Self-Harm

by Aisylu Chanysheva

I was married when we met. It was supposed to be something light, just for a couple of months. But we fell in love. 

When we broke up, my mom said that some relationships are like chickenpox. The sooner you get over it, the easier it goes away, and it leaves fewer scars. You can only get over it once, because then you develop immunity. 

Despite the illusion of being chosen for each other, we were never truly close. In this relationship, I evolved from being safe and carefree to fainting from anorexia nervosa. My ex-partner systematically gaslighted me, chose to hurt me while blaming me for my feelings, as if vulnerability itself were toxic. With him, I lived through the worst of it; I developed PTSD, and love became etched into me as a metaphor for illness. I chose to write about it because there are so many people, especially those socialized as female, going through similar traumatic relationships, and these experiences need to be shared. 

I made this text a few days after the breakup. Over the course of the year, we've been in a spiral. My suffering graphomania has filled the notes in my phone and my entire desktop. Now I'm turning them into a centaur of chewed-up words. There are fragments of letters I never sent him: quotes from Oxana Timofeeva's book This Is Not That (written in italics throughout this essay), lines from tracks I can no longer listen to (First Love by Mitski and Jigsaw Falling Into Place by Radiohead), my last message before I blocked him, and a tattered birthday greeting I composed while I was on another continent. 

Image credit: Aisylu Chanysheva

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Please, when you leave me 

I can't breathe. Please don't say you love me 

If I love you more than you love me, then you're using me, which is unacceptable. Could you at least take out the trash, please? I deserve more than that.

Give it to me

 June 2023

I like feeling like a shell. 

I style my hair, smear on creams, buy clothes. 

There was no filling inside the frozen Charlottes, that's what made them break. It felt like I could break at any moment, I liked that. 

Walked home through the ring, no going in or out. 

Cars making noise, the highway overhead. Threw my head back in indignation.

He wrote when I went in, finished when I came out. 

It's a dumb, soggy stadium. 

 July 2024

It's been a little over a year since my last journal entry.  Went into life, stopped wanting to talk to myself.

Pulled parts of myself out of different pockets,

rearranging, scattering, changing. 

Tried to reassemble into something else. 

I did. Then I fell apart. 

Then I came together again. 

We spent a year believing in a love that was always barren.

Yesterday, while you were fucking, you almost cried again. 

He looked you in the eyes and said it's like you're from a teen movie, where two people love each other but can't be together.

asshole                                                

He dips pork in my sauce, knowing I don't eat meat. 

Many people think that love and sex are different things. 

This is a very common patriarchal misconception that affects women in particular, even if they pretend as best they can (primarily to themselves) that they just want sex.

July 2023 

We kissed on Mtatsminda by the cross where Shanaya was killed. 

I looked at you in your red pimp room, and you looked at me. 

And there was nothing in that look but the look itself, 

And I felt loved, 

And that was enough for me.

I can feel the sun going cold 

As the neatly chosen letters are thrown around. 

As you conduct my strange flow, digging tunnels,

I don't like this scatteredness so much. 

I cry when I think I'll never see you again. 

November 2023 

And the thing takes shape, flows from one to another like something in which there is no isolation. And cold fingers become warm fingers. 

and the fingers themselves become warmth. And there are

no nails, no hands — just a pearly white sheen. 

I see you in the plots of this simple, humanly falling-apart city: In the boy picking out cheese at Carrefour, in the crossroads at the gates of St. Martin, in the packed subway cars, in the wet shimmering streets, in the big tables at which people sit in cafes. 

This is how your absence is embodied in things, and you are everywhere, living your twin life.

Happy birthday, sunshine! (or Kepler-10b, the exoplanet with the most thunderstorms).

July 2024 

Sleeping on the bed next to me while I write. He's leaving tomorrow. 

Yesterday, I told him I was actually glad he had another girl if he felt calmer with her. That's how I loved him yesterday. 

And the day after tomorrow, I won't. 

And the week after that, I won't. 

And in a month, there'll be a picture.

We defend our boundaries against emotional claims, and so our love is like a war. The matrix of this war is the struggle for recognition. The one who demonstrates that he is not afraid becomes the master, the other — the one who is afraid — will be the slave.

July 2023 

I don't want to be a stone in someone's pocket,

Not in yours or anyone else's. 

I don't want no half-measures. 

Everything will be covered in slime.

And messages as ridiculous as сroaking froggies — sometimes cute / sometimes stupid shouting out of turn. 

Everything will dissolve, become dead water you can't drink. 

The warmth you leave behind — your excuse for the slow death you lived through — will fill your little piggy bank.

But I don't want that politeness. 

The sun doesn't wait until the lights come on to go below the horizon. I want absolute darkness. 

Anything is better than this shallow glow from a mouse hole in the floor. 

Anya said this is the fourth time I've broken up with you,

but you don't know about any of them.

May 2024 

If you stroke a flower by its velvet green cover, it'll bite off half your hand. 

Intimacy is not a value in itself. 

Is intimacy a value in itself? 

Inside the circle and outside the circle. 

Clockwise and counterclockwise. 

Simultaneously.

I never really got there. I just pretended that I had.  What's the

point of instruments? Words are a sawed-off shotgun.

January 2024 

It all comes down to one big thing that can be broken into a thousand if desired, as with the metaphor of blind men groping an elephant. 

I'll get close to its tail, its trunk, try to climb on its back. This huge elephant walks back and forth across me for days and nights. 

He doesn't show up when I'm around you, but even then, I can feel him watching, just waiting for me to turn in his direction, like a dog waiting for a look of permission to follow you for hours through the streets. 

In simple words — I have phantom pains all the time, and I have no idea what to do with it. 

I'm so tired of waking up suddenly and crying and spending so much energy not thinking about it and realizing it means nothing to you and feeling so lonely with this pain and feeling upset that we're so unlucky and mad at you for kissing another girl on the bed beneath our only mutual friends then calling her a friend then saying you wouldn't have done it if it weren’t for the drugs. 

In that case, is that cheating? 

And I hate myself for that. 

I only despise myself like that on the very worst days. I can't tell you about it because you can't do anything about it anyway, because you're relegated to the role of a crisis manager who can't manage the crisis. At times like this, I feel awfully lonely. I think I'll never talk about it again, and when the beast comes at me again with its multi-ton paw, I feel trapped under the dome of the circus with no way out. 

And yet it is still a form of a loving relationship in which — potentially — anyone can be a doormat.

July 2024 

The way you said, “Well, you failed,” when I was crying and telling you how I’d been suppressing my feelings so I wouldn’t scare you with them.

The way you made me feel inadequate again for my healthy reaction to the loss of intimacy. 

The way you said I couldn't fulfill a request for distance (have you ever met my needs?

fuckhead). 

The way you twisted that it was my own fault that the conversation went badly, and I fell back into guilt and poured with tears in the German quarter at night wondering if it was okay to go home or if you were still pissed. 

You're an evil and cruel man. I hate you

July 2023 

Drawing pencil eyelashes on the graphite eyes 

That looks through you 

As if trying to assemble a 3-D picture out of repeating patterns. A burgundy butterfly, a green spider. 

It takes a long time at first, 

You have to move the patterned paper closer and farther,

To see a big, three-dimensional heart or a key. 

But once you learn how, the pictures appear in a couple of

seconds.

It's all about one finding the other,

and it's all about anchoring and retracting. 

I later learned that it causes glaucoma. 

As a child, when my mom hurt me, I made a promise to myself that I would never kiss her again. Then I would stop loving her, and we would be equal. I never managed to last longer than five hours. 

Eventually, I fell out of love with her.

The new woman overturns this logic. Her desire is completely unthinkable within the framework of classical or modern bourgeois morality. She will give you everything you want, and she wants nothing from you in return. And she does not want power over you either. 

November 2023   

I think of my mom a lot because all love skills come from moms.

There are new ones now that weren't there before. 

Before, it was always about “give.” I just let myself be taken care of. 

It's so amazing to me that I want to give it on my own, outside of duty, sacrifice or challenge, it's so different. And I'm so grateful for that. 

 and I love everything

How you get angry and change voices like you're playing 10 characters at once. 

How you turn in a second from a bitch-faced enby to a plaid-shirted father of five on an American farm.

How you frown when you start criticizing someone at work and say “well...” a little shyly, and then, when you see that I support it, speed up and almost choke on your saliva with rage or start laughing out loud and rolling your eyes, 

How you send me a million Spotify links when you know I don't have Spotify. 

How you put your fingers on my neck.

How you moan when my hand touches your stomach.

How you stare at me when I'm sad and childishly skipping letters, ask “whatcha s’ppened?”

I remember when you said that you had a good relationship with all your exes. I thought that was totally unnecessary.

that when we broke up, we were gonna hate each other. And now I think I totally get all your exes because you're really incredible.

June 2024 

You need to calm down. He loves you, it’s just a phase.

July 2023 

I'm constantly thinking about disappearing. 

It's such a childish, nasty thing, I just don't know how to behave. 

To cool down in time and show up when asked. There's too much of me in me. It spills out, boiling and bubbling. 

I would never tell you that I'm in love, that I'm cramped inside, that our communication can't fill my desire and that it's becoming more and more like running in a hamster wheel where

my libido inflates like a balloon to be poked by the needle of an unread message. 

And I hate it so much. 

Communication consisting of words is a forced alphabetical suffering,

don't want to don't want to don't want to.

June 2023 

A few remarks about a clumsy drill that must perforate to penetrate, that coughs, that searches for oil, screws a nail into a wall, divides the indivisible, not strong enough for a painful shock, strong enough to be impossible to ignore.

Naturalism is one of my favourite types of vulgarity.  

January 2024 

There's no such thing as just sex. If you feel like you are just having sex, then you are probably in a state of emotional stupidity. If it weren't for this defensive reaction, you would probably feel loneliness, misery, worthlessness, and other things, the escape from which drives you to seek physical intimacy with another being or group of beings. 

I'm grateful for a million things. 

for the pictures from the ancient internet that you send me when I'm sad. for making me talk,

for your utmost honesty, for the unconditional love I feel from you and to you. 

for spoon-feeding me at night, for reading my writing, for stroking my head when I'm tired. 

for all the English videos we watched,

for how I felt the very heart of you, like an apricot

pit.

I feel sorry about those needles that break and stick in, leaving red dots or white pearly lines. I absolutely trust your words, in the sense that I know you believe everything you tell me. But the way you believe and the way I believe are different. 

I don't believe you because I don't understand you. 

I was glad for our close connection, the nightly conversations, the search for the boundary between pupil and dark iris. But I'm not sure I was glad to be part of your story. 

Every time we stepped outside that delineated circle for the two of us, something didn't work; I stopped seeing and recognizing you. But that's you, too. 

All those kilograms of letters and signs, telegram reactions, square pixels — all the stuff that makes up our history — has been disintegrating more and more over time and assembling into an obscure lettered cough that communicates nothing but noise.

I know it will all melt away; you'll fall out of love with me even faster than I’ll fall out of love with you.

He will never know about it because we will never tell him about it — trapped in the Other’s tongue, our mouths are always busy with something else.

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Last Message, July 2024

Fuck you. For money, talk to Jana.

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Aisylu Chanysheva

My name is Aisylu, I'm almost 26. I'm a seeker, a migrant, a dissident, a divorcée, and a young woman. I left my country after it started a war of aggression, and since then I’ve been wandering — touching what's alive, trying to understand what it's made of. I write from a position shaped by intersectional feminism and a postcolonial perspective, searching for compromises between freedom and safety, studying intimacy, trying not to break or be broken — without tying my own hands.