the goldfinch

I finished reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt today… Reading it has honestly been an emotionally difficult experience for me. It’s hard to articulate why on a deeper level, but more superficially, the main character’s life contains a lot of similarities to mine—dead mother, abusive and often neglectful father, drug and alcohol abuse to essentially self-medicate and go on living, a self-destructiveness and feeling of pointlessness to life and wishing I were dead that came out most predominantly after I’d had too much to drink, etc… Even though I’m now in a much better place than I was in my teens and early twenties, it brought up some of the most difficult times in my life... Rebecca even mentioned the main character, Theo, reminded her of me a bit. It’s a well-written book, and I loved her other book The Secret History; but it’s just too real for me in ways that are hard to explain even though I wish I could.

Here's a poem partially inspired by it, though, that glimpses an aspect of the nihilistic elements it invokes:

I’m trying to find the motivation to deal with tomorrow and all the pain it has in store for me.
Caged.
Trapped.
Hopeless. Helpless.
Dangling from a wire above an ocean of black with no reason to hold on but no courage to let go.
Weakness.
Brokenness.
Abandoned. Alienated.
Every day deluding myself tomorrow will somehow be different, better, a life worth it.
A person without a people; a place without a name; a road with no destination—nothingness personified.
Apologies.
Eulogies.
Regrets. Resentments.
Digging myself a hole to crawl into to hide, to die, to just rot away for the eternity of punishment due.
Smiles.
Tears.
Sadness. Stillness.
“Life is catastrophe,” and it's only in the space between mind and reality where beauty can be found.