sakes. So, I have resolved to be true to myself, forget about all that, and be selfish for once in my life. I suppose, in that way, suicide can seem selfish, but I can't tell you that I find it anything other than perfectly justifiable. The only times people find it agreeable to commit suicide are when they've been hurt by the very people they've tried to love and understand, simply by virtue of the fact that no one can comprehend the vastness and oppressiveness of a suffocating depression. I can't interpret that as my fault, their fault, or the fault of this disease. Death is the only way to escape from a world that will keep on pushing until it's pushed you over the edge. People just aggravate that; they have no idea how much they affect someone like you or me. They have no idea how much they hurt us, even if they're not trying to. They have no idea how much we just plain HURT, and they certainly can’t help us if they're too afraid to try and understand.
I love you, Belacqua.
Magno cum dolores,
Perdita
“You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
--Samuel Beckett
The End of It All