One blue foil sweet wrapper, in pieces, found between the underlip of the carpet and the skirting board in my childhood bedroom. I found the hazelnut Baci wrapper – a chocolate called Kisses in Italian – shredded apart, almost unrecognisable, but not quite. I saw it and immediately remembered the last kiss I had given to the person who had eaten that chocolate in that room. Memorabilia. I gathered every last piece, confetti’d metal, and put it in an envelope to keep.
One bleached blonde hair, coarse, tucked between my pillow and the mattress cover. Half brown, half yellow. I found it a week after the head from where it had grown had lifted from sleep to catch a train for work. I left it there. Wanted it close.
One seashell, muddy, with a hole bore by the waves - hidden in a jewellery box on a bookshelf at home. With a wire wrapped around it, and some string tied around that – a makeshift necklace made to ease me into falling in love for the first time. Ten years later, I knew exactly where to find the hidden note – I FANCY YOU – in biro on the underside. I kept it safe.
These are the receipts from bodies that gather like driftwood. I want to eat them up. Fill my insides with litter. Fill myself with rainbow microplastics. Secrets. I want to be a snow globe of memorabilia. I want to slosh in saccharinity.
Every time I leave the hospital, I walk by a hotel called Arosfa. The word - in white writing on a black and grey background not dissimilar to the scans I spend time looking at in the surgery, from the ultrasound, with the camera and the cold jelly and the machine that shows me what my heartbeat sounds like from the inside of my body, and what a whole other life could look like too - feels like an order.
The word, when translated from my home-tongue, means
a place to stay.
Doctors are the writers of the heaviest realities. They use words with a surgical precision. They know the difference between the word baby and tissue. Between it and they. Between body and matter. Their hesitation before speaking draws a silence as bright as the first day of summer. It blinds. It overwhelms.
The / tissue / is still remaining. The / matter / is getting smaller but / it / is still there.
I had an abortion in September / It was unsuccessful / I was given two options / to surgically remove what remained at seventeen weeks / or wait for my body to remove everything itself, and last week, my body tried my best/ I bled / pieces / fragments / glitters / pebbles. I bled away whispers. I bled away / ideas. I bled away promises. I bled away / morsels. I cried disappointment and hope from one eye each. I melted into this new edition of myself. I crawled into the pain. I was/ a / baby. That word I can’t say anymore. I was / scared. Everything was loud and bright. I thought it was done / I thought.
Then, today, I was told that the cluster of body and tissue and matter and person and promise and thing from which all of these little pieces fell, and fragments cracked, and light glittered, and stones eroded, and ideas whispered away, down the drain and into my gusset – had shrunk, but not disappeared. Withered. Worn down like a shell by the sea or a foil wrapper from a piece of confectionary. I have confetti insides. Shards from a blown bomb. Little kisses all across my lining. Sand.
On the bus home, I listen to the same song, over and over and over and over –
I am a mother
A baby
Coming back to you
Coming back to you
I am the root
I am the leaf
I am the big tree
You grew beneath
Coming back to you
I’m coming back to you
Arosfa will be the name of the first child I keep. I will name my first child Arosfa because I want the first child I keep to see themselves as a place to stay. Their body will be a place to find rest. Their body will be a place to find stillness – but not for anyone else. Not for boyfriends or girlfriends or partners or lovers. Not for greedy lonely people or for sad people, and not even for me. Their body will be for them, and them alone. A place to stay with themselves. A place to stay.
They will be named Arosfa, too, because I will have been their place to stay. I will have been their little hotel, for a little while - a temporary place to stay before their permanence. Their body will be my body, and then it won’t anymore. In naming them, I will be naming myself, in a way. Our bodies will divide from one to two. Our sharing place will disconnect like icecaps splitting on a steady sea. And, when I decide to keep Arosfa, the word stay will mean more to me. The word stay will be magic.
The word stay will be everything.
The word stay won’t mean just for a little while. Or even for longer than expected.
The word stay will mean forever.
I'm Coming Back To You
Utterly beautiful x
As paradoxical as it sounds, I really enjoyed that. Beautifully painful, painfully beautiful.