What might happen, and you will let it

The seven stages of grief and not meaning anything but words to me.

You’ll steal books from everyone in order to keep your mind occupied. You’ll feel alone, at times. You’ll visit your family but find no relief. Occasionally the money you spend on alcohol will birth a fantastic night in which the future does in fact seem as brilliant as it did when you were pre-pubescent. You’ll wake up late, and feel as if your heart has slowed to an almost still. Or it has sped up to the point that each beat conjoins so you cannot count the drums. You’ll spend time finding inaccuracies within guilt as an emotion. You’ll stop believing in whatever God you relied on till now. You will find it difficult to make easy conversation about mundane things. You’ll spend too long on your parents lounge floor, with your back to the fire, searching for solace in the over-dramatised emotions splayed across television screens. You’ll cook meals you don’t plan on eating. You’ll go for walks that you know are pointless. 

You’ll buy drugs and feel better. You’ll burn candles in the midst of a comedown. You’ll fall out of love. You’ll run out of clean clothes and feel hopeless. A lot. 

I don’t really know what to do, I admit. Whatever new experiences I imagined in 2010 have faded to a water stain. What’s worse is that it’s still there. I can still remember feeling mindlessly hopeful. 

Recollection, Remembrancer

Something I remembered. Lucidity slapping me whilst in a gin-steeped-embrace.

Thirteen years old, you were fifteen. Leaning over to throw up all over your shirt. You Instantly grabbed my shoulder.
“Oh my god, are you ok? Holy shit how are you feeling? Do you want to go home?”
There was no recognition of the vomit all over your torso until you went to pick me up and acknowledged it would get on me.  You stopped to strip your shirt off, left it there in the middle of the floor, somebodies house, we didn’t even know who the fuck they were. You would never get your shirt back. Picking me up and sitting me in the front seat of your car. Driving home, pulling into a service station. Bottles of water and a toothbrush with toothpaste. Hair-ties. Tissues. Deodorant. It was a half-hour drive back to yours, my head spinning.

Waking up in between your sheets the next day, you upright on an armchair, a bucket resting against your forearm. A bucket full of my vomit. Eyes wide open all of a sudden.
“Are you ok? How are you feeling? You want something to eat?”
Already on your feet.

This bleeds into my sleep. Every recollection a nightmare.
You had so much to readily give.  

Bend to what will

Something bad that happened whilst travelling: I got bitten by a spider and had to have my elbow drained. The medication they gave me, they warned, would make me retain water and gain weight.

Something worse: I retained water and gained weight. Mainly in my face.

Something terrible: I watched an old friend pass away, as if whatever dreams he was having clutched onto his insides with soft claws and just pulled him up and out. 

Something heartbreaking: He was 23.

Something gut-wrenching, soul liquefying and life changing: This is the second person I have loved, that I have watched die.

Something that just shouldn’t have happened: Both have slipped away this year, in the time span of a month.

Something I can’t make myself feel bad about: Any of this. All I can see is two sets of parents, mourning their only children. I didn’t give birth to any of their quirks, facial features. None of what they were was mine.

Something I want to do: Stay in bed.

Something I can’t: Stay in bed.

Something that doesn’t make sense: Why none of this hurts.

Something I wish I could change: The past. The passed.

Something I will change: Myself.

Something that struck me as odd: The neatness of their rooms. One may have planned for death, but the other.. It was like he knew. This doesn’t make sense to me.

Something I wish I had: Someone tall and strong and absorbent enough to cradle me, in my bloated, sickly body and leech up all my tears, when the time comes for me to expose them.

Someone I wish I had: You. And you. Together. Together in my room at fifteen. He already had his camera, and he already had the softest face I will ever know.

Something I wish I had said: Please don’t leave me here.

Something I did say: I’ll be fine.

Something I planned for: My own demise.

Something that will never happen: My demise at my own hands.

How dare you. How dare you leave me here. You didn’t even get to see me in my most unflawed, perfect state.

Housing ill and sick tree limbs

I am so sick of being sick, of being ill, of feeling my mind curl into a diseased circle of flesh. I am so tired of images that make me feel at odds with my form. 

I am at odds with the sun, with light in general. If I step outside, I sense my fingers curl into fists, with which I could shake at the sky. Why are you still bright? When people are failing. Everyone I love has failed. Been failed. 

He lost his mind. Not over my crap face but over his crap emotions and crap nerve endings. He lost his mind and then deposited his life, in my arms. A shaking stillborn, his eyes closing [when will this image haunt me, his death, instead of the life he would have had if he were well?], my tender side closed in time. His lashes met, so did my wits. Instead of fighting, they resolved to keep me safe and sane. Linked arms, like bars, kept emotion out of a situation I should have/could have/will have presence over.

I am now allowed to throw myself to the feet of passersby, howl at a ceiling of stars, curse two names, two faces. I am allowed to question a God, whichever one I want. I am allowed to stop eating, eat too much, drink too much, pass out on the floor of my kitchen. I am allowed to live in squalor, drink tepid water from day old glasses. 

But I don’t want to do this. I want everyone to stop treating me as something damaged, or fragile. My shoulders remain broad, my face round, my manner deliberate. I am still the strongest person I believe I can be, and still class myself as stronger than most [this is me at my most arrogant].

I wish I had not told you. I wish I had not told any of you. But I keep on telling, it falls out of my mouth like a pearl I keep on trying to hide in the lining of my gums. It may be my sub conscious urging me to recognise. Find fault in the way I am ‘handling’ things. I can feel it coming. This swell, almost pleasurable. I know I will throw myself in front of a train, someday soon. 

Each day I feel the soles of my feet warming.

I can see the fire, less than three weeks away, I’d say.

TN 

Oh, adore and please forget.

Dear ___

I’m not 100% sure why I started this as a letter to you, to be honest, I am a little scared & the thought of your smiling face made this too large, mean city seem a little more bearable. Like, if you were here, we could just scatter through the streets, completely unharmed. I even ordered a glass of Ra Nui Sav, because it was the only NZ wine, & I thought it might remind me of home. Aside from my huge, hulking hotel and lack of friendly Melbournite faces, I can still see myself living here. I keep on looking at the price of things and thinking it is in NZ dollars… This restaurant is actually insanely expensive. I had nothing to wear. I’m thinking I will go home and order stupid amounts of room service treats.

____s life ends tomorrow. But he is already dead, really. I cannot cling to a hope that is completely unfounded and I cannot let myself dwell on ‘incredible recovery’ stories, either… There is no ‘incredible recovery’ for him. His heart is broken. It keeps on seizing and collapsing, lengthening all the gouges splayed across atriums and ventricles, thickened walls mixed with transparent ones. Chaos in his chest. His beautiful photographers mind is ruined, his perfect boyish face is a plasticine mask. All of those soft curls look just-washed, like he had showered and then just closed his eyes to a clean sleep. I have not cried. I was left alone in that stark little room with him and instead, I sobbed. I weeped, lost sight of any boundaries completely. I mourned like an old greek woman. You could have measured my tears in overflowing beakers. I can’t quell these raw memories [I was in his arms two weeks ago! We stood and watched each others faces at another friends funeral! He coloured my hair for me, nimble fingers on my skin, kisses next to my eyes]. I kept hoping his face would twitch into that brilliant smile and I would get to gaze into those melodramatic blue eyes. No such luck. His mother carried me away after forty minutes, I think. She folded me into her car, like I weighed nothing, which didn’t make sense, grief feels like it weighs a thousand lead balls, clutching my skin. I was blind. I woke up in my stunning hotel room, my face puffy and lined. I had cried all of my makeup off and it had pooled between my breasts. She had taken off my shoes but left me in my bland grey dress, which I saw fitting. 

I’d like to imagine I was crying for ___, too. But I wasn’t. The taker of my virginity is yet to appear in my nightmares, only his blood stains my sleep. His face has not yet materialised between my sheets. Nor his gait swaggers into my fantasies. 

Gee Ess Are

Crying out [on the floor, of your house]
Wishing the breath on your lips to stay in your blood
Transfer from your lungs
And that rich red to remain [on the inside of your veins]

Have you met my friend Maltitol?

All the money you left
And your unmade bed
Oh fuck, fuck fuck fuck.

You said “Spend it on friends, because they are important”
How hypocritical and nonsensical and whimsical and HORRIBLE
You couldn’t even spend a life with me in it.
Just on the side.

G is for a graceless departure from something you should’ve just fucking stuck at.
G is for great loss.
And Greed [You had literally bundled up all the sadness ever left out untended to, hadn’t you? Others have emotions too. Even now, you leech mine from me.]
And the Growth you influenced and the Gap you left like in between two mattresses [I fall between, I keep on falling between]
The Girls you turned down because you were helping me sort soil or tape flowers to my walls
G is for Grief I have never experienced. G is for the Gruelling waiting period.

No, but really, have you met my friend Psyllium?

Control over the things you hated are now mine to own. And they are all I have.