This is an edited version of an essay that I am not ready to share. Instead, I offer morsels, and gratitude for your welcoming of the gaps in sense.
The audio is recorded from my bed, and the quality is low.
– and in the nights that followed, curled up, shedding, I called you through the dark, asking for reassurance, or for quiet company– I felt as though the pieces inside of me were being ripped apart. Dwindling.
I was torn up.
I listen to Fields of Gold by Eva Cassidy, pulling away from the train station at half passed twelve on a Thursday afternoon.
I can’t describe it without entering misconnected metaphor. It’s red. It’s incomprehensible. It’s the division of sense and sensation. It just happens.
I couldn’t keep up.
I search for relevant paintings and am met with Tracey Emin’s ‘Week from Hell’, trying to find solace in the abjection of it all. In the red oil paint and bare canvas. The blood and skin of it all. To feel a hand and hear her tell me that it’s alright to feel disgusting, emptied out.
Her paintings tell me that it will be over in many ways, but not all, very soon.
I listen to Now I’m In It by HAIM.
In another time, the world soft and delicious and full, up the hill by the pub, in the bathroom, I found this little notebook, no bigger than the palm of my hand, leaning against a wooden mantle by the shower. Folded and unstitched with a cover that read –
It was a piece by Tracey Emin.
I felt in those weeks that I really was covered in love. So basted in it. Kiss me. Kiss me. We are in this together. Kiss me. I want to be wherever you are. This is it. This place, here. I’ll be here.
Then, this first page, so small in my hand, and full of life, and grey, it read –
I remember thinking of the intricacies of love right there, reading that, in that bathroom. The beauty in the ugliness of love. The little disgusting bits that make up a love. All the debris left about between it. Within the cracks. The magic of it lying in that mundanity, not despite it.
I read on –
So those were the pages, and I remember thinking I’m the luckiest person on Earth. I’ve found this thing, so light and open to laughter. So easily pleased, and easily upset like me. A thing that feels things so willingly, and quickly. How brilliant it is to feel together in that. To cry at the telly and laugh, and laugh at me in that mess of the world and laugh at them at the laughs and knots of feelings. Had I found a Joshua, or the opposite? It didn’t really matter.
I listen to Don’t Tell All Your Friends About Me by Blake Mills.
Sometimes, we open out in a way we never thought we would. Life asks it of us. Pushes us into a corner that makes us bloom into a version of ourselves we didn’t even know was there, and the inside of us – all disgusting like three days of rubbish – isn’t what others would expect to see. It scares us. Or repulses them. Or just isn’t as neat as they’d like it to be. Maybe we want things to be simple. Maybe that’s better than not wanting things to be simple. I’m starting to think that’s the case anyway. Maybe it’s good to want it all to go back to normal – but what is that? Life is sinks and bedsheets and sofa sleeping. Right now, it’s an endeavour. It’s a loss. A walk in clay-mud on a river bank. Life is tripping up. It’s slow. I reach out my hand now, and the one that takes it, is this other one of my own.
I listen to On the Outside by Ethan Gruska.
But after it all, I am sleeping. Out of the darkness I see red, thick, wet washes of paint around me, wrapping me in a shroud of dark, dark matter. It is a blanket, and I am tunnelled. My skin sheds anew. I am queazy, frightened of and by myself, and I call out as I go through the tunnel and silence as I come out the other end on the way home.
We used to do this together.
I grow towards an even newer version of her. An animation, she is ever moving. A spiral.
She can’t keep up or, maybe I can’t. I can’t tell anymore – but how beautiful it is to go through something and feel that something’s missing. To go through a tunnel and notice the silence at the end, after all the calling and the game and the darkness.
And, through this, I am a giant – naked – alone. I spin away, and what a sorry shame.
I spin away from it all.