My dead father, long-time dead, apparently sat by my cradle watching me all night the night he died. Ever the immature child, I still like to wonder if he watches me masturbate or fuck guys or take shits or paint my nails. Sometimes it even makes orgasms more elusive.
My boyfriend, my dead boyfriend and our hilariously tragic drama. I dream of your warm, rosy lips flush against my skin, but I see your blank, grey face overwhelmed by your gaudy, overstuffed coffin. Speaking of which, you never did come for me. Bastard. At the very least, we should have started fucking sooner and you should have pulled the trigger later.
The people I have wronged are all suddenly waiting in the darkness to exact their revenge. I dredge up my excuses and justifications, my logical reasoning, but none of it helps assuage my guilt, not tonight - it’s too much and they’re hungry for a feast tonight because no one likes going to bed on an empty stomach.
I start to see the swirls and movement in the dark space between me and the walls, me and the wardrobe, me and the edges of the bed. I toss and sweat. I become confused - the dead, the living, the ghosts, the monsters - they’re all the same make-believe and fact and out of focus stories that I tell. I want to cry or scream, emit a primitive sound to indicate that I’m alive, that I’m here.
Can he see me typing now? Is he more dirt than dust? It really doesn’t matter, does it? I’ve got real concerns when the sun rises and instead of partaking of the restful period, I’m pissing time away psyching myself out with pointless questioning thoughts and this treacherous body plays along. Quickening heart, sweating palms, drying mouth and heightening senses, making everything an affront: the hum of the fan, the rumble of motorbikes, the passing planes, swirling darkness, the muffled voices - they all want something from me and I’m just too tired. I want to sleep for a thousand years and wake up just in time to sleep again.
I wish whatever’s going to get me would stop fucking around and come and topple me now. Give me my cancer battle, my rapist-murderer, my horrible accident or whatever unglamorous downfall you have in store for me, life - even a wisp of my own hair brushing against my shoulder is freaking me the fuck out tonight.
I want to lay horizontally across your lap, resting in the bend of your arm with my cheek on your chest, my ear to your heartbeat, my nose poised to inhale you; my bottom on your thigh and my legs dangling off the side - your free hand reaching across me, stroking me gentle but sure - first my shoulder, upper arm, my elbow, my hand. Then my stomach, the side of my torso, my hip, thigh, knees. I want you to speak to me softly, sweetly. Tell me something kind, preferably about me, but nothing too obvious. I will reach up to stroke the side of your face, your neck; to feel how solid your shoulder, your chest. You can take my hand in yours and bring my palm to meet your lips. I’ll feel a touch of self-consciousness, wondering how my fingers smell, but this feeling will dissipate with your calming, tender kiss. I want you to lightly brush the hair off my forehead and kiss the bridge of my nose. Smile faintly at me. I want every deliberate action to reiterate my safety and existence. Every affirmative gesture securing my place in the physical world.
The truth, the truth, the truth, we’re all so preoccupied with the truth. The word has no meaning anymore, if it ever did. The truth is I can be pretty fucking awfully self-serving. I take what I need and give only as much as I can afford, and with my resources, naturally that isn’t much.
I didn’t realise, I don’t realise often times until it’s too late. I know, I know, I know how trite that sounds, I can’t help it, it can’t be helped, I can’t ask for help, I don’t deserve help, but I need help. A specific type of help, if you’ll hear me out. Yes I did, I did, I did say that I believed that the truth was that the help, this help, this specific assistance wasn’t forthcoming. Mmm, I’m reaching for the slightly longer ones now, now, now that I’m nervous, I’m anxious, I’m scared - am I too revealing? am I not revealing enough? am I fun? am I zany? but in a ‘cool’ way? not too much? too girlie? too butch? too needy? too withdrawn? too self-loving? too self-hating?
Am I bitter? am I clear?
Clarity.
Clarity of thought, of word, escapes me. I see the patterns, I see groups of three, I think in parallels, I feel just there, just behind the hazy yellow mist there’s a real, three-dimensional, unequivocal, undeniably real… something. That you can touch. That you can see. That you can form your mouth around and express. But when I try, and I do try - it’s a glob of mess, of nothing, undefinable pulpy, gloopy, shit. And even I can’t abide that.
When I dare to cast my gaze in that direction for long enough to see, there’s only one thing I want: the one thing that will make it worse. Because what makes it worse, makes it better in the short term. And the advice-givers tell you to ‘live day by day’ and take things ‘one step at a time’, don’t they? Well I need it. To take the next step. I can’t step knowingly. My legs won’t cooperate and my hands are pins and my burden is heavier than all the world and if you don’t believe that, fuck you. It’s mine to carry until I decide otherwise. Until I can decide otherwise.
I am alone. Not lonely.
Alone.
In the sea of faces I groped noses and hair-handfuls and poked eyes, blindly feeling through until I stumbled upon yours: perfectly moulded under the fleshy pads of my fingers and palms; the crook of the nose at just the right angle to the bend of my thumb, the rosy cheeks pliant beneath my fingertips, and a jaw line, plainly pointed in my specific direction. An awkward position, to be sure, but one into which we couldn’t help but fall. We are the clock-watchers, the song-singers, the passively-aggressive, tragic romantics of this story. We amble along unsure, viewing everything askew, watching mostly from without, quietly humming to each other.
Yes, they have thick and shiny dark manes and brown eyes wide with credulity. Yes, they have round breasts, perky with just-barely-lost virginity. And, yes, they do have narrow hips, and shoulders like apples and gently sloping lower backs, and their skin is taut and plump with youth. But they exist everywhere in the world. They exist in other places, in different colour combinations; they exist here, too. In shades of cream and pale and cool.
So why the overwhelming need to butcher them? Perhaps because you think they know no better? They’ve seen no better? They can’t have - could never have - better? You really think - with that small mind, with that sensible car and those beige nothing trousers - that you have a better ‘chance’ with them because they are working-class displaced and you are middle-class bastards?
I don’t know. You might be right. Okay, I fancied one, yes. But she was flaxen-haired, timid and somewhat ill-tempered. She was rough-calloused, lanky, and smiled like it hurt. She was kind underneath. And she wasn’t your regulation immigrant, currently flooding your shops and your sheets (to hear you tell it). She was from a country that no longer exists. And. What that must do to your sense of self! The country of your birth is no longer to be found on any map. Only in history books, and then only the most obscure. She frequented the library in search of said books. But having never talked to her, you would never know.
So, yes. In our superiority and our virility and remarkable civility, I decree we reduce the whole place - a place of not inconsiderable size - to but a wet dream and a pair of slashed knickers. And your standard, rumpled twenty-pound note. To feed her family back home. For at least two weeks.
This will come as no surprise to you: I really have no idea what the fuck I am doing. I am the only person in the world and at the same time, I don’t exist at all. I am surrounded by lots of no one. I am alone. I am not together. I am all that matters. I am worthless. I am saintly. I am clueless. I am acid. I am apples. I am rain. I am trees. I am nothing. I can not stop writing sentences that begin with ‘I am’. I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am. Someone take the wheel, please. I am in no condition to drive.
I am trapped and swept along in a horde of workers all clamouring for the attention of a non-sentient being, non-being entity, unfeeling and unwashed and illogical, masses clamouring nauseous. I feel dull and repetitive and listless and ashamed.
I am free, they tell me. Free to serve, free to act, but always in my best dress and matching muzzle. I am trapped. In a mass of grey cotton clouds, seeming fluffy yet rough-heavy with water, retaining me, flush to the surface. The inactive captive sways, my captain.
I am tired. Been chained to the radiator for weeks without the promise of a healing wash and dry, heaving fuck at the end of a hard day’s work of waiting and waiting. I can feel the wrinkles around my squinting eyes become permanent, minute by minute by minute and mute. I am queasy with the ghost and green with the promise I can’t fulfill.
I am sick. Of absence and doubt and mindfulness and helpfulness and helplessness and whipstitched seams. Rip. And break apart. And breathe in and cough. No oxygen is forthcoming, no mask enough to veil the unmasking.
I am afraid I need to be bound and gagged and fucked and beaten mercilessly every time I mince our words again, again. Beat to the beat of a beating heart I can’t prove still beats there, in a chest cavity unknown. Write and release. I must do something. Eke out the short-lived high of the quickly exhaled paragraph or the quickly inhaled puff. Whichever makes me come quicker. Scratch my skin and bleed. And bleed. And be bled.
And admit once and for ever that no one is coming to save me.
I am scared.
Dear Daddy,
While I truly appreciate your support - financial and, um… financial - I regret to inform you that as of today I am no longer your keep. Yes, I have enjoyed the security of your virile embrace, but as you snap like a twig to the whims of dear old, Guantanamo womb - I mean, mummy - I feel your autumn song is my cue to exit stage left. My only regret is that I became a creature enthralled by the comforts you provided, instead of licking my chops and slinking out the back, immediately following the crème brûlée.
Bisous,
Ani
Good stuff goin’ on here:
And here:
Click your damn fingers off, put your money in your fanny and regurgitate. Mwah.
