Building 21 “Letter From Margaret”

“I have been trying to smile more. The more I look at my life, the more I see that there is a lot more dark than I would like, and that I want to bring some light into it. So I try to smile even when I my face hurts, and I go for walks even when my legs ache. I look for these things, because what is life in the dark?

It's a trick question. There is no life in the dark.

The only way to get a bit of life is to get a bit of light into your life.

But the dark is so damn tempting, and so constant. No matter what, I can depend on the pain and the anguish to come back to me, to find me wherever I need it to be, or even where I don't want it to be.

Especially where I don't want it to be.

Some days the skin itches. It has been years now, and the medicine is simply something I do instead of something I particularly think about. I take the medicine, and the face stays on my face, and I don't worry about my tongue being rejected or all the other terrible complications that would come from me ever stopping my daily dose of pills.

Pills allow me to stay as I am, instead of accepting what I was.

What I was made into by him.

His death should make me happy, and it does. Oh, the drinks I had over that night, the way I mused and cackled in delight, knowing that it was finally over and he wouldn't never hurt anyone again.

I didn't plan on killing him. It was just a consequence of a lack of information. If the doctors had a full report, maybe they would have saved him. Maybe even without the notes I took during the surgery, maybe he would have still survived.

Sixty pounds of flesh taken from a body is catastrophic, especially when done over the course of a few hours. But I have seen things that survive on much less, things that seem unwilling to die no matter how many holes you put in them, or how much you carve away.

But Michael simply didn't have that sort of strength. His will to live was fueled by his desire to hurt me, or to possess me again, but that was never going to be something I was going to let him do.

And it is incredible how quickly all that piss and vinegar simply fell away once he was strapped down on the table.

It is like he knew that the time to be brave has finally come due, and that when he looked deep down into himself, he realize that he wasn't nearly as brave as he thought he was. At least, not as brave as the person who he hurt.

This may seem so irrelevant to you, this talk about smiling and the preservation of foreign tissues, and the way I found strength enough to end what he started. But the thing is, everything is connected in ways we can scarcely understand, especially around here. Things that seem to have no connection to anything else somehow connect, leading us to see things in a new light.

Things like a scalpel given on a Christmas night, or a barn sale, or a night at a Christmas market. These things seem disconnected, but they are all part of a narrative, and the story it tells is whatever you want it to be.

You have been fighting for so so long. I have seen it in your body, the way it waxes and wains. Make no mistake, I am an expert on the strange ways a body can be at war with itself, and only the blind would be unable to see what it is that truly ails you.

Your weight falters, and your mind falls apart as you struggle to find connection, a way to keep steady and living. You do that in so many ways, I am sure of it, and they work for a while.

But only a while.

But eventually, like the itchy skin of my new face, or the loss of weight, or the pain that I feel every day in those places where the stitches didn't take as well...

Or the way you fear your dreams...

No, I haven't been stealing your correspondences or anything like that, but it is hard not to overhear things in a space this small, especially if you choose to go looking. Like discarded medication that is meant to suppress dreaming, to induce a state of darkness that no light can come into.

But the light is in there, and the dark of sleep is artificial. Your dreams are truth and real, and you cannot escape them.

I smile, or try to, and I take my medicine, and for a long time those things and many more were very hard to do. Some days they are still hard, and sometimes I still wake up screaming, the sound of my flesh being scrapped off of the bone of my face causing my teeth to get set on edge. But it is only sometimes, and I know the best way to handle it.

Dreams are the truth trying to get through.

There is nothing in your form now that is beautiful, and nothing that surgery could correct. But there is something that would help you, but it is something only you can find.

We all have our music, the thing that speaks and weaves a narrative that we simply cannot ignore. It is a call to do something drastic, when all other options have been spent, and there seems to be no other way out.

I won't tell you there is always a better way, because sometimes those desperate acts are the right ones.

Some day soon, when things truly fall apart, when all those connections that you have learned to trust are ripped away from you, and all you are left with is that quiet little voice, nestled somewhere in the dark of your mind, waiting to be heard, then I hope you will listen.

You will find your music, and it will be beautiful.

You are still in desperate need of surgery, but not the kind I can provide. But please, take this to heart. There is a right and a wrong way, and so often it seems to be a fight between selfishness or being selfless. But the truth is, a world that requires your pain to survive is no world at all.

It is a hell of our making.

And the only way to stop, to make it right, is to destroy it and start over.

I removed the flesh and organs from my husband.

I wonder what it is you will do, to finally make things right. To make the pain stop.

To make yourself feel beautiful again.

With Love,

Margaret”

I didn't want to share the letter with you, at least not till I had had time to think on it. For months I have had to deal with the memory of seeing her husband's damaged form, and feeling sympathy for him even though deep inside was something terrible.

In a way, his death was a release even for me.

Is that terrible of me to be happy that someone like him isn't in the world anymore?

I feel like I should want something different, and maybe redemption would have been nice, but I think things ended the way they were supposed to. He was never going to get better, and she was never going to forgive him.

But the part in all of this that continues to bother me is her vested interest in me.

I try to appear strong, and I do think I am, but she is right that there is something terribly uncomfortable about...me. My body feels off and my skin feels disconnected from the rest of my form. I am trying to think about it, but I always seem to get somewhere close to the answer, only to retreat back right before I reached an understanding.

The girl from work, the one with the same name as us, has been talking to me about her dreams again, which have been getting worse for her lately. She talks about how she feels like she is drowning, that she is being pulled under.

She has had bad dreams ever since she was little, but there are differences now.

You should have seen her today, dark circles under her eyes, yawning whenever she thinks no one is looking. I gave her the number of my sleep doctor, but I don't think she wants to call. The way she talks about it, you wouldn't almost think the horrors that exist in her dreams are something she feels proud of.

No. Not pride.

Maybe something closer to kinship. Truth is, dreams are a part of us, and every element is born from something we find inside. She needs to get some proper rest, but I get how hard it is to let go of something if it has been around for a long time.

Especially if it has been this way for a long time.

I didn't want to share the letter with you, not because I don't trust you, but because I found it upsetting, and I think it may likely have upset you.

You, me, and the girl from work, all seem to struggle with dreams and sleep, and when Margaret says that there is something scratching at the surface, I feel like she is talking about all three of us.

But maybe I am wrong. Maybe I am seeing connections where there are none.

Who knows. Maybe one day I will figure out what all of this is.

Thank you for the additional pictures. It is nice seeing the outside. I do hope that we are able to visit one day, and catch up on everything that seems to have been missed.

Talk to you later.

With Love,

Naomi