Someday. One Day, Any Day Now

And one day you will wake up into a life completely different from that which you are living now.

And one day you will wake up and not remember your nightmares because sleep will not be a battlefield. 

And one day you will wake up to realize you have forgotten his name. 

And one day you will wake up and recognise the face in the mirror. 

And one day you will wake up and the day will not threaten you, time will not drown you, existing will not frighten you. 

And one day you will wake up and see that you are free.

Loose threads of thought

i. Phosphorus; atomic number 15, essential for life yet never found as a free element on Earth. It was given its name for Lucifer, for light-giver; surrounded by the oxygen we breathe, it glows.

ii. You and the colour blue have a lot in common, although I’ll always associate you with red. The cliché of an ocean, of a river that meanders smoothly through my blood and feels like it’s always been there, running that river, so I don’t realise until it’s too late. I’m empty. I’ve got no more tears, no more tides. The cliché of a spreading bruise and your voice a hum, the rest just spindrift. 

iii. Am I more like a swarm than a girl? I feel buzzing under my nails and tongue, my skin a hive of nervous bees. I feel dizzy in crowds and on train platforms because what if this body decides to jump? I picture bad moments so vividly; they never happen, the person under a train, a contagion of fire, a sudden silence and inexplicable emptiness. I count and count again what could go wrong and weigh it against the fragile goodness that I try to sew, but my calculations are always erroneous and nothing can put a leash on chaos.

iv. Combustible, relating to combustion; able to catch fire and burn easily.

v. We are brittle eyelashes and frostbitten edges, oxymorons and poor translations; our hearts are begging with each beat to escape this burning orbit, to crawl away and find somewhere beyond our atmosphere, where the constellations will have a place for each of them.

vi. Touch me and you will feel it- me as electricity. the blush of my cheeks and how my hair is always messy. In this simplicity, I catch myself wordless and that makes no sense. I  don’t have words for the burning- burns that left scars before, burns that won’t leave them now or do any damage at all because it’s not a real brand, it’s not the white-hot heat I try every day to forget I know the feel of or know of at all. It’s just the feeling that comes when you’ve so long been isolated and the touch of another burns so beautifully, so warm. There’s me and not just me and a switch flicking, no noise, no static, no unbecoming. I know I’m shaky, it’s been that way for years. But maybe now it’s just the shock of falling into something good. Something safe again.

vii. Melting, to melt: to thaw when exposed to heat. To become more tender, to become more loving.

Habits

I keep writing apologies, elegies, static frames with my palms facing up or framing a face without touching it. The same songs spin in loops on the intangible record player lodged in my brain. Then there are the poems, the verses. They are not the same. I sometimes wish they would return on a loop like a record on repeat so that I could put pen to paper, but my thoughts are racing ahead of me, riding gusts of wind or whistling through leaves or between the wheels of cars without having to pause for breath, because they don't run on lungfuls of air. I sleep when I can, as well as I can, but I seem to have taken up sleepwalking. That's the only explanation for why I was jolted awake between my bedroom and kitchen with my forehead slammed against a jutting wall. I rarely dream but when I do I am always either running away from or running towards something, or someone, frantically, and it's a terrifying threat that I'm escaping. I'm always cold even though it is summer. I was very lonely, but this is beginning to change. Among my apologies and lists of wrongdoings, I also keep writing litanies of questions to myself I still struggle to answer. I have stopped writing excuses but they still linger in my mind like an itch. 

Today I trailed my fingertips against the walls in my hallway so that I had something to focus on. I sleep with my cardigan and eyeliner on. I can't ever seem to get enough air when I breathe and I am terrified of seeing my reflection in a mirror or shop window. I still want to disappear but I guess I've become accustomed to living that way, and now I'm trying to make it work regardless.

Storm

Sleep is like a cat- it only comes when you ignore it.
Realisations hit me like raindrops, splashing,
a spatter on the windowpanes as the storm
goes on lowering, nebulous and bellicose.
I am unformed, I am broken. Maybe hopeful.
I am gnarled tree bark, two hundred years old,
but I wear the skin of a child and my eyes sink
into my face; yellowing light, thunder inside.

Crying and praying

Eventually I figured out that tears can't make somebody who has died come alive again. Nor can they make somebody who doesn't love you anymore start to love you again. Praying is the same thing. People must waste so much of their lives praying to God and crying. The idea of the devil makes sense because it gives people someone to blame for their misdeeds. And the idea of God may make sense because people are afraid of these misdeeds, and if they believe in God and the devil there is this idea that both are playing a game of tug-of-war with them. They never know which side they are going to end up on, and that can explain how, even when people attempt to do something good, what they do turns out badly.

Scrappy words

Love oddities

Only a few months ago my ivory-white skin was an atlas of bruises, a map marking the grip of something(someone) there to hurt me. I thought that I'd never trust a touch again. I'd never feel the warmth of leaning in for a kiss. Then you kissed me and all my bruises came undone, my purple-blue-yellow mottled skin turning from the darkest dust to the clearest dawn, still lilac but pale and dewy. I wonder how you managed to take so much away with your hands, inhale such pain with your kiss. How does one touch something and make it stop hurting- perhaps not completely, but far less than it used to? And why would you choose me to touch?

I should be out there thanking anyone who has ever loved me just for trying. I have been told that I am loved but that I'm just too much. Which is at odds with the all-vaulting feeling I've always had: that I've never been and never will be enough.

What a strange world

The world certainly is larger than one things,
and unfailingly split into sums of parts and parts of sums.
Plurality in the psychosphere. Sometimes,
do you wonder whether you are living in a dream?

Am I okay?

There is something about this darkness- it conceals the best of us and reveals the worst and maybe that’s why roads are always deserted during the little hours.

“Are you okay?“

Sometimes when I’m on the street my knees buckle, and my eyes start to loosen, and something is disturbing because strangers ask me if I need help.

Sometimes my breath gets caught in my throat for no reason other than because it doesn’t see the point in rising out of my lungs.

Sometimes I am making a point, talking about an issue I feel passionate about or want to debate, or am answering a question, until I realise I am living alone and I have been talking to empty spaces.

Sometimes I wonder if I were to swim far enough into the ocean, I would just let go and dream and get swept away by the waves.

Sometimes I am afraid to look at myself in any mirror or reflective surface, afraid to smile, afraid to be the girl I should be, surely.

Sometimes i stare at my hands and wonder about palm-reading, attempting to etch the lines in them- heart, love, life - but it’s all in the head, not the hands.

Sometimes I don’t know were I am or how I got there, what time or day it is, what the hell is going on, and whether I’m broken.

Sometimes it’s like the sky is scraping against my scalp and my fingers are rattling, meaning I’m nervous and over-tired, which is why I see glimpses of men in my peripheral vision, who were never there when I turn to look.

Sometimes there’s a ringing in my ears, the vestiges of some old argument, which makes me

wonder what I could have done.

Sometimes there’s just not enough. Sometimes there’s just too much.

Yet there’s something building, breaking and churning, roaring, shattering and collapsing,  tumbling amid the dust clouds rising, rising, rising, rising -

What did I do? What is defective in me and can I do anything about it and most importantly, will the people I care about worry too much or care too little? I don’t know, I can’t breathe, and oh god oh god oh god oh god what do i do what do i do what do -

“I'm fine, why do you ask?"

Honestly..

My imperfect scribbles are no more than that.
I am not talented. I only would like to be,
because the only way I can get by is finding
the right words, constructing the right sentence,
so that all the tangles in my mind finally loosen.
When I find a way to write it down, it is resolved.
I'm not a talented writer. It's just another need.

Poem written using strange associationss

The pavement and sky are cold, and my hands like birds.
Morning songs are more like the groan of a garbage truck.
Wheeling, wheeling, it all may be a rat race.
I never won a race. I never won anything.
Running breathlessly towards something old or new
And ripping holes through time and space
I realise I need it- my own time, my own space.
Nothing really belongs to me and I don’t belong to anyone
Or anything else. Possessions are sentiment incarnate.
Sentiment can bring me to my knees with tears.
There are bruises on my legs turning blue and purple.
Once in a blue moon, I’ll share the secret.
There's a dark side to everything. And a sea of tranquility.

I Need A Phone Call

Not poetry really, just something I just had to get off my chest before I go to bed.
Thank you, you know who you are.

There is that concept that they name 'stranger danger'
and of course, thunder can clap and the unfamiliar
can hurt you. Detectives examining bruises,
police stations in general; I'm blessed to have someone
there to hold me while I fell into a broken leaf.
But danger doesn't always come from storms
or from strangers. Sometimes it comes at the hands
of the familiar, of those who you thought loved you.
It's been a long time since the first stranger.
Even longer since the familiar.
People are good. They are basically good.
People are good. They are basically good.

A phone conversation today meant the world to me.
Reminded me of what happened, what I came out of.
Felt my heart breaking a little- the voice that spoke to me.
It's been over a decade since we knew each other,
and yet I want to hang on to every word,
and I want to speak of things I have so long buried.
Friendship works that way, I am sure of it.
People are good. They are basically good.

i'll never give up on that.

Free writing

The hours strike apart like broken plates because
my hands are familiar with the anxieities.
the best intentions of mine get tangled up
and I wonder if cutting myself open would help just to show
what’s true about what I really mean, underneath, inside.

The terror bleeds through without a sound or word.
It’s just a simple unravelling. But this is nothing
compared to the world, the television and sweet sweepers
and being bitten by memories of nightmares with eyes open.
Thousands upon thousands of circles, futility and reflection:
unchangeable. I wonder why he wrote that it’s April
that is he cruellest month when any of them, any month
or cycle of the moon, can be cruel and can be kind or both?

Will we see parts of the universe through a telescope?
Transcend, transport, escape? We can see patterns all over.
We’ll look for stars, even the dead ones staying on to carry time.

I have been betrayed before. Sometimes I ought to be wary of hoping.
At least I remember to breathe and look up at the city blocks
scraping the sky, instead of at my shoes  Reason clouds the heart,
or the other way around. At night it’s fragile evocations,
a mixing of memories and hallucinations of winter dawn.

Will it bloom this year? The broken gate from where words flow
without resoution? No answers. No reason, that only there with emotion.
There are answers but all answers are followed by doubts
and different answers to the same questions.

Eventually I will write about the history of fire escapes,
the mysteries of the two hemispheres together and apart
and how they lateralise when the words and visions overtake us.
And the forever-land of forgiveness I'll find without forgetting the path.
The delusion of freedom, and wanting to believe- I couldn’t count
all the things I’d like to believe. Then there’s. wondering what is real.
He says it’s nothing and everything is a hologram.
I don’t know much but I know I’m not hollow, and whether or not
I’m real or any of this is, I’m glad to see what I see as I see it.

Regulars

There are a few things I like when it comes to my work. Overall, it's exhausting and mind-numbing but in some ways it's beneficial to be ground down and anaesthetised. But what I like the most is recognising people who visit regularly and remembering their drink orders.
There's a guy with white hair who looks like a cartoon character and drinks London Pride and works just upstairs from the Foyles where I once worked, and says that he hates it due to a culture of nepotism and 'cronyism' and talked with me about the power of social influence on one slow evening.
There's a wine connoseur who drinks ESB ale in a tankard and tells me about his visits to wine tastings and port tastings and whiskey tastings and God knows what else, and who fiddles with his phone and eventually falls asleep, without fail, over his dish of pork scratchings, but not before inviting me to accompany him to one of his many beverage tastings and I am too busy.
There's a guy who pops in early afternoon and always has the exact change for a pint of Guinness, who then disappears and reimerges with another order, who grabbed me to the backdrop of Save The Last Dance For Me and we danced together while my boss clapped, inebriated as she usually is.
There's an incredibly effeminate customer whose name is David and comes in every day, who drinks chardonnay with three ice cubes and stays for many hours, way past closing time, applying his make up while looking at himself in the mirrored wall.
There's an attractive man with a beard who wears pressed shirts and drinks lager, standing outside with friends or strangers to smoke, and who I would like very much to kiss, and when I let slip to my manager that I thought he was good-looking he made fun of me and told me my boyfriend would be jealous.
There's a woman who has a bespoke drink devised of vodka and a very small amount of orange juice with ice and a straw, who was there the other day at midday and again in the evening until midnight, but who won my affection despite her lingering after the last bell because she gave compliments about me to my boss.
There are two men in creased suits during after-work hours, one of whom looks a lot like an ex-boyfriend of mine and drinks Seafarer's Ale, who always rack up an expensive tab and want receipts so I wonder who is paying.
There is another man in a suit who always attends with a group of other men in suits and who showed me his phone, saying, 'Look who I had lunch with!', to which I replied, 'Nigel Farage!' and went into a brief soliloquy about his politics before kicking myself because I realised that they were actually friends.
There is another man in a suit who used to do what most people would gauge as flirting but has since given up and orders Guinness and asks for huge amount of cashback but mostly stays outside with Heineken Top, who is named after his drink order and because he's so tall he's always at the top, and always asks for a lager with a top, and during my first week I stupidly put soda water in the lager instead of lemonade.
There is a man who always sits in the same spot at the bar and slowly drinks his lager and occasionally asks me for help with the Evening Standard crossword.
There is another man whose voice gives me nightmares and who stands at the entrance to the bar so I keep having to squeeze past him and each time he says, 'Hi Daisy!' in a very strange squeaking voice, which I used to think was a joke but now realise is his real voice.
There is an Italian guy called Marco who had a birthday party the other day and gave me a slice of cake and many hugs and made my heart warm.
There is a couple- a long-haired blonde and man in a blazer- who come in and stay for hours until they are both more than tipsy and they are kissing and cuddling, and she drinks wine and he drinks lager, who had a conversation about becoming boyfriend and girlfriend on official terms, which I picked up from eavesdropping, but which worried me because I could have sworn I saw her with someone else a few weeks ago and when my manager and I were gossiping about them and I mentioned this, he said, 'I like her style.'
There is an attractive close-shaven man who drinks Amstel and sits alone, scribbling in a notebook, and when I asked him what he was focused on told me that he's drawing jellyfish because he is making illustrations for his friend's writing, so I have decided that I would like to be his friend.

How many?

How many years before the fire? How many years still looking up at the sky at night and seeing nothing but black? How many years of imagining a mirror up there above you, something to gaze into all wide-eyed to see something that looks just like you staring back, to see creatures who have spent all the days in their lives looking up wondering whether someone else is out there? How many minutes spent hoping that maybe we aren't alone at all? How many hours did we dedicate to dreaming up these people, dressing them up in bodies like ours and lives like ours and words like ours, in names that fit comfortably around our tongues and then giving them our hands to shake? How many days did we wait for them to give a reply? How many times did we send out exploratory ships and crews on voyages into the big endless blue, navigating between the stars using a tape measure, looking for some small hint that there are others out there too? How many times will we come back, shaking our heads in disappointment but our eyes glimmering with resolve because we are not giving up yet? How many seconds will we waste away, raking through the galaxies, only to prove that we are not alone out there? Surely we are not alone out there.

Memories in Motion and Finally, Meliorism

There’s a window and the night waltz comes, just a little too drunk,
so there’s nothing much to say but the words of the insomniac,
and secrets that cannot interact. The moon is quiet in the sky,
but like an egg uncracked.

Here is a story, made up inside my head.
Failure and glory, but it’s someone else instead.
Dirt under my fingers from digging in the night.
But beauty lingers, petals falling as I write.

In and out again, he floats as a cloud right by, made up of memory.
Hello stranger, may I ask why your greeting
is a just as good a goodbye? And your words of love
as concrete as the sky.

Here is another tale. I think this one may be true.
You were fractured on the inside and I took care of you.
I know those were your secrets and those I’ll always keep.
I know there will be sometime you’ll visit me in sleep.

So I’ve gathered the remnants of your stay,
thought of destroying them by May.
But no matter why you proved unkind,
you know the inside and out of my mind,
and I’d never give a moment or memory away, for I love blind.

Meaning in Life Questionnaire Results

Conducted at Penn State University, I took this psychometric test. These were the results considering my Presence score was 21 and my Search score was 29:

If you scored below 24 on Presence and also above 24 on Search, you probably do not feel your life has a valued meaning and purpose, and you are actively searching for something or someone that will give your life meaning or purpose. You are probably not always satisfied with your life. You may not experience emotions like love and joy that often. You may occasionally, or even often, feel anxious, nervous, or sad and depressed. You are probably questioning the role of religion in your life, and may be working hard to figure out whether there is a God, what life on Earth is really about, and which, if any, religion is right for you. People who know you would probably describe you as liking to play things by ear, or “go with the flow” when it comes to plans, occasionally worried, and not particularly socially active.

Little stories

All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of the prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Make no mistake, I only achieve contentment and simplicity with enormous effort. 

Reality prior to language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded the possession of silence.

Where does music go when it is not playing? - she asked herself. And, disarmed, she would answer: May they will make a harp out of my nerves when I die.

They often talk about falling, not floating or flying but falling. Falling up, falling down, falling all around like wishes or kisses or ash. What goes up, must come down. She falls over her own feet. He falls off rooftops for her and she waits at the bottom. She falls off faithfully for him but doesn’t always find him where she lands, if she does at all. Is this love?- she asks or herself- or self-destruction like the white-coats say, or hope, or blindness, or admiration? Maybe even madness. To face the possibility of falling everyday and always climbing up up up.

No sleep, just time

I don’t have anybody to talk to about these things. Even if I did, I would never be capable of finding the words to fit the war that beats its drums out of rhythm with my own beat, beating back against myself as I push a path forward through the universe that only goes in circles anyway. It’s yet another feeling without a word. These not-yet-existent words lower and tremble with such loud violence they could bring down every library wall.  I leave notes in the condensation on taxi windows (‘I’m sorry’; not ‘am I there yet?’ But ‘will I ever make it far enough to know where that is?’). So I try to write it down, and out it comes like nonsense mumbled in sleep. When I first lived alone after so many years, I noticed that I had begin to talk to myself. It wasn’t thinking out loud or singing in the shower.  The voice was mine but not in my head like before, either. The words were spoken by me, and mostly to me, although sometimes to the absences that were bothering me, living alongside me and occasionally taking up more space in my cluttered world than that which I was in the presence of. I recovered from my preoccupation with absences several years ago. My brain was just trying to help, I suppose- the loss being not only emotional but perceptual, it could fill in some of those empty spaces. It didn’t help because I found no comfort in the hauntings, or the one-sided conversations. I’d rather go about stumbling into hollows than share my alone time with ghosts.

What is it that I can’t speak or effectively write about in this unavoidable life?  The ringing alarm and how it calls to mind histories of fire escapes. The broken door from when paramedics kicked it in. The little hours, the nights without the courage to close my eyes, the mornings coming so close, but my closeness becoming somehow a little less crippling every day. Clouds folding over, packaging up all the absolutes. The futility of some things, the sacred nature of others, like remembering to breathe, to stay in orbit, to let the anxieties bleed right through without pooling on the floor, and to let the city in and these new people in (though the city spits people out) and to let them meet the genuine person I had hated silently and fiercely for years until being left alone with her and realising that armfuls of her is not hopeless; I am at least worth something. My bus-stop mind will probably wait there indefinitely but I hope someday it will travel far enough away from the old loneliness that routinely follows me around and close to where the simplest words and the simple ways to love are enough.

The TV shows I watch are violent and strange and I like the ones without a resolution, where the questions remain unanswered and sit behind your brow as it faces the screen. Staring in when it’s over, my own face is shadowed back at me. I feel like a wide-eyed alien in a small godless world of grey and yellow, and I have no real name, just hundreds of books. My hands are unfamiliar and warm. Sometimes they touch a cheek and upon contact the light that floods into my mouth turns from lemon to something sweeter. The sky is dark as a fist whenever I manage to get out these non-specific words and jumbled reveries. Over the buildings across the street, the moon is a creamy gold and you could see all it’s contours- I would say edges, but circles and spheres don’t have them (or do they have infinite edges, or are they all just one edge?). It hums to me, I hum to myself. Sometimes I sing and look for stars that might be pricking our sky, leaving tiny wounds of white. I see them so seldom, but most frequently at bus stops.

You can just sing