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 

If I cut my hair and never set foot in my mouth, again

Work is always in a wrinkled shirt. Head office guy [looking sanded and orange] down from the big city, looks at me like I should care.Yeah, I really don’t. And I’m not about to start. I don’t own an iron. Go fuck yourselves.

Even if I did own an iron, I’d probably still wake up late/not actually give anything resembling a fuck about the face I’m putting forward for this company. As much as I love the job, I am indifferent to the name in front of it.

Then my sister walks in and I realise sickness stays unless you rest and remove.

I have no time to rest and remove. 9.5 hour days, 6 of those. My Sunday is alcohol lacquered. I don’t have the capacity to recognise the block missing from the jenga tower behind every sonnet I let slip from my dry lips. And she’s still sick, anyway. She’s not even here. What the fuck am I talking about.

If I was callous I’d put one hand on my face and push my smile out. Tell you it’s ok, no really. Because deep down I know I possibly hate your stance and face and speech. And I just have to realise that. Rest and recognise and remove.

Stevia slips and bobs in another mindless drink I paid for [with this money not touched but tainted] And I feel my appetite light another cigarette, flip its legs up and shrug. Yeah, could potentially eat something, but what the fuck are you gonna do?

Nothing renders me speechless anymore.
Actually.. Anything renders me nothing. I am un-renderable.
Tell me you love me; nothing.

When my mother used to leave me with babysitters, I’d get so worked up I’d end up being sick. Almost every time.
Now you leave without a word and there’s no buildup to churn my stomachs empty contents and the harsh real-world lesson I just learnt should have left me reeling, dizzy over the railing.
Instead I unlock the doors to earn in a wrinkled shirt.
And each day I can feel the buildup of words gathering momentum and weight, in the place I leave untouched.

It’s happening soon.

Oh and fuck you. A relentless amount of You Fucking Suck to all people cruel and childish and can recognise my face.
You are so abhorrently ugly.

Just What I Got Was Not What I Had Gotten Previously

No one notices the beauty of pigeons. Or the sexual appeal of smokers [Because there is none, you idiot]. Common birds, though, and the insects they survive on, serve as a reminder that people are seemingly obliged to let the common go unnoticed.

One word you would use to describe yourself: Observant
One word others would use to describe you: Flaky

I’m chugging away at spirulina like it’s going out of fashion [it’s not, that shit is red hot at the moment]. It tastes like bile but I feel AMAZING. The sales rep for my store takes eighteen capsules a day. She is quite the conversationalist. But I feel her eyes may be just a little too wide.

I took maybe 20 today. My eyes are most definitely too wide.

Whenever someone I don’t know sneezes, I literally have to fight the urge to yell ‘BLESS YOU!’

Word I hate: Masticate. Who, the hell. Seriously.

Therapist at my sisters group meeting ‘How old are you?… You’re very impressive.’ And me, thinking “YOU’RE JUST SAYING THAT BECAUSE MY SISTER IS IN THE MIDDLE OF A “MAJOR DEPRESSIVE EPISODE”’.

On being twenty very soon: I am feeling the need to do all the things I thought would be exciting in my teens, but never did. Like streaking. Or body-painting. Playing for a crowded room. Being involved in a mass orgy.

Instead, when I turned sixteen, I got my lip pierced. Then again. And got drunk a whole bunch. It was all pretty mundane, and really, my parents had nothing to worry about. The psychic I went to said I was very intuitive. As did the psychic at my work. I know when someone’s a bad soul. They both also said there would be a pregnancy in November. And it would most probably be mine. Oh, thank goodness for that. Here I was worrying about fertility. Now I’m going to have a kid at twenty. The thing that really got me, though: Both of them said it would not be a mistake.

I can’t even imagine how I am supposed to be taking that.

Stocking up on contraception and abstinence pants for the months of October and November… Abstinence pants? I don’t know what I was thinking of just then. Maybe like barbed wire pants. ELECTRIC-SHOCK PANTS. But then I’m like… If I decide to abstain for those months, will the pregnancy fall to someone else… Like my MOTHER? My sister is not allowed to have sexual contact or any sort of relationship when she leaves the institution, for a year. Or that’s the advice that was given. She’s 23. My mother got married at 22. I know that really doesn’t mean anything. But it’s interesting to look at how things can change in 30 odd years.   

Peter Sellers

Taking time to acknowledge my almost dead, soulless sister. The institution has transformed her into a harsh, misguided teenager of a woman. Like a great vacuum pulled her away from me and kept on at her chest. All her giggly ways extracted. We get left with the irritable shell of a human. I liked her better when she was fucked up.

I know what you’re thinking. That’s unnecessarily harsh. That is, in some way, ‘wrong’ for me to think this. Because she’s happy now? But she isn’t. She just isn’t sad anymore. Or crazy. She’s angry and immature instead. All she had to do, in my mind [naive as it is, I guess] was just stay close to me. Stop wandering off with these boys she called men but acted as mothers to. Take my advice because I’m a realist where she thinks she’s so fucking intelligent.

I honestly just can’t be fucked anymore. Family may be family, but good company is such as well.

My mother telling me about her first time on acid – “Peter sellers was sitting right next to me and I couldn’t stop laughing”.

My mother telling me about her second time on acid – “I think what I had was… We used to call it a ‘bad trip’ in those days.”

My mother on any kind of ailment I might be complaining about – “… You’re not pregnant, are you?”

My mother on calling a psychic whilst under the influence – “Oh no, I can’t do this. She’ll know I’m drunk. She’s psychic!”
And me – “Well, if she’s psychic she’ll know you’re about to call anyway.”

I Wish I Was Going Further

Tomorrow at 5am I’m traveling to Dunedin to see my sister at Ashburn Rehabilitation Center. At 9am, my mother and I have a personal session with my sister and her therapist. Then, in the afternoon, we have a group session. Which includes all the other people in her unit, and members of their family.

I have nothing even remotely lyrical or lovely to say about this..

My mother keeps on making hints at how nervous she is. Really, I just can’t wait to see my fucking sister. I can tell my mother and I will just get drunk and smoke in the hotel every night.

Anyway, I may not be on again until Sunday. So I hope you all have a mind-blowing weekend. If you get bored, I just realized I have posted 200-201 pages on this blog. Send me a note on how I’ve changed.

Oh fuck. Keep my mind off this.

TN

Just

Telling my doctor I can’t climax because of the meds she’s put me on. She wets her lips and looks at me like she’s about to tell me something about her personal life, but then falters. She has thin hands. Thin hands with thick creases riddling the surface. I’m staring at every feature of hers apart from her eyes. Because she’s known me since I was eight. And now I’m telling her about my sex life. And I don’t really want anyone to think about me having sex.

It’s one of those moments where your face curls up by itself, and you start doing noise-making things like bashing your teeth together.

And yes, this is personal. And no, I don’t care.

On another relatively similar note. I’m in the ladies bathrooms, staring idly at one of those sanitary disposer bins. Perchance, overhear a conversation between two older [but not old] ladies. One asks how the other is, the other says ‘Oh good! Got my period though. But I actually like getting it now, after going so long without it, makes me feel like I’m a woman again.. How sad is that?’ And they both chuckle along together.

Sometimes I forget I’m a woman. I think I’m a big mismatch of old and young parts. Like my wrists could be old, but the shape of my face makes me look infantile. I am a big nasty ill-fitting jigsaw puzzle.One that no one can complete. Because it just looks too odd to be correct.

Remember when my face was heart-shaped? Yeah. Good times.

Seeing my crazy sibling in 6 days. Latest message from her - ‘Dude. I’ve been drinking this homemade mint lemonade, and I just took a crap and it smelled like mint!’ I replied ‘DUDE IT’S YOUR TURN TO TEND TO THE FUCKING WORM FARM!?!’

The clinic she’s in [Ashburn], have a worm-farm. And they let the crazies bake cakes. It doesn’t sound all that bad. She went clothes shopping with three anorexics the other day. She’s a curvy pocket-edition goth. The thought of this makes me giggle.

TN

Scabs

The last time I saw her she was keeled over the gutter up the road from my house, animalistic and disgusting but completely captivating. Instead of helping, we drove past. We kept on driving. Maybe I was the only one who saw her. Last time I enquired, some bland-faced boy told me she was overseas, a picture in a paper and some bad people dying. All I can ever see is her exposed neckline, slick with exertion, the bumps that ran down the centre of her back so raised they seemed like spikes through the thin cotton of her shirt. Now and again I get sick thinking about it. I feel like a dinosaur in common conversations about simple people. I know bad things happen sometimes. I know that normal people have normal problems and they handle them in normal, neat ways like cry and cover their eyes with their hands, stop painting their nails, start wearing black. Stay inside, eat less, eat more. I feel cursed, any normality is rendered unrecognisable, shaken up with the constant shaking of my eyes and hands. I catch eyes at the bus stop sometimes and can feel them looking when I look away. How can they know, this animal girl that has haunted me is not just someone I know, not someone I was close to, not someone they can understand or place in white robes in white rooms with white soap and then expect to walk through white double doors all shiny and smiling and new. This gaunt yet driven, sad but content creature was no less, no more. Than me. Maybe. So hard to admit. So tense is the moment that I tell I have dug myself through solid packed dirt with my own broken, bleeding nails. Been dragged down by dogs. Dogs that I raised though.

Now what, though. Now what.

Skeletons tears

How haunted you were never came into the equation when we went out together. You could kind of tell, I guess, your pale skin was ethreal and constantly cold, or cool, even during casual drinks outside [well-known street I don’t love as much as I used to.] During summer I’d watch your fluid limbs clutch at themselves with this toe-turning [inward] awkwardness that, I guess, might have hinted at some secret, illicit inner turmoil, but one that maybe my eyes couldn’t catch onto. Ultra-violet distress. We were throwing back tumblers of warm red wine [you likened it to vinegar, I likened it to sex with someone you shouldn’t], I’d stopped making bad calls long enough for maybe thirty seconds of aching silence to slide inbetween us [knees drawn up to it’s chest], then you wouldn’t catch my eye, reached inside your chest for a mallet. Smashed the quiet that had settled so comfortably between us like a fine, warming dust. A thousand pieces for a thousand different words, screaming at me a range of nightmare-inducing memories you had. I didn’t know you in the past sense. I had known you for a year. For some reason twelve months you had held out, to explode into a glittering, razor-sharp [but finally open-ended] question. I have never felt the effects of alcohol halt so fast. I didn’t need to hold your hand [your eyes open but wary], but I needed to warm the blue ends I now knew the reasons for. I needed to fold you up, curve all of your corners until you could fit into one of the valves in my frantic beating heart. Leave you leaning against an artery, no longer cold.

I could do no such thing. You were all elbows, all soft happiness left ragged and distressed, only present in the corneas of each eye. I didn’t wipe your tears, they slid far too fast down each sloped, gaunt cheek. And then you stood, knees clicking like a metronome, shuffled away. Closed, never slammed, my front door.

I am yet to see you agai. Every leggy frame and skeletal chestplate catches my eye. But I heard you flew to Sydney. And why haven’t you called me?

I would only try to round your edges. Make your flaws subtle to your own eyes.

09-04-10

How can everyone be so happy, when I have a sister who might die, on purpose, at her own hand. Her own medication. Handfuls.

And then I would die, too.

And people continue to laugh and smile, and carry on and on.

A whole ordeal over mental health. Public health service. And me left sad after bottles of wine. But they just fall into my hands from racks. Cornerstore assistants just smile [and laugh, carry on and on] Do I feel better for the things I do? No.

And so she says ‘Why bother?’ there’s ‘No point’. And she stops eating then eats heaps and I’m going crazy watching this person I love almost completely unravel. I know exactly what she means, though. And it doesn’t scare me like it does her.

She’s drinking charcoal in a bed somewhere in Christchurch and vomiting black with panda eyes all red and wrung out. I cry when she cries. I cry when I see her wrists and legs and face, all have lines. Brackets around her eyes, deep scarlet welts on her pale skin.

Trying so hard to remember what she looked like with dimpled, smiling cheeks and eyes turned up. But nothing comes. I just remember feeling isolated and left behind. On the bus to school while she’s in bed, physically wrecked and probably sobbing.

And I cry through a biology exam when I see a diagram of a perfect human form and it does not detail how the head can be so riddled with illness, like worms in apples.

My father on a plane, miles above me in my duvet cucoon, dry wretching, we both are, probably. I want to go home. Home when I was 8 and she was 10 and not yet sober to all the worlds short-comings and everyones faults. Home where neither of us were sad, just worried, I guess.

I live by myself, and she comes round, when she’s ‘well’, and we walk around and talk circles [tip-toeing] in delicate lines around her ‘illness’. I stub my toes on the sharp corners of her voice as it breaks. And I do, too.

I always do.

Haven’t used your face for inspiration in a while. Making fun of other peoples’ laughs instead.

Somehow or another, at the end of most days I find myself with dirty fingernails. I rarely use my hands except for picking up coffee cups, clutching a bag to my side. Smoking, eating. Covering my teeth when I laugh. It’s like my fingers sneak around when I’m not looking and go searching for places to dig holes. I’m not surprised. There has to be at least one part that isn’t afraid to wander.

I think I’m a time of my life where I should be doing more. I want to learn some more things. I have written lists of what I want to achieve this year. I am most afraid I will not achieve any of them. And then next year will be the same. And next year.

Then the year after that.

Tomorrow I meet up with my crazy sister for coffee. She hasn’t done much in the last 3 years since she was my age. 22 isn’t really that young to me. It sounds jaded. She seems jaded. Then again, I probably sound jaded.

My Dad says I think too much and my step mother agrees in that toneless, fake voice, she only owns one. And it sucks. I think he & she are insanely simple. Like, crazy uncreative. Happy with their lot. Their boring, a-typical lot.

I want a nice hard slap in the face right now. I can’t click myself out of this dull mood.