My Heart In My Throat

My health has been very poor since October last year and almost everybody I told did not act accordingly.
I don’t know what I expected, but it certainly was not this exile, this inability on their part to deal with my sickness. I stood gaping at the starting line, carrying hospital beds on my back. Hauling the weight of cab rides where I had to ask drivers to pull over so I could empty my guts onto the sidewalk. Every eyelash that fell out, that I woke up to on my pillowcase, my bare face, they weighed a tonne each. For every morning I had to kneel beside my bed before standing, those were the weight of one whole person, every time a stranger asked if I was O.K, those were heavier still. Strangers were more concerned, I peered at their furrowed brows and could not imagine this same reaction on the faces of people I had loved previously. They have finished whatever race this is months ago. The one person who kept reaching her hand back to grab at my wrists and pull me along with the rest of the world is, of course, just like me. I don’t understand, for all the time I have spent watching people and observing people and writing about them, I don’t understand their simple evasion, do they even have guilt to ignore? It’s upsetting. I am allowed to post ugly things about me being upset.

Tough Night, huh?

Yeah, well.

CHCH FOUR

Every ad I see for The National’s new album twists my arm to level me with May 2010. Forcing the face of an animal into what it did wrong, what it continues to do wrong. I said YOU and you were someone that was with ME and I dragged my fingers through your hair the same way you dragged out your vowel sounds. I would like to live through the bus rides home from the airport everyday listening to Afraid Of Everyone, I would like to live through those nights making late-night coffees for late-night flights and late-night faces with better places to go than I ever did. Again. I would like to live through these sad place-cards for my life again. 

(I still don’t have the drugs to sort it out)

The autumn here is bold and bitter, my breath has a body to it. I spill a mess of synonyms for my chilled features. And I got sick, I stayed up late eating jalapenos to aid my sinuses but it just left my mouth feeling as fevered as the rest of me. There is a lot of me to feel fevered. I push my face against the glass of my borrowed-bedroom window and marvel at the stain my cheek leaves. I was littler once, I left a smaller mark once. 

I vividly remember climbing beneath hopeless duvets with you, clambering at your little body, finding warm places to rest wind-bitten fingertips on. It doesn’t matter so much that you didn’t write it down, like me, that you don’t remember anything. Autumn in Wellington feels so full of prospects, every year, for me, because of you. The smell of the city reminds me of Central Park, your bent knees, my crooked heart. 

(Your voice is swallowing my soul)

I Never Asked You To Leave

I think about my parents dying all of the time. I would make jokes about inheriting my mother’s calves at her funeral and everybody would laugh even if they didn’t understand. I would mention my father’s blue eyes and how I only got the skin of them, this bleeding bluish line surrounding the green of my mother’s and the brown my body made for itself. 
I think about standing at my father’s casket and kissing the top of it like I saw somebody’s son do when I was small and couldn’t cry because I didn’t understand and I couldn’t fill his shoes yet. 

Previously I’d make sure everything I said to everyone as conversation fell apart was lovely. But I could never admit this to my family lest they think my love sent and blurred down phone lines or muttered against buttons of coats was less than what it was. Because I do love them, but I was also making sure the last thing I said to them was sickly. In truth it must have seemed like an afterthought.

By the way, I Love You.

When I was nineteen my sister sent me a txt message saying I’m Sorry and I Love You, and I knew what she had done. My family was not a family but we packed up like a family would and we flew to see her like a family would and we sat in a diner with her while she looked at me from across the table and I knew she was thinking
What’s The Point?
But I was on a diet I’d designed and I couldn’t eat anything off the menu. I so hungry and so tired and so high off my weight loss that I just stared back at her and thought
We Could Be Beautiful, Though.
But at least I had always said I Love You at the end of every phone call. 

And I do.

I booked my flights to Christchurch only last week to see her, this still-ruined city housing my only slightly-ruined sister, and she will turn twenty-five and she will have tried to kill herself no less than six or seven times. It’s not a boy-who-cried-wolf situation, it’s a scar that you can no longer feel, because it’s dead, so you can quite happily keep running your nails across it. But I don’t think she does, anymore.

I called to tell you things like: I Quit My Job, I Am Going To Try And Like Myself and I’m Making Small Books Would You Like To Buy One? But really I just wanted to make sure that you know I love you, quick and blunt and you might just miss it, as you put the phone down.

I Love You.
TN

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.

You Are So Sentimental (Keep Sending Letters I Love You)

My heart is a cage today.
An empty enclosure, but a cage none-the-less.

I coloured my hair that gaudy red again, two days ago, only to hurriedly colour over it with a vivid black. I don’t know what kind of person I was at twenty, to have somehow suited a festival.

Somebody on Facebook posted something about how awful it is to be considered unfeminine and I agree, some days. But to be feminine to me somehow reeks of being fertile, which I am not, so why am I so ardent in the face of bulky men who look at me sideways with disapproval. 

It is always: I hate the way people feel they are towers to my squalor. These men, and women, terribly, they stand above me in their own minds and they are in brilliant colour and parade around in a terrific spectacle while I must curse myself. I must curse myself. She must curse herself.

I wrote a list of things that I no longer want to do, things that must not ever apply to me again. I was in the gallows, brassy head bowed over a table out the back of some cafe, smoking cigarette after cigarette like my life was happening somewhere else and I was a spectator. And I wrote a lot of things about other people but all my characters were sad and bent up over themselves, peering at their twisted insides . Now I barely write at all but I would not go back to that for the world. 

I spent eighteen months inside. I spent eighteen months in bed. I spent eighteen months wondering what was so wrong and planning tattoo ideas based on a song lyric that went: Did You Love This World And Did This World Not Love You? Because, oh God, did I love the world. I stuck a sign in my window at seventeen that read SMILE, facing outwards onto the street, for everyone to see. I did want everyone to be happy. I wanted ordinary sadness based on simple, unchangeable things, for everyone. Pursed lips at the weather and bitter swears at the traffic. I only wanted that for you. Did you love this world and did this world not love you? Yes! I was screaming Yes! Yes! 

I don’t know where I am going with this. I never am, anymore.

TN

Embellished

I was once so honest, not so much poignant but precise in my truths. 
I always hated the ‘tip of the iceberg’ metaphor. It implies chilled and harboured emotions whereas I always felt somebody’s outer appearance was more like a volcano or two clasped and closed palms together. Inside my own I hold unending amounts of dirt. It fills my mouth when I go to speak and when I lie down to sleep it settles in my lungs and stiffens my joints.

I did sit down and become so worried about who would read this, every night I finished work and wanted to spin words around myself so tightly that I might feel embraced by them and comforted by them and know that somebody else did know exactly what my life looked like.

What is inside your palms, I wonder?

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It Starts To Rain

I spat ‘I love you’ like an insult,
the only person in love with you is pathetic.
A sad, drivelling little girl.

And we slept like victims, together and alone.  

Your funeral was so pretty
& all my friends were there
& they had grown their hair or cut it off.

Death has a stickability that I don’t have.

And this wasn’t supposed to be sad, but I guess it is. 

If You & I Were To Sleep With Each Other Again

If you and I were to sleep with each other again,
We would make love, furtively, earnestly and honestly.
We would take small sips at each other’s lips and feel out the new and changed parts on each other’s desperate bodies.

I am capable of loving you so much more than I love myself.

Sleep would settle unhurried and as an afterthought, a victory not worth mentioning, my arm flung across your neat hips, my lips grazing your shoulder.
In the morning you would prowl across my naked neck, we would nest in a humble acceptance of things done with ease. We would be frank and honest with our forms.

But I can picture quite clearly you getting up, eventually, subdued and strained, I can picture quite clearly you leaving.
Pulling rags over the links I love , the stretches of skin that tranquilize me. 
Just rags. You are wearing filth that hides the brilliance beneath it.  
In my mind, as it bled, I would beg you quietly to stay forever. To tread with slippered feet through my need and to match it with your own. I would say little, of course, I would not mention what we had done as the act itself began to settle into a melancholic thought, a sad and vivid memory that I could recollect at times when there was nothing else wrong with the world. 

I love everything you hide. I love the lazy way you look at me when you are sick. I love your weary smile, mocking me as I talk with my hands.
I love the elegance of your body, the free-fall of your limbs. 

I can still feel, quite plainly and achingly, the resilient skin of your waist, your lips as they sunk into mine.

I can still feel you pulling away from me.
All of this, all of you hurts so magnificently   

On: Loneliness (the human condition that isn’t human at all)

My inability to post anything about topics unrelated to sex or the sorrow associated with past relationships just irks me. 

But of all the beasts behind my diluted skin, this one strays closest to my heart. And I have never said it, for fear of vulnerability and all the painful places quick feet could strike, but the groove it’s worn is hollow, like the indent of a thumb. Anyone could reach inside my chest and clasp their palm to where it’s been, quite comfortably. I would be anyone’s fool.

Indeed it lives here, beneath my ribs, quelling excitement where it starts and stripping the colour from my cheeks. Humourless and dour, this is how it leaves me. But it never does leave.
Brushes up against my lungs, sleep is breathless and weak, did I say Some Day, once? Did I say By And By? In Due Course, In The Long Run? This is the bitter part of me, this is my solidarity, and this is permanent and this is malevolent. And so ingrained in me I can’t even feel out the seams.

Sex is a sedative, an opiate. Drugged and duped, loneliness rests and I can change small things, how I am set up, how I might better or begin myself. But the stir of its terrible limbs is inevitable. I know this. I know every place its feet might fall. 

I have so many friends, did you know? I look at them and want to exclaim I Love You! But nobody is so heartfelt anymore, we are not children, we are sad adults with restrained faces and sober airs. I have so many good friends, but they are lonely too. Their beasts reside beneath their eyes, unlike mine, with its soul shadowing my own, at least their urgency is acoustic, hear it echoed throughout every conversation. 

I have said many times before that I can feel somebody close by who will be close to me, I can sense someone on their way, I keep on saying. But I miss them, again and again, find myself staring into the eyes of customers who tell me their loves are on their way, can they hold a table for two? And at one am I walk back up the hill and clean my room, I clean my sheets, for nobody else’s pleasure but my own. And this act is steeped in the same gloom that settles when I switch the lights off and dive into dreams where I am not alone, and somebody understands my sense of humour and looks forward to my company.

I would wait for winter to sit on a park bench, in the cold, with you. I will grow my hair long so you can wrap yourself up in it.

TN