This weekend, I drove to a building on the outskirts of a dying town, pebble dashed and crumbling at its edges. I rung the doorbell and waited for a while at the waterlogged step, and looked at the remnants of a charred building opposite. Rain was surrounding – the kind that’s hard to imagine actually landing with impact or noise. A sort of mist. I tapped my feet and looked at the ribcage of beams that were, slowly but definitely, being filed away by the weather across the garden. Weeds wiggled.
Eventually, I was handed a package, and took myself away. I stole a chocolate chip cookie from the bakery of the supermarket and ate it in the fruit aisle, looking at the waxed peel on the apples.
I took one of the tablets on the Saturday, and four different ones on the Monday. I let them dissolve under my tongue and, with them, dissolved too, in part, dissipating. My sister held my hand and held me up. I wobbled like a loose tile, then slept for eleven hours.
My body is a sandcastle now. It softens. Loses its integral strength. I am battered by waves. A granular body.
I have come undone.
That night, after the tablets and the pain, and the sickness and the worry, I dreamed of oak leaves holding on with every tenuous thread of their own makeup. I dreamed of hope and health – that promised place I honestly have no memory of at this point in the day, when sleep creeps in but my eyes resist it.
I eat marmite on a bagel. Burn the first one. Chew the second.
I write a text to my friend and then delete it before she sees it.
Ignore that, I tell her, and I ignore it too.
When we’re forced into realising that our body is the driver, the only thing left to do is ride with it.
The TV tells me to go on holiday. I go to sleep instead. This time, I dream of seeds. Little ones the shape of teardrops. I plant them in an egg carton and they grow into a body.
The night between the different pills, white and chalky and full of promise, I watched a film called Men. In it, Harper goes to a house in the country to heal from pain and trauma, but instead of leaving it in London, it finds her. She runs towards it, circles it, photographs it, punctures it – manifested in men with oak leaves protruding from their foreheads like folkloric symbols. She wavers, defiant, survives – all while wearing a pink dress not dissimilar in shape to a dress I wear all the time. These men crawl towards her and multiply, give birth to themselves, slippery, new. Over and over and over. Their bodies are their limitations. They are a full stop, and a semicolon. They can’t outrun themselves.
Harper hears a noise and goes outside to see what’s happening. She watches as every apple from an apple tree falls to the ground at once, in slow motion. It’s a moment that defies nature, and how beautiful it is. How powerful it is. How limitless.
Similarly, I am new. Every day I am different. I am bad metaphor and simile. I am like a thawing pudding. I will be good, later. For now, I am healing. I am in the countryside, in stained clothes, in suspension, too. I’m trying.
Tonight, I’ll dream of movement. Dinners, flowers in jam jars. Tonight, I may wake in the middle of the blue night and look outside of my window where too, there are apple trees, and maybe tomorrow, I’ll pick them. But today, I rest.
Moving, honest, poignant, brilliant writing. It made me cry