Hamartia

I am like Nina Zarechnaya,
From Anton Chekhov’s quiet cruelty,
Not when she flies,
But when she learns to call the fall art.

Daughter of a lake that mirrors to well,
I learned early that devotion 
Sounds like suffering when spoken to the self.

I fed my sentences on wounds,
Never pausing to ask
Whether the knife carving them was fate
Or simply my handwriting.

They said the artist must be sad,
Drugged, fevered, unwell in a romantic way.
I listened.
I footnoted it.
I made my own philosophy on the premise.

I took the doctrine seriously,
Until pain ceased to be a corridor
And became the sanctuary.
Candles turning off like friendships that leave,
Silence arranged like relationships that falter,
Blood as the very incense you breathe.

I curated despair into something legible
Turned happiness into a rumor,
Love into Loss.
Found the angle,
Let my life bruise with taste
So imaginations could flee the scene
And call the escape transcendence.

I do not regulate myself through danger.
That would be vulgar
I regulate myself through narrative tension.

Silence does not adore me,
Calm refuses to be my friend.
Emptiness offers no witness, no friction,
No proof that I am, in fact occurring.

Pain, however, looks back,
Pain, remembers my name
So I choose it.

Not because it is sincere,
but because it projects.
Because it fills the house.
Because chaos is the only language
in which I sound fluent.

I am not living a life,
I am sustaining a performance
with no wings, no intermission, no backstage mirror,
a role that cannot be dropped
without the lights going out entirely.

That is why solitude terrifies me.
That is why I confuse desire with oxygen
and reaction with truth.
Because a character without an audience
Is an abandoned script.

I believe existence requires choreography.
I believe being watched
is the closest thing to being real.

And so, discreetly, reverently,
I follow Dorian Gray
not toward pleasure,
but towards composition.

I make my downfall beautiful,
symmetrical,
worth revisiting.

If I am to be ruined,
let it be exquisite.
If I must suffer,
let it leave a line worth underlining.

I have mistaken intensity for depth,
and bleeding for proof,
and applause for breath.

Still—
the curtain has not fallen.

And the tragedy persists,
The only one that matters.

not that I sacrifice myself for art,
but that I have not yet learned
how to exist
when nothing is being taken
from me.