Gun To Head

So, two weeks after I had turned twenty, I opened my friend’s bedroom door to find that he had slit his wrists. He died there, with me, waiting for the forever impending chorus of ambulance sirens that didn’t come even close to soon enough. I’m not sure if I ever did state this, on here. Regardless.

This is not a call for sympathy, this is a call-to-arms.
You had better seek prosperity first and foremost in the weapons you arm yourself with. You had better grit your teeth and revel in your aching jaw. And you had better not let anyone tell you that you have brought whatever bitter misery, that you are forced to own and wear, upon yourself.
You had better not feel guilty or stare at peach coloured palms and imagine them red, and assume you are caught. 

That being said.

Some days I wish he had stepped out in front of somebody else’s bus. Had been smeared across their windows, across their pre-dream thoughts.
I wish he had found inspiration from deep-sea-divers, filled his pockets not with rocks but with mercury instead. Poisoned all the water and everybody else with him.
I wish he had hung himself with a noose of somebody else’s notes and photographs.
And I wish, this weakest part of me, holes throughout, that I had been there earlier, that I had not thought to complete one of the mundane things I had felt so necessary to embark on that day. 
And I still have wary, frightened dreams where you come home and you do all the things that normal happy people do.

An Expression You Once Used

Having lunch with my family, who are growing up and also growing old. At times I catch glimpses of my father and there’s a likeness to the man I recognise, but mindless errors, faults that are breeding with age. Dad, I wanted to say, you need to trim your eyebrows. Dad, you have a coldsore, you shouldn’t be so stressed, eat more B vitamins. Dad, where did your comforting middle-age go? 
It terrifies me, he is closer to death now more than ever. That’s obvious, I realise, but I have not paid attention, my extreme youth too frightening for me, too consumed to notice it draining from his face.
My older brother turning thirty and my youngest brother only five, with a dragon painted on his left cheek. Making jokes about gluten. I’ll Have Her Gluten, the thirty-year-old says, the little ones laugh too because there’s this sweet and delicate period of time where things can still be joyous even when you don’t understand them.
I feel like a pickpocket, stealing their conversation away from them. I don’t deserve this much. My words fall flat. I desperately want my face painted too.

Before, though, I was leaving somebody’s place at nine am and meeting my mother and my blood tests have come back and I am:
Extremely Healthy.
We laugh and smoke with our fruit and vegetables in the backseat, redeeming everything.

And after that I was in tears because it’s the twenty-sixth of February and I ask my flatmate for filters, placing the extra firm nectarines he loves, that I bought for him, on his set of drawers. The slightly marbled wood reflects my face, all of my fragile skin, aching eyes, waterlogged or shipwrecked. And he asks Are You Ok? And I say Yeah and also I have a red capsicum, because he is strange with preferences I don’t understand. I leave quickly and I hear him come into my room, he doesn’t say anything. 
He just hugs me for minutes and I cry and cry and cry. Because it’s Today and I have an infection in my tears ducts I need to cry out, right? All he does is let me, and stands shirtless, I feel illustrated. He hands me a cigarette and opens my window, staring at me like he has just realised who he’s been living with or talking to. 
And after that I leave to go to lunch.
You see? 

Tepid

I would like to tell the woman I have replaced at work how effortless and without quarrel she has made me feel. The deviant turned exuberant. Not caring for eloquence, the inhale exhale days of just getting through appear distant. 

Instead when she tells me her father passed in June, I widen my eyes and stand sidelined, across a busy street from grief. 

I never understood the term ‘tables have turned’, we put the chairs up and sweep underneath our own tables, all the while I’m begging for her to recognise the circumference of loss we share. Without words, though. Is this how you felt? With nothing you could think of saying seeming beneficial? There aren’t any correct words to mouth. All of me in the coffee stained shoes and bare neckline, emptied of use. 
Nobody knows what to do when someone dies.

I’m in a rare state of discontent today. Something to do with a cold spring morning, hail storms all evening and a dream I had where someone I respected was much taller and left me alone in a hotel nightclub without saying goodbye. It’s a particular foreboding emotion that remains incurable no matter what I have evaded in the past when struck dumb by it. If it had a face it would be mine, when I was leaving your place that last time, in an ill-fitting wet dress and my exaggerated curls bleached and stained blood-like. Bending my neck back to eye the clouds and trying in vain to distinguish the needle-point drops that stung my cheeks and hands. 
Abandoned, that’s how it felt, even though I was leaving. I probably got home and sat inside, bent my knees up to my face and remained until the evening. Or I might have slept. I don’t remember arriving, I only remember the sorrowed and submissive stagger to my door.

I have work in an hour and a half. I can’t stop thinking of everything that was ours. 

Doing It Again

Looking out for everything unclaimed by your clavicles and follicles and lips and hips and eyes is arduous. Two cars passed with your name mingled into their registration plate digits. I laughed heroic. I cringed somewhere watertight inside. The girl with the carmine locks, the former, she truckles to your memory. It’s disappointing, it aches, too. In a place I am blind to.

Grating fresh beets, palms streaked and ruddy, lost my appetite again.

But these are two different people, not to be confused with each other. Both are holding candles, there is no one better than the other.

I miss to the point of flushed features and a brief relapse into seclusion. I want someone to tell me I look pretty brushing my teeth. Or I don’t, I want to keep my eyes on the ground.

I don’t think there can be any more private pain than that of this year, for me. It all seemed sarcastic out of my mouth. That’s what made it so easy to inhabit.. I couldn’t describe it to the extent of damage it was doing, I couldn’t twist my lips around vowel sounds for emotional agony , so I stayed inside with it, while it pitted me. If you break a bone and it pierces the skin, you can see it, others can view it.. Casts, band-aids, slings, stitches. But there is nothing obvious about grief, there’s no evidence for others to gauge. No excisions from games or social responsibilities. 

If it happens to you, I’m going to be around. Don’t worry. I’m going to be around. 

Amity & Please Call Once More

And so I avoid my ‘home’ and sit on the steps of the residence he used to reside, before. Two hours with my reminiscence. Alone only with what his face used to contort into when he was perplexed. And she comes out, because she heard me breathing. She touches my face. I am on the carpet in his hallway. I am on his bed and she comes in and asks if I have a cigarette. We smoke inside with the window closed. She says nothing. She hasn’t changed his sheets. She doesn’t sleep, she eternally utters, because she feels he may still come home. She grasps my fist and her face is an effeminate version of his. She doesn’t cry, and I don’t. We sit and ache in silence.

I tell her I don’t know what to do. I lay my plans out, with one hand outstretched towards the ceiling. My palm is a landscape of lines. I don’t feel anything, I tell her. I don’t think he’s coming home, I tell her. I don’t think he’s still around, I tell her. I don’t look at the stars for the infinite number I could wish upon, I tell her. I noticed the stars this evening, though. By mistake. And I don’t think he’s there, either. She looks at my palm. She looks at the window. She looks at his sheets. She tilts her ash onto the floor. She looks at me. I look at her. He was not my child.

She agrees with my wish to escape. She lowers her head when I talk of the blonde one. She utters my name when I mention the photos of the taut skin and bones of sixteen. We sit and ache in silence.

She leaves when the man down the hall closes their bedroom door. I sit and stare for a while. I stare at his pillowslips and sheets and photographs. I can’t sleep for the scent of him. I sit and ache in silence.

When the sun comes, I pull a dark brown hair from under his pillow. I mourn a little more. I wish upon every single star that is yet to light up, tomorrow night. I wish upon every Christian persons prayers. I don’t think of anything else. At one point I wish I’d never met him. I don’t hurriedly take it back. I wear it on my thick figure and sleep-stranded face. I sit and ache in silence.

I don’t think of you, or you or you. I don’t think of him or her or her or her or him. I think of myself. I think of what I must look like. I think of how I will not wear close to anyone else. I think of how I will cut everyone off. I think of how I will leave. I think of being abandoned with myself for always. I think of the simple affection I crave and nothing more. I think of how content that would feel. How the swell and throb of evenings with beautiful bodies would be more than enough. I think of love or like and feel ill.

And I get home and write a list. Of all the things I will do and all the figures I will not fight with. I write  a list of all the names I know won’t trip over themselves thinking of me mid-stride. I think of what their skin would feel like under thumb. I write a list of things I wish I’d done better, not done at all.

I wish I had spent nights with him, with my oppressive heat oppressing his. I wish he would have been the last person I told I loved. Whereas, real life resides just under my clear and sad. I never once told him I loved him. I never once curled an arm around his spine and pulled him in and under. Yet he will be the last person I tell, endlessly, that I love.

And I don’t sit and ache in silence. I proposition someone nameless and faceless. Someone I know won’t trip over themselves thinking of me mid-stride. I make plans to gain affection Someone beautiful to make up for the ugly I am. 

Arrested

I just want everyone to be happy. I just want everyone to smile more. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.

I am trying to say goodbye but you keep on kissing the top of my head. Or you get both of your arms around me like I am but a frugal figure. You hold me like I am slight. Like I am small(Like my mob of appendages might just melt). And before, I was watching the angels from that candle lantern spinning loose but even circles on my ceiling, and you came in and let me say nothing while you made it clear you had too many things to say, but wouldn’t. 

Everyone always apologises. Then I am indebted to them. I have to make you feel O.K.

So I won’t explain why you haven’t seen me for four months. It tires me. All of this ebbs at any stores I had remaining. I just tilt my head and ponder what I might do, when I get back to normality. 

I’ll probably just exercise a lot. That always used to make me so happy.

Faith Where Faith Should Furrow

Little girl steps out of the dark and damp, again. Now she’s wearing square-framed glasses and a brusque disappointment emanates from the flush on her cheeks. She sighs and says “You really are doing nothing with your life, you know.” But now I punch her in the face like Smackdown and apply a naughts-and-crosses background to the lenses of her glasses. So she’ll see that life is not exactly how she might see it. It is contained in similar shaped boxes, all shuffling along together. 

So, sure. I do not have a job [as yet]. I do not have a lover [as of now]. I do not have money [at the moment]. I do not have a plan or guideline [anymore]. I don’t really have any socially-acceptable qualifications [at all]. But, all the boxes in my life contain a brilliant small half circle in each corner. That would be the sun. And sometimes I can get quite ghoulish about the swell of nothing in my days, but the fact that there is light after the swift invasion of glistening insect wings that claimed any radiance from my ceilings the last year is an accomplishment enough, I think. No. No, I know. I have to know. I have to be ok with the camouflage of failure my 20 years have taken on. Because I have to smile more than I was. I have to recognize the sweet in tannin and the grandeur in rust. More than that, though. I do have to recognize [and I beg; let it be soon] that I do have a talent for something. I have anything that differentiates me from other ‘failures’. I don’t think there can be failure when there is still happiness. So I must instead, for now, focus on this. 

So. If I were to write a list of things to do, each day, for the next year. Number one would be bare my teeth in hazy, indifferent delirium, as much as was even slightly warranted. Number two would be to shower. And so on. 

And yes, I lost my first time to the debilitating pressure of ‘accomplishments’ in life. And then I lost my best times to the filmy mindset of a sleepless man in his car. But this is something that happened. It just happened. Like other things will happen. Like other things have happened. And it’s O.K. No, really. It’s totally O.K. It is also O.K to drown myself in the elixir of melancholy sometimes, so long as it does not reign supreme over the other boxes in my life. And even that funereal, heavy little box has a blinking, almost imperceptible sun in its corner. Because to remember the fantastic-isms and cracks at smiles edge like pottery, is to recognize that such memories containing the faces behind the smiles can not be recreated, ever. And these recollections are really all I have. But I am free to share them with people that care for me, or even people that don’t. Because a lot of them aren’t humorous for the people in them, they are humorous for the kinds of people they were. And nobody else has to know them personally for them to see the same, startling slight sun, and then let their own mouths stretch, then pull to cracks. And I create a memory from the remembrance of another. So their legacy lives on, as jarring and awkward as that line is.

What is best, though, is I can let these relics dapple my wan and watery skin, reside just beneath this barely saturated layer and I can beam like I did in the presence of their ease. I can incur the prediction of a lighter soul under the shy, strained speech, from others. 

And, as much as I hate to say it, these two toppled seraphs can live on through me in some small way. And I’m not too sure I would have exposed their presence in my life so much if they had not fallen.

The Same Line Skips

Things I could have said which might have persuaded you to stay:

• You are the only influence that leaves me exempt from sadness.
• I have nothing to do but creep, and I won’t do that alone.
• The birds outside keep me awake and I covet an arm around my waist so much sometimes the curve aches.
• I have lost my standards and I need you to recognise the honor I possess and stand up for it.
• I have faith in your faith in me, but no faith in myself.
• Please don’t leave.

It would have been as simple as anything I made it.

Instead I substituted love for personal strength and I told you to go home. With my low heels lifting and your palm pressing to the base of my skull. Vines strung across my back and again you asked, and asked again; Will You Be Ok? And any words I may have said, they sent you to your death. But I was just trying to do what was best. I thought I was a burden, and you had your home across ocean.

I didn’t foresee the crisp curl of steel or embroided beads of sweat on your forehead. The heart attacks that the doctors couldn’t quell and the pain on your parents faces. 

Every day I remember something else about you. Or you and I. Like iron shavings they collect, attracted to my quiet affliction. How I wish I had gathered my pride the same way, pulled it from my lips and disposed of it. If I had sobbed the same way, admitted I wanted you to keep yourself here for a while longer, you might have even slept by my side last night. Helped me pull my bike up the stairs. 

And instead we sifted your spirit into helium balloons, something like two weeks ago, and I haven’t seen you since. Not even in my nightmares to remind me that this is all my fault. This year alone, I could have prevented the loss of two lives. Which just doesn’t make sense to me. 

Dolour but warm again

It’s as if you have materialised before me, in some darkened tunnel where the foolish and frivolous never arrived. The light at the extent; what light? The mess on the floor was never even slightly illuminated. It’s as if you have been waiting, as patient as you always were, whilst I struggled to keep my stomach as I crawled, face to the floor. Stopping to cower from the complete funereal realisation that if there was no end, what was the objective of hauling myself through all of this filth. But then, there you are. Gesturing wildly to a gap in the foundation, you may now proceed with other things. You may now move along. But I do not have enough time to embrace you a last time, before the crack seals.

You have to go cold turkey on grief and loss. There is no ‘just one more time’, like the breakup of hormone-sheathed youths. There was no hand holding while you were still conscious. To let you know that I do love you and I will always keep a reminiscence of you in your element, carved into the flesh and muscle under my ribs.

But this must be your last gift to me. A broad, sad smile like that in tragedies, ushering me out through the back to avoid prying reasons I should stay here with you. The tunnel never has an end. And I’m sure other people have had to drag themselves through it for years, whilst others took the walls into their own hands, and through sheer force; created a gap. But I am lucky enough to have kept my limbs intact and unscarred.

And so you guide me through the crack and it seals behind me.

It’s so fucking bright out here, though. 

Send more books

Crap. Crap shit shit crap. Another night at home with my stomach in what feels like the throes of pre-passion. I am no sailor but my digestive system seems to have invested far too much time in learning how to tie knots. I wish I was a sailor, actually. I like stripes. And navy blue.

I am boring. I want employment but then I want to stay unemployed. To get the sickness benefit, I have to go to a new counsellor. She’s better, she doesn’t say all that much. She asks if I feel disconnected, and I realise I do. She asks if I can still feel that my legs are crossed, that I’m sitting down. I can. She asks if maybe it feels like my head is disconnected from my body. It does. She expresses her concern over my current state and avoiding cars, I laugh it off and walk home feeling  four years old. Dazed and blissfully happy to be wrapped up in a big coat and scarf.

Oh and my old employment thinks I stole eight vouchers worth fifty dollars each. Which is totally effing ridiculous. But fuck, as if things were going to get any less confusing.

I felt alone then, too. Like the wind between individual picket fence pieces. I’ve been imagining my bed with looming railings on either side. The safest place I can manage at short notice.

With the morning brings new promise. It is a shame I watched it dawn. Another evening where repose remains just out of reach. I had such affection for sleep. Now I have the most lurid of lusts for it and it disgusts me.

He hadn’t been dead for days. He was not dead at all. He was not lustreless when you found him, and if it wasn’t for you, you filthy female, and your poor time keeping, he would still be living.

So I bestow upon you a great guilt and the final shove into the realisation; destruction is not beautiful. Withered thin girls and shaky hands on traumatised limbs are not captivating. Death is not a stunning swarm of insects that renders everything dark but glittery, with wings beating faintly like the rise and fall of a breathing ribcage.

And when you press the cool backs of your fingers to your fervent, torrid eyelids I hope you feel homeless in the knowledge that everything you once thought would be inspiring and thought-provoking, eventuated to be utter torment and disease.

I do in fact feel exiled; derelict.

And I do, in fact, at times; wish I had never woken past the age of twenty. I would have known success and love and riches. I would have known great friendship and courage and determination. But I would not be left in the pornography that is another night, deserted.

I wish for the simple play of finding stick insects. Of filling buckets with stones and sand. I wish on stars, occasionally, like a child. I close my eyes and expel the faintest hopes of pleasant days ahead.

I am not looking for someone who wishes on the same stars, who hurls their heads back to the night in unison with mine.
I am not looking for anyone, at all.
But I feel I need someone who has something I do not know of, but unexplainably need.