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? 

You With Broken Desires

You see a year ago I was naive and aching from ordinary experiences. I had been in love and unsurprisingly had found myself unable to evoke the same in somebody else. I had turned twenty with drama I wholeheartedly believed was sinister and I was anxious over full-time hours, the shape of my body, how I appeared, my stance and laugh. I was worried about a future I could not yet perceive or write down. My closest relative had a personality disorder in a clinic somewhere and I had my palms empty, with too much emotion for the mundane. 
I was ungrateful for my broken heart, my shoddy anatomy and all the time in the world to make no plans at all.
Almost a year ago I wandered into something with shy and brilliant intentions and became the last person someone I cared for would see and touch and listen to.
And when I found you, I knew the crepe material under my eyes would only deteriorate that much more. Maybe that burgundy would somehow sink deep behind my skin, cause the whites of my eyes to redden, cause my lips to swell and contrast with my colourless face. I knew all of the things you left unsaid, those sad and angry confessions, would poison me completely, I braced myself for sickness, holding you up against my inadequate frame. 
When you left, my twenty years was pulled out with you.
And when the sirens came, they asked your name, I gave them mine instead.

It is so callous of me to admit I do not think of you at all, really. In shock, your face and voice, they were enveloped by the performance of your passing. And we were not that close anymore, feigning friendship in the hope it would slip between us again unexpectedly. You were not really my friend at all. And you knew I was coming over. In the end, you knew I was coming over.

You gave me the migraines and also the nightmares. You gave me the ability to lose friends and become volatile with almost anyone. You gave me a fear of blood and relationships. You gifted me loss and violence, how could I resist the anger, when it came? I did not love you, you were a number of firsts I had when I was an infant. 

A year ago today I was, what, pulling stones from my shoe in angst? Wishing I had somebody to fall asleep with? To say it feels like yesterday would be tacky if not untrue. 

It must just be terrible, for all of your planning, to have me get over it, to plan a life without the memory of you colliding with my ideas? 

So last week I turned twenty-one and you’d be twenty-three. Your parents never liked me much, don’t even want me at your memorial. I don’t care for the life you had and the growth we experienced together. I do miss the chances you threw away and I miss normal pain, without a depth or background that bleeds. But your slowing pulse isn’t mine, is it?
Your ignorance and lack of stamina, surely that’s not mine either? 

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. 

You Already Know

Running home from the hospital. Running home from the hospital. It’s all I can think about this morning. All I strung along this past evening. When the ambulance blared its watery tune and I held Your wrists above my head , bowed, touching yours, repentant already. Against your bedroom wall. You left before the music began. You weren’t ever really one for melodrama. As the daring and miserable and red stained my forearms. I was praying then, out loud. Howling at the hopeless to run back up Your arm and mine, to stop pooling, cooling, to retreat and reabsorb. My recognisable garments, the black and gray and mediocre I was known for: I didn’t wear jeans for two months. The ridiculous stains on my favourite materials, they sit still, in plastic, in wood, in an off-white room. I have drawn them out once, the scarlet hardened, my knees (so ugly) shaking and absurd. Touching what I know to be true. The dark brown red and You left. You left. 

But at least I was there. Jesus, what the fuck do you do?

I’m taking a few days off. Stop reading this. Things change but events that have shaped you remain. Shaped you. As if I am the contour of Your palms or the rivulets You let loose or the waist I loved: I am. I wish. 

True: I miss You exorbitantly. But I would go back to that afternoon , minute after minute, to watch you and hold you as you affected the air for the last time. I’d relive that again and again, if that was the only version of You I was allowed. I would ruin all of my clothes. I would ruin the rest of my life. And feel You leave again and again and again. 

Silence

All that remains in my cupboard is brown rice and something like seven different kinds of tea. So all I have been ingesting is brown rice. And seven different kinds of tea. Turns out that it’s incredibly hard to digest. And so I have been eating nothing at all. It’s mildly unpleasant.

Weave a story around this mixed proverb: “Silence is a great healer.”

Well. You didn’t talk to me after I sent that drunk message. Then you did. And it made what was a fantastic evening suddenly stepped-on for an hour afterwards.

We are gagged in the hallway.
White coats with sport-shoes squeak as they twist on linoleum, it feels fiercely absurd. Cartoon character feet and us misunderstanding their language. I look at my hands, urged to find hope in their familiar lines and delicate curved nail-beds, they are lulled too. Sign language for ‘Thank You’ is all I know anyway and gratitude is just so inappropriate. We have all thanked them anyway, we will all thank them anyway. Coats and shoes, laughter so pornographic behind the desk at the end of the corridor. A window is open somewhere close and the birds outside remind me it is summer and I’m inside with artificial unflattering light. With the coats and the shoes and the stains a sleepless night left behind on my face. Whatever words we might keep are too ordinary to close the gaps I can feel lengthening and gorging themselves. They are trying anyway, they are dabbling their fingers at the edges, as if they might make music from our unseen hollows. I can feel her looking at me, and him looking at her, but to meet any pair of eyes would speak volumes so overwhelming. My eyelids click, instead. We bathe in the hushed and suppressed and it helps. It starts to help. The quiet assists. Five of us, where what you look like doesn’t count for anything, for once. We sit in a paltry resignation and as it begins to heal the corners, we are called inside. It all ends, anyway.

Offered prayers we don’t have faith in, we mutter affection with rounded edges instead. Five stilted sentences which don’t affect the mutual quiet at all. The mild blots of monitors are screaming, though. So particular and even, they are pulling hairs and skin. I’m watching the ordinary screens, surrounded by ordinary white with ordinary life breathing and waiting, lungs are easy, pulse is easy, the normal swallows me. He is staggering. It happens and I guess He goes. The bleating halts and silence sits like smoke, everywhere but intangible. My eyelids click. My heart works. My teeth are secure in my gums. She cries out with no language and I move my tongue over my bottom lip. Thirty minutes and His skin cools. No words, not words at all, just us alive and breathing, beating. Haggard and hollow-cheeked, so ugly in comparison. Unworthy, I don’t say anything at all.

Silence heals, does it? Time doesn’t even heal. Silence reigned when the forced functions stopped and He left. It healed nothing. If anything it meant a great wound was created. Separated them and I from all the heedlessly noisy and fractious, unappreciative life outside. Silence is a friend I hate but keep around so I don’t burst from everything I’ve left unsaid. So I don’t revolt company with what each type of smile He harboured meant on what occasion. What He drank with vodka (grape juice in bottles that looked like wine). Silence doesn’t heal at all, it keeps my thoughts inside and homicidal, killing me. They kill me. His mouth kills me and His gait kills me.

I can only find sanctity in the fact that this is ordinary pain, for ordinary people. Ordinary people like me. As much as it might help to talk and talk, the normal hurt, it lessens. It does. Not from time or silence, from working through every memory that I possess and working on myself, not altogether noiseless. I don’t cry, I remember. I make plans and follow through with them. I work with words but keep the ones so reminiscent of Him to myself.

I am feeling so much better. I am progressing with varied successes and touching beauty on every surface. But silence healing? Not so much.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.