1.
I keep trying to write but nothing reaches proximity anymore. I am a dog on a leash too short. I am a gaping bra, tight at the back.
2.
It’s Sunday and I listen to Small Memory by Jon Hopkin and the washing machine whir through my blood covered underwear. I feel for my own small memories but they’re too small to illustrate. I feel myself falling away from sense again.
3.
When I realised that you were growing inside of me, a story started writing itself in such haste, severity and emergency that all I could do was keep up. The sentences followed like shadows, presented themselves without insecurity. Now I sit in bedrooms and kitchens and galleries in a way that feels lonely. It’s easy to fall in love with the idea of solitude when you convince yourself you’re not alone, not really. Now writing is like waxing. Lots of dread and apprehension void of sizeable reason.
4.
At the house party, I say the word abortion with the same cadence and importance as the words hair cut or cruise. I want someone to stop me, slow me down, ask me everything there is to ask, because maybe then I will be able to write something good again, with my sentiments aired under the orange light of the kitchen hood, through the smoke from the cigarettes pointed into the rain. But they mirror what I give them, we brush over the details, and dance between my flippancy.
5.
At the bus stop on the way home, a man taps me on the shoulder to show me a photograph of his mother. She is wearing a purple cardigan and orange shoes with a blue sole. He is holding a university degree wrapped in a red ribbon. They are smiling. Without her, there is no me. I promise you I am a good person. This is my mother. Look. I tell him in Welsh that I don’t understand what he is saying, and he ignores me, doesn’t understand what I am saying, repeats himself between drunken coughs. I want him to get on the slowing bus in front of us, but he doesn’t. A woman on it, by the window, looks out at us and gives me a knowing smile. I promise you I am a good person. This is my mother.
I want to end every sentence with maybe. I promise you I am a good person, maybe. This is my mother, maybe. I want to tell you that I am not a real person, maybe. I am not an honest writer, maybe. I am not a writer at all, maybe. I am a diarist at best, maybe. I want you to read my work and see a full stop as a maybe, maybe. A symbol of uncertainty between each sentence.
6.
My sister orders noise cancelling earplugs straight to my apartment. I wear them so that I can block out the sound of my best friend and her boyfriend, leaving only the sound of my breathing and the blood between my ears. Their love is muted between two rings of rubber and plastic, and mine amplified inside of my own head. I dream about you, crying, forgetting who I am. You don’t recognise my face anymore. Your words are forming through screams and tears. Your first word will be abjection; a theory I learned about at university, about the human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between self and other.
The sound of my heart pumping blood around and out of my body makes me feel nauseous but it lulls me to sleep.
7.
I find myself drawn to songs where women are screaming, and films where women are running, and books where women are lying. I underestimate my own desire to escape sense. I end up self-editing before sharing anything.
I convince myself that the character who makes the most noise is the one off screen, out of frame, off the page. The one who never had a line to say. The one who casts a shadow over the whole story without a name, or a word, or a face. They are the subtext, or the neighbour, or the back story wedged between the wall paper. I tell myself this to feel better about my decisions. I tell myself this to remind myself of the virtue of silence and secrets. That nothing is really silent, and nothing is really a secret, either.
8.
At the sportswear shop around the corner from my apartment, I come in from the rain with my hood up. The security guard comes over to tell me that I mustn’t hide my face. It is a prophecy translated everywhere I go at the moment; the author at the writing retreat tells me the same thing; You mustn’t hide your truth. Where is your honesty?
And, honestly, I can’t find it. Not when I take my hood off, or my clothes off, or my skin off. I can’t find it in the blood pumping around my body. I can’t find it in my diaries or in my laundry bin. I can’t even find it now.
Beautiful Words Hattie