A short story

She cut open my palm with a letter opener and blood dropped from my hand onto the carpet like a fistful of rubies. I thought I was going to be sick as she cut herself in the same place. Her motions were violent and had a force behind them that I didn't know how to cope with, and I couldn't stop staring at the jeweled blood that collected under our clasped hands. She grabbed my hand and held it tightly in hers, our bodies facing one another's, each an entity on its own but at the same time moving, changing, metamorphosing into one. We were two impoverished halves, adjacent. We'd be perfect as a whole.

That was the start of the summer.

And yeah, we whiled most of it away watching reruns of bad TV shows in her air conditioned living room, sitting on her sofa, wasting time. That's all. Her house was enormous and was more of a well-lit, central-heated, artfully decorated mausoleum than a home. Maybe that was just because there were still cardboard boxes out, half-emptied of possessions but still half-packed up, suspended in time. Even though it was big and open and deflated like dead lungs inside, it smelled strongly of dog. I remember how it smelt, and how much I hated it, and I hated how her dogs would roll at our feet, and I hated how there was hair everywhere. How it made my eyes sting and run with tears, my nose itch. I spent those months pretending that I had a cold so I could just stay there with her, in those moments. Imagine- we were licking ice-cream off each other's sticky arms, peeling ourselves off the garden furniture that stuck to our thighs, sweating into the blankets we shared at night, and the whole time I was pretending to have a cold. It was stupid. I know. Whatever.

It was the summer when everything was like everything else. The feeling that ran underneath us, underneath it all- I can't describe it. In retrospect those days and nights pool together into a spill of hot sun and it seems like it all happened at once, all at the same time. That sun was so hot my tennis teacher cancelled two of our classes because she was at home sick with sunstroke. I remember wondering why it's called sunstroke when it strikes with such violent malice, and ruthlessness. I can't put my finger on what it was. It was like a gas station at midnight in the dry nothingness of the Dust bowl, silent; it was a drum beat heard at a funeral, sombre, and something ominous. I don't know. It's stupid to say that about something you can barely even remember.

We were avoiding children at the lido when she suggested it. Or did I? I think it was her. I like to think it was her but that whole chunk of time is so blurry At some point, maybe the same moment she was cutting our hands open to close around one another's, she whispered in my ear, 'We're sisters.' I thought, 'But this isn't what sisters are like.' Still, I would have torn my whole arms off if that had been what she wanted so of course I said yes, yes, yes.

It started off with reasons. Then it was just people she decided she didn't like, or people who looked at her in a way she deemed wrong. I got better at it over time. It was quicker, quieter, cleaner. In between we went back to our long lazy days, our TV shows again, putting on stupid accents for one another, sharing ice cream cones and wrapping ourselves around one another while we nodded off trying to read the books on our reading list for the next year of school. We didn't wear anything at night because it was so humid, fabric clinging to skin was unbearable and suffocating. Mostly I just remember the monotony of the sluggish days. That's how I blocked out the rest.

Then it all went too far because she said it would be better if she were gone and I said yes, yes, yes, and then it was just her blood dripping onto the floor. Suddenly everything was noiseless and unmoving. I looked for my blood there too but it was just hers. I was alone, and I realised I could never be whole now. That was my completion.

And it was the end of summer.

the rarity of words

abulia 

the sky and walls are soft, the ground is spongy ~ nothing has an impact ~ i have a vague knowing 

that i must find a way to something solid ~ everything looks the same as I do and the same as everything else ~ blood pump, shuttering valves ~ stinging feelings from deepenings flinging up and catch in your eye, makes it cry ~ black hole spills out across the hazel of an iris ~ somatic signal ~ I can't find any here ~ here is a silent and interstitial, it's a concrete block, no ways in or out, and it's still ready to send rockets to space. 

{the inability to make decisions}

daltonism

You can dress the Christmas tree in festive colours, crystals and delicately blown glass baubles and ornaments all in emerald and ruby, as tradition tells you. But however many embellishments you pin to the days and nights from Advent's onset until that sad day in January when all the lights must come down, however many jewels you pin to your tree and to walls, ceilings, furnishings, your front door- it still all looks the same.

{the inability to see the difference between red and green}

crepuscle 

The moon is curled up with its knees to its chin, but the clouds obfuscate a london-road-human-eye-level view of what would most likely go unnoticed anyway. Maybe that's why it always seems the moon is getting smaller. Maybe it's just like the demons; the more you believe something is there, the more capable it is of actually being there, so by looking at it and responding to it you give it the power to affect you. If it's not scaring you like the demons scared me, and it's just a celestial body wasting away because nobody can be bothered anymore with moon phases and moon-manic behavioural changes, which were always a theory and never did have any empirical evidence corroborating. My thoughts are splitting, like strands of light, like thread. Sometimes there are needles. But how can I think about noxious cognition when the night is poised, ready to fall, and the cold of winter just feels close instead of cold, and feels like the promise of arms around you, because you know there are arms waiting to hold all of you, every vagrant thought, the spindrift rising upon the impact of daily sensations- and not too long ago, I was living like I"d no skin at all and like my blood was too much for the capacity of my body so if I were to be touched somehow, knocked even gently, the wound would be agony and I couldn't stop the bleeding. Now I have at least a year-thick layer strong enough wrapped around me to protect me from my own reflection or from my own oversensitivity to it. This is where so many of my thought threads end up, loose and all dropped. Stitches pulling closed with a neat gasp of satisfaction under the hospital lights that were tinted clinical and somehow made everything look septic, the nurses wily. Forearms lying there like dead fish. The harbor where the ugliest ideas were conceived and teenagers vomited on the rocks, drunken shouts drowned out by the roar of nearby waves. Someone's kitchen at night when everyone else is asleep. The moon has a lullaby but it grew deafening and all at once and for years now I haven't heard it at all.

bibliomancy

to be continued...

no gravity.

I've just come back from outer space,
a neverending, pinpricked place
where I was nothing and left no trace
but the flecks of stardust on your face.

Restlessness is the roots all dried out.

Restlessness pushes my heart around like an empty
shopping cart on a desert road,
a loose wheel, always veering off course.
Rattle rattle, underneath a scatter of stones.

My new method of survival is
to gather up all the dead pieces: the red dust and bile,
each papery smile that crumpled, a throbbing laugh,
the knocks of my knees, bad senses of direction,
Then I'll sew them together
to form something strange and alive again.
No more dried up roots, deserted lives.

"That thing you’re afraid of losing.
It’s already gone," said the shovel to the dirt
that covered its face.

"Worse," the dirt replied, "It never existed.
It wasn't there in the first place.’"

Me & You Vs the rest of the universe

EXHIBIT A:

The empty drawer where the cutlery used to be.
Half a glass of red wine left in a bottle,
wine stains in a ring around a ‘best boyfriend’ mug.
Another stain- my hand print on the wall,
and there’s no blood but something more urgent
and inevitable
like courage,
leaking away
in the wrong direction.

EXHIBIT B:

The pockets of your coat,
their contents.
An English to French phrasebook,
a packet of tobacco
mostly given away, a piece of paper on which
you keep notes on the smallest observations
imperceptible to any other eye.
If I had to choose a reason, it would be this one
Love, or the thing that staggers behind it,
undignified, pooling at our feet.

EXHIBIT C:

My hand in between both of yours.
You trying to get the blood back to my fingers.
The dog-eared pages of the book I’m reading.
You trying to hear me over train sounds,
other sounds,Band I am repeating myself
because I am too scared to speak up.
Is my voice lost somewhere? Did it drop
from my throat onto the winter roads,
is it wailing from inside a gutter
somewhere and should I go out looking,
to find it before it drowns?

One of my best friends- the one I used to call my best friend- has cut me out of his life.
I don't understand this. Not because I'm hurt or angry but because I don't understand how human beings who have spent so much time growing together, caring almost singularly for one another to the point nothing but their own shared reality mattered, and had been so very close to one another for a length of time such as this- I don't know how humans can cut that other person out. What replaces the parts of you that they had grown into, and only they could fit, Because you matched in one way or another, and it worked for as long as it did. I never want to forget the great things  we made together. I never want to forget all that he did for me. I am never going to make that cut.

Bravery

If you are searching for some sort of formula to carry on fighting, or for a sequence of numbers or symbols to decode bravery, there is no purpose to look any further. It’s not that you are close to it, or getting there, or that the concept itself of a bravery code is the first step towards deciphering the code, but you’ll never get the chance. There is no code. When you are trying to pull your parts together and make them work in concordance even though you have been unhinged an inch too far from the here and now, the currents of reality. For example, where is one of your hands? One is banging on the tabletop for attention while the other presses down on your trachea to crush it closed. You need to calm down one hand so you can use it to loosen the other from your own throat. There are no pretty ways- or any ways- to suture the open wounds that have been left on you. It feels filthy and confusing to speak, and it hurts because you know only yesterday your talk was free.

It is disturbing to smile and to hold your face without anything to express. All you want to do is release that scream that begs for freedom, just as speech. But you can’t go on like this, all torn apart- this is a body fighting itself, a war against its own shadow; it’s a mind murdering the body from inside. Think about that, if you can just about bear it, and then you’ll catch onto why there’s not a instruction manual waiting for you after your experience to lay out in bullet points the right way to feel. How to’s on coping with grief, guilt, disgust, dissociation, nightmares, the memory becoming part of your autobiography. There’s no manual or guide because there is no way to make peace with that.

No one ever taught you that bravery can be something other than clawed in eyes, sharpened nails, feral smiles. It doesn’t appear as the torn up hands of a wrecked clock or the veins filled with venom under poisoned skin. You can decide what your bravery looks like. Maybe it looks like smashed plates, slashed tires, the silver gleam along the edge of a bread knife that flashes as you make yourself a sandwich. Maybe it’s letting the shadows give you some comfort when the windows are jammmed and refuse to open. It’s framing pictures of yourself and your mother because you have a need for nostalgia almost as much. It’s changing the colour of your hair, it’s gin and tonic before noon or else only juice you drink from cartons. It’s taking out the rubbish bins whilst knowing they contain one or several things you ought to not throw away, but taking the words of Kerouac- Accept loss forever. It looks, perhaps, like trying to fix a clock but allowing for times ahead to weave in and out of an arbitrary linear path. No matter how many times you look at those hands on that face, you’ll never be able to turn back time or bypass a single moment on fast forward. It’s brave to try and invent a potential cure and to persist, but someday you’ll be thankful you couldn’t fix yourself by going back over time or denying the disappearing time.

It could be going to confession every Tuesday and Thursday, or visiting a shooting range, whether or not you end up firing a gun. It could be learning to bake your favourite cake, then baking dozens of small cakes and eating them alone. It could be a simple mouth to pillow scream. It could be the development of an entirely original and organic dream. It didn’t come from nowhere, nor from what you are trying to be brave for. A terrible event can be catastrophic and cataclysmic. The evidence in that is surely in all catastrophes and the associated ways in which the world shifts around it, accomodates is corners, and is changed even just by the wake left behind.

Most likely it is writing and it’s burning. It’s howling, visualising your head split in two against a wall. It’s bleeding to remember why you stopped drawing your own blood. It’s acting sinfully to forget. It’s undergoing an exorcism of your own by drawing a map of your body and marking out all the hiding places taken as territory by the spectres that haunt you. You’ll need your bravery to claim those spaces back, to conjure a monster frightening enough to scare the spectres themselves out.

If you try on lots of looks for bravery, be aware you’ll be black-night and blues and plum-colour bruised. Healing looks a lot like brutality, but it is the best home you’ve ever had. It is the first that you have built with your own hands and you owe no one for it.

Remember: Whatever has been done. Whatever you have done to survive.
Remember: the war is almost over.
Remember: you have always been home.