CHCH SIX

Trying to write about nothing this past week has been difficult.

All of my friends are beautiful and creative and hostile. I feel intimidated sitting at a table with them. Naturally they sneered when I mentioned where I was going. But this city is not nothing. I would not pay seventy dollars to escape my own brand of nothing only to lower myself into somebody else’s idea of it.

I didn’t mention the unusual stillness or how every vantage point you could stand at gifts a stunning landscape of sky. With no hills there is no beginning nor end to every sunset. There are still the cars of boys who yell from their half-open windows and there’s still disgust to be had at general things. The kids outside my window right now, they are awful just like us, smearing face paint in stripes across our cheeks and taking all of our photographs in black and white. 

My sister is better than she was in the months after she left the institution, and of course much improved from the months and years before. She sticks her arms up in the air to exclaim something and her shirt sleeve slips to expose just one of many slug-like scars across her forearm, it’s not sad anymore, it’s not a concern. They are more like stretch-marks, tiger-stripes that have developed with age and pain and are finished with a silvery-white. Not quite beautiful, not ugly.

See you in Wellington, 
TN xx

On : Food & Fun

If you have been following me for some time (against better judgement I assume because my goodness looking back on the tack I post sometimes makes me cringe) you’ll know that food, or lack thereof, has been a large part of my life. Like an astounding (and sadly forever growing) number of young women and men, I have dealt with an eating disorder that gave me no room for stability or even the slightest feeling of control or self-worth. I thought it was time to elucidate further on this, for my own purposes but also because there are a few blogs I frequent regularly that are starting to show signs of their owners being controlled by food, and I do think that with exposure, things like this might be easier to be honest about and not be such a shameful topic to come forward with.

So this is that, then. It’s long.

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All Of My Little Black Books I

Friday 22/July/2011 1:33pm (This Time Last Year).

Joints are aching at 5pm, still in bed. Sheets clutching on to her scent with their numb fingertips, but more so mine- the heady smoked sweat and toxic breath. Shower while the jug is boiling, skin is tight across swollen cheeks, mealy marble eyes. Black coffee, Revolution! The bag announces. I stay silent, strut for cigarettes, feel no pull into the almost empty local coffee house. And I feel sickened, smoke on the inside. On the inside, on the inside. 
Plans are made, leave again. Bus smells like candy, smells like the mornings before school. Too many places to swill in town. Too many options, always.
Smile. Smile to myself. Think of him (not her), again. My Mother’s place, fireplace and horror film. I want to die occasionally. I eat a lot, want to feel my bones. I want his sinewy skin.

My Mother has a bowl of terrible apples on her dining room table. I have smears of lipstick on my eyelids. I am fairly sure my Mother doesn’t like apples, this notion is approved by their slightly leathery skin. They shrink beneath their exteriors, I dwell on that ideal.

Sometimes I sleep too long. It is often twelve hours or more. My joints throb, my lips and eyes seem content to lick together. My motivation is dainty, it sits between my fingers, resides under my nails. Dormant. I let it sit, I am futureless at times.

I don’t know how they do it. People, in jobs, people on the street, clicking the ground in self-importance. It’s like they run their baths with positivity every evening, they bathe in it.   

The Moon During The Day

It’s possible this has already been said here. Packing is uncomfortable and time consuming. I keep on stopping to wander through old workbooks. 

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I Would Love The Ending Too

When I slipped on cobblestones and that couple stopped and asked if I was OK, looked at me with stretched eyes that screamed Oh God She’s Drunk By Herself At Six Thirty PM, I really did wonder if everything does happen for a reason. Some statements are meant to be said without contemplation or any brand of belief. I did not burn half my hand this morning for a reason. I had a sudden burst of inspiration and curling my hair was quite possibly the best idea I had ever had. I should be wary of my initiative. It struts like a teenager, all my ideas are hormonal and flippant. 

I wasn’t even drunk. My shoes are too big and the soles are worn smooth like sea glass.
I always liked sea glass. It’s been fairly passe for as far as I can remember. But it’s another thing we don’t control (maybe that’s why we deem it tacky). Something we make and discard ends up in the ocean and it calms the edges for us. I like things that have been dulled.

I enjoyed your company just so much. But I don’t want to see you spinning lust between fingertips like knitting in another woman’s colours. When I come round to see you. Your sleeves are long and in my face, no heart bared. Only a dull frayed wool that does nothing for me. Neither of us give anything away. I feel maybe that’s the crux of it. 

It’s too late to think on the roots of my desires. Why I sat behind an older man on the bus and realised I wanted to sleep with him and had no other explanation for my deviance than the fact he smelled delicious. I spent at least seven minutes with my eyes trained on his suit jacket, willing him to lift a hand so I could glimpse perhaps a lack of a wedding band. I decided if he got off before me I would smile at him. He stood up at my stop instead and we got off at different doors but turned slightly to look at each other. 
Walking down the hill while he shuffled away in the other direction I thought: That Was Really Fucking Weird.

Once, he kissed me on the doorstep of my apartment as we both began our respective days. A lady I didn’t know caught my eye as he walked past her and threw me an explosive grin, felt forgiven for any wrong I’d ever committed. My face curled too, an uncontrollable twist of lips and teeth, such is the loved excused. 

She makes me drive even though I don’t have a license. She’s drunk and insistent. I say If We Get Caught We’re Fucked and she looks at me with eyes blended blunt and vacant, says: We Are Fucked Already.

You were more me than I was.

Keeping plastic bottles in the shade for fear of chemicals, cancer. Smoking anyway. I’m a slave to the frivolous girl I was at a time, for a time. Indeterminable, I guess. I am much the same.

At the time, the time that was, He and I were budding, blossoming. Fighting with water inside, making memories on every available surface. Our reflections seeming deep in a blank television screen. His bones and olive limbs, my wan waist and curved shoulders. Dying to dirty our fresh faces and bright futures. Soil our laundry and air it in public: we were doing a lot of drugs, yes, having sex in public places, yes yes I’ll admit to anything! School-less, routine abandoned us for a summer. Us. Such a foreign concept, this extension of I. An odd pair. How could this person who looked so different, hip bones pronounced and caramel coloured, be tied in any way to my mess of soft blurred lines and translucent pelt?

It’s bizarre. How passionately I felt and how inconsolable I was when he stopped coming over, driving me to work. 
And now I just see this immaculate sunny-seasoned aura. Something so lovely to hold and inspect. I see Him (the Him he was, my Him) now and grin not out of spite or obligation. It’s almost as if he bred a particular brand of emotion in me and eventually, without his constant attention (measureless affection), it waned and halted in production.

Now my new sparkly display of a mindset fails to recognise:
We Were Us Once.  

Gall, Sore Spot. Conversation Startless

Counting down my ribs, you are. Fingers slick with silver silt. You lecture me on appreciation. I don’t feel that all my uninviting is showing, rather, I am unabashed, prosaic and unblushing. All my negotiation is alone and exposed, in truth your attack comes completely at ease. I don’t feel a thing. I can’t feel a thing.

Things had been unpleasant at best. Unpopulated and sterile. I was surly in the face of friendship, unrefined and callous. I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry. Light appeared tapered thin and sour. When I sat outside and someone said ‘I Know What It Feels Like.’ I was so quick to wane my pleasantries and in my mind I snapped shut and snarled No You Fucking Don’t. I could have accepted good-intentions, even if they were misinformed. I stood and stubbed my cigarette out and went inside, instead. 

When I begged someone not to do something I knew was inevitable and had accepted their actions would indeed be lecherous and I would feel terrible but it was unpreventable. Yet, still, when they confirmed what I knew they would, and I felt the pre-conversation smirk become illegible on my face and they called my name as I walked away and they cared, I guess. I could have just accepted that things were not the same, things were not secure or safe and they were entitled to do whatever they wanted with whoever they pleased. Rather, I felt ruined and didn’t even make it inside. On the ledge outside, I remember, one hand on my face, the other bent unrecognisable, unseen but outside, while they walked away. I left a black-fingered handprint on the wall in the hall, meters from my door. It’s still there. This mark which embodies all of that shrewd aching. 

When I was invited to events and didn’t show up. When I made excuses. When I hurled all my force at doors in avoidance. When my friends weren’t my friends, they were my competition and I lost, always. 

When you said ‘I Could Love You’. When I let someone else walk home in the abusive evening. When I sat cross-legged across from him and sneered accusations without any realisation of how I had been, how I was. How things were, looking at me instead of out of me. When I said ‘Don’t Touch Me.’ When I was annoyed at their presence, irritated by their help. 

I’m so sorry. I am so disappointed in myself for how I acted. I am repentant, always. But I had lost the only two people I knew without certainty I loved, with no family-ties to their threadbare memory. No choice involved. You can only excuse actions to a thin line, though. I remember a doctor angrily exclaiming that no pain was too great to explain, during. Actions might be ignored, only for a time. Mine were inexcusable. 

I was thinking only of myself. I am penitent and earnest. I am sorry.

Grew w/o Genetics

But now is not the time for thinking out-loud. Now is the time for gluing my eyes open and forgetting how they were unnecessarily the same at 3am this morning. Throwing my weight around and ignoring the top sheet. It detracts from the duvet, I think. Conventional things like healthy, tan skin. Things I don’t have any need for, really. I never saw the ugly in an etiolate rind. Which may be a good thing, as my exterior takes on only a slight caramel stain even when exposed to hazardous hours of sunlight. Something about less wrinkles, my Mother says, something about English Rose. Something about iron or vitamin D, I think. Something about summers spent lingering behind desks or undercover. Something about as little skin as possible, something about please don’t make me bare my limbs. Something about girls in little dresses making me bow my brassy head.

I’ll probably be too busy for all of that anyway. The summer before last, that was a bus-ride, a run-around. It was boots and tights and shorts and singlets. It was not, never, in the shade. It was brilliant blue strips of powdery self-neglect, all of us sniffing, left eyes red-rimmed and running, on the deck while the radiance was slow to set. And I said ‘This Is The Best Day.’ A pageantry of youth, all of us flighty females and masquerading men. Hollow calendars. And they said ‘You’re Back.’

Last summer, though. What a slow return I had to make but then could not.. What a cancellation of ease.. Poverty and famine. Just as the air was settling on exposed shoulders and I was smiling in acknowledgement of the outside from the inside, where I counted the hours down.. Just as I was ready to throw all that winter-romance and creased forehead and eyes to the last of the wind. Walking into that house and delivering a stunning performance to a scene I was so under-prepared for. I Just Came To Say Hi. I Just Came To Show You We Can Relive Fourteen And You Can Stay Close To Me. But there’s too much self-loathing on His bedroom floor and clothes. I was as deficient as He was defective. His body worked the right way, emptied out like it should. His mind (I swear I did not realise) so garishly distorted, black and terrible. Waiting for the screaming sombre bells and sirens, that bled out, too. And so in summer, I had nightmares and headaches and blood I couldn’t seem to remove from around my nails. I ran from the hospital that night. I ran all the way home.

So it was never destined to be anything but make-do, the stupid season. Then You went and did what you did in the car at the intersection and you bled out too, though thankfully a lot gentler. Summer never stood a chance for anyone. Natural disasters reigned supreme, and I didn’t, in the end, feel bad about anything. Comparing silly ills with major flourish’s of tragedy, on my computer screen and on the mouths of every boy that made my coffee in the morning. I would say Two Vs Millions. And the rest of us survived.

This summer, though, all that aside (may it be the last time I speak of it), I’m more than willing to brush up on stock conversation and up against deepening skin. Letting the past and passed rest, as it should be. One year on, I think things will be much changed.

Feels like puberty. Less sloppy and tawdry, though. Feels like no-one in the crowd has eyes on me, that my nail-beds aren’t shoddy. I’m holding out for a simple season.

And yes, I grew up. And developed a brand of sanity. You can stop looking out for me, as much as I appreciate the time and sadness you spent in doing so. Looking forward, not only to looking forward. I still have cinnamon with everything, that’s it though. That’s all that’s left, I guess. 

Barefaced. Again.

Keep in mind, you should be here now. Winter spirits under my skin and I am pallid again. Nobody envies the ‘unique-looking’ lurid girl. Even worse now that I’ve had to revert back to low glycemic index bullshit with no dairy or added sugar. Cue the headaches, mam! SUGAR IS IN EVERYTHING.

But you could make me flush. Or something. I don’t even mean that sexually. I could just yell about something humorous. Pull faces to make you laugh.

A brief cohort with my monetary situation. Yes, I am fucked.

And it wasn’t even that good.

I am panicking, now. I have been told I can’t leave. Because my sixteen-year-old self decided to set up an account in which to deposit funds I am not allowed to touch, under any circumstances (so it would seem), until I am twenty-six. My sixteen-year-old-self was a little bitch who had no concept of tragedy or independence. I would like to have a stern word with my sixteen-year-old-self. I would say, one day, you will want to get the fuck out of the city you love so much as of right now. You will leave your job, maybe. You will lose all independence and a great scrape of pride will come away with it. You fucking idiot.

Could have done it better myself, kind of fucked.

My little panglossian self. I would happily fumble through those four dramatic years again, just so I could grab you by the shoulders and say LOOK AT YOU NOW. The world is not roseate. Everything may or may not work out. She was all kilojoule-counting, romance-reliant, a-typical. Now she is a brutish rubbish truck of swear words and embarrassments.

On that note. I am not embarrassed by that evening because I did not want to go home with you, even if it may have seemed like that’s what I was pushing for. I did not want to go to his house or my house or your house. I just wanted to talk to someone for a while. Big fucking deal.

Someone with money must read this. I need help. I will be kicked out. I get sick at my mother’s house. I get abhorrently angry at my father’s. I have never felt such keen desperation, like I am physically grappling at the edges of a hole with no hand or foot holds. I have been to something like eighteen job interviews. I am the ultimate unwanted and the ultimate unemployable.

Sometimes I see myself as a tacky little spray-painted box. A box full of crap. And my face is changing again and it isn’t nice. I can’t even rely on my own features. ARGH I DID THIS ALL MYSELF.

Something I Thought To Record When I Loved You. When I Did. When I Did Not Know It.

Tuesday the 18th 5:52pm

I am used to older men exhaling when they walk past me at the airport, the smiles at my smudged makeup [or none at all]. I am not used to your eyes scoping out mine like I’m hiding something, but my face is bare & I’m willing to tell you everything [I promise]. An open book, so to speak. I want you to rough up every page, dog-ear all my talents and leave my faults unread and indifferent. I am not used to such close & thoughtful scrutiny. But then, you have nothing bad to say, at the end. Which I think makes me suspect what you could be hiding. And what happened with them, & if it’s as bad as I get the impression it is, I am scared. And yes, I am a little muddled up. And self-loathing. I hate the jagged edges of me you claim to be fond of. I am scared, yes, that soon you will see my flaws as not carefully placed mistakes but blossoming weeds that you can’t pull for the thorns that sting your palms.

Wednesday the 2nd 3:25pm

Feet linger, they drag, cross the damp pavement [stride home from work]. Cutting behind a church, watching the rain. It falls like a thousand blue-tipped needles. Home should be warm, open fires. Duvets that mottle and contain the bodies breath. My inner-city apartment does not ‘cut it’. I am sitting, shaking, knees up to my neck [almost]. Face just a blank, cold mask. Smile-less and maybe bland, no expression lingers on my lips. Still I cut all the corners I can, to arrive at somewhere dry and without the pin-prick points I’m feeling scatter under my eyes. Crass I may be, but right now I’m just cold. Hungry, too. Can’t eat. Picture your face. I’ve made my bed, no sheets just thin covers. I crawl into my nest, think of your feathers. How warm they’d be & how I can’t fly, I just slide, without you in step next to me.