theessaflett

[theessaflett]

'A Real-Life Dawes' : Musings on Hell Bent, Witchcraft and the Sorcery of Cooking

There’s a line in Leigh Bardugo’s Hell Bent when the protagonist, Alex, realises that she’s been underestimating Pamela Dawes, her colleague and sort-of friend. Gathered after a particularly gruelling day - it’s a ‘saving the world before lunch’ sort of book - Alex looks at Pamela as she prepares and presents food for all the team and realises that she is, in fact, powerful. Surrounded by ghosts, curses, demons and prophesies Alex has never stopped to realise that there was a witch in her own house, all along: one quietly helping and healing through the sorcery of cooking. 

I love Pamela Dawes. It was one of the best days of my life when, at a Leigh Bardugo fan event in February 2023, the excited twenty-one year olds beside me in the queue quickly christened me “a real life Dawes.” “She’s even got snacks!” one cried as, concerned by the fact that none of them had remembered to eat lunch, I found granola bars in my bag and firmly offered them to the group. When I finally reached Bardugo’s signing table, I happily mentioned the comment and she was kind enough to see how much it had meant to me and continue the hype. 

“Oh my god, yes! You’ve got the hair!”

 It’s wasn’t just the hair, or the granola bars, or general lack of glossy femininity. Dawes is about my age, the same gap in years between her and the other characters in the book as there was between me and the twenty-one year olds in the queue. She complains about blood stains not coming out of clothes and rashly made plans which hinge too much on optimistic bravery and not enough on pragmatic strategy. And when the heroes limp home having heeded none of her sensible advice, she makes them hot chocolate. If it’s a particularly bad day she adds an extra marshmallow. 

It’s not surprising that Alex, the main character in the Ninth House series, takes a whole book and a half to realise that Dawes is magical. Dawes is quietly anxious; Dawes is quietly sad; Dawes is quietly lost. Dawes is, overall, quiet. A woman who has gotten lost inside the depths of academia and academic promise and wants to stay there, isolated and safe. To a brash, bold survivor like Alex, Dawes seems weak. Someone who hides, even from herself. But by the end of Hell Bent, there is the promise of more. Dawes is, finally, beginning to realise her potential.

I lived in London for seven years. For those seven years, I didn’t really cook.  There just wasn’t time, and besides, cooking just didn’t seem appealing when I was constantly on the edge of nausea. A mixture of travel sickness, tiredness and stress meant that I never felt well, my upset stomach such a constant that I stopped even noticing it. It was only when a colleague of mine described the symptoms of her chemotherapy treatment and I realised it was what I pretty much felt like all the time in my day to day life that the reality of the situation truly hit.

This isn’t working. 

I moved out of London soon after, but then: 2020. 

I tried to use all my free time in my family home to get back into cooking - I’d loved cooking as a teenager, surely it was possible to learn to love it once more - but the nausea remained. It’s not much fun coming up with new recipes when you have to lie in bed for two hours afterwards with debilitating IBS.

 September came and went. I moved into my new flat in Aberdeen; I started a Masters course, first in person and then online when the University gave up and moved the degree fully onto Zoom after Christmas break. 

First one person dropped out, then two. By the end of the Masters I was the only full-time student left. 

Still, I tried to cook. 

As someone with more food intolerances than would seem physiologically possible, my only chance of eating nice food is to make nice food. It felt like failure after failure. Pesto and pasta would work for a while; then it would make me ill. One week I’d be able to eat feta; the next it would give me acid reflux. Alone in my flat, lost in the depths of academia and hiding from even myself, I despaired at my situation. 

Someone who loved food, cursed to feel continually poisoned by it. 

Still, I tried to cook. 

A year went by, then two. 

I went to see a health specialist, who advised that along with the long, long list of foodstuffs I’d independently realised I couldn’t eat - “you’re the second most severe case I’ve seen in twelve years”- I also should avoid starch, and anything fermented. I stopped battling with tofu. I cut down on gherkins. (I refuse to not eat any gherkins. A woman needs reasons to get up in the morning.) Gradually, lopsidedly, in a very non-linear sort of way, trying to cook slowly turned into cooking. 

There are no guarantees with food. There is still the chance that a meal which worked fine yesterday will make me feel ill today. That bread is one day off? You tried to eat that cheese whilst upset about something? Forget about it. But as my life slowly levels, my ability to digest, to enjoy food seems to be slowly levelling with it. And, as it does, something else is slowly coming to the surface too.

To be a hedge witch is to be a witch alone. Classic descriptions of the witch type are ‘someone who practices rituals like tarot […] or has some physic ability […] a wise woman living on her own.’ The definition, as found on Mabon House’s website, expands to describe this woman ensuring the well being of those she loves though imbuing magical thoughts into everyday small tasks. Such as cooking. 

If someone was to ask me what sort of witch I aspired to be - not a topic of conversation which comes up very often, it has to be said - I would probably say hedge witch through sheer necessity. There’s not exactly a ready made, non-gender essentialist, queer-friendly coven knocking at my door ready to go, after all. But that’s not the only reason.

As this settling continues and I level out into my late twenties, as I finally have the space to sort through the baggage and trauma I’ve somehow acquired in the last ten years, it’s a relief to find truer versions of myself buried down deep under all the masks, personas and lies. 

The world wasn’t ready for me, aged 17. It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t kind. 

So many things were lost in my desperate scrabble for survival. 

Cooking wasn’t the only thing to fall through the gaps. 

As I sit here writing this, however, I am a woman who is in the process of reclaiming herself. The reclaiming isn’t finished. I’m not sure if reclaiming can ever be finished. But as I look at the dried garden mint hanging from the wall, the incense smoke in the air, the flickering candle on the altar and the kettle on the boil I know that I, just like Dawes, am beginning to step into my potential.

If food is a hedge witch’s power, then I am becoming powerful indeed. Friends who come round to my house are full of home-made snacks and herbal tea by the time they leave. My parents might not eat the same meals as me - it’s just easier for me to eat solo when they have dinner at 6pm and I’m lucky if I’ve remembered about the concept of dinner by 8pm - but I often gift them little offerings, fresh from my own plate.  A roast potato each, eaten with much delight. An unexpected batch of stewed apples cooked with cinnamon and nutmeg, enough for all three of us. This year, for the first time, I’ve volunteered myself as the cook for Christmas Day lunch.

When Bardugo wrote the character of Pamela Dawes, she wrote a character for all of us who aren’t very good at remembering we’re the protagonists of our stories. Perhaps confidence, like mine, was forced out of us with blank looks and unkind jokes. Perhaps confidence wasn’t something we were very good at to begin with. It’s been a beautiful thing to see my own confidence grow this past year, every tray, pot and tin, every meal cooked, leading me back to my most magical self.

“You’re a real life Dawes!”

I’m beginning to think that those twenty-one year olds may have been right. 

[theessaflett]

my grandmother was never mad

(a poem inspired by a 1937 photograph: a graduating class of all-male medical students)

blank eyes straight tie rigid in your nothingness

faded pencil and folded corners

no words, now just an empty briefcase sat in the attic heavy with dust

kept as a warning by the wife who outlived you

some of you believed in the art of doing good some of you believed in your own goodness

an oath sworn in bright yellow light and white cold metal slick tools and prescription bottles sleeves rolled up to get at the rot

clean suit slick hair clear mind

carefully clinical in your uncaring

oh you were all such good students in the lesson of learning to be always right

[theessaflett]

superstition

my lecturer tells us never to call something superstition

that the correct term is supernatural belief and that any other descriptors will result in a failing grade

but there’s nothing natural in the way I still look for you after all these years or how gifted I have become at making the everyday into the otherworldly squinting until I am surrounded by signs sent only for me

my course book is full of the advice of others, long forgotten what to do with a placenta or a house that’s cursed

how to bring someone into a marriage how to lead someone through death

I think about fragmented community

on the lives lived in that book and how none of them could have been mine

I write an essay about hand fasting with all the windows half open for good luck as I type

I hand it in with my fingers crossed

as I walk through the courtyard I hear you in a seagull’s cry

and for a moment my belief is built on good faith

[theessaflett]

rotten empire

those who rewrite history are destined to deploy it facts and figures rearranged to fit their ideas of what the future should be

a man in a garden asks me about truth and I don’t have an answer to give him I talk about america and he nods, satisfied two liars taking comfort in the words left unsaid

my twitter feed is a masterclass in repetition rotten empire and street party bunting

we were benevolent really weren’t we? oh god

please let us have been benevolent otherwise we were

we

no

we’re

it's

no

we cannot

yes

we must

have been

benevolent

it’s not our fault that they were

so bad

at being grateful

[theessaflett]

feminist

you say that you’re working for the common good but what good is a female movement so focussed on female biology that it’s forgotten why we started this fight?

facebook Iivestreams spewing hate facism hiding behind gender critical rhetoric an icon, a hashtag, a raised fist a cut up flag

you tell us that we forget to be grateful but is this really what you fought for?

hope turned to hate feeds festering with feral witch hunts

those first wave feminists would be so proud

of how selective you are

in the kind of woman you believe to be deserving of any kind of rights

[theessaflett]

Moss 

Elisabeth Flett

Eyes blurred with tears, I thrashed through the weeds and foliage at the edges of the woods, too angry to care about the burn of nettle stings as I pushed forward, away from the village, away from Alex’s words and Alex’s eyes. 

“I’m not like you. I’m not strong.”

I didn’t feel strong now, already covered in mud from my half-run across the field, the bottoms of my jeans stiff with muck. The branches of an oak scraped against my face as I stumbled along, not even knowing where I was going except from that it needed to be far away from where I’d just been. Alex’s kitchen, always faintly smelling of freshly baked bread, her art hung on the wall, her collection of Disney mugs sitting on the shelf. She’d built that shelf herself when she was fourteen, her father handing her the nails. The fact it still hadn’t fallen down said a number of things about her. Her durability. Her determination. Her ability to hold onto the things she created, no matter the cost. 

Even if those things included a life built on a lie. 

“I’m not strong.”

She hadn’t thought to mention that when we’d met outside the corner shop last August, when sunsets still smeared the sky late into the night and the world seemed softer around the edges. Hadn’t said it out loud as we lay on my sofa watching Halloween films instead of going out with her friends. 

“I just want time with you, Jessie. Just you. Why are you acting like that’s a bad thing?”

She’d fallen silent over the Christmas holidays, yes, the occasional texts distant and lacking detail. Yes, she’d liked my presents. I knew without asking she hadn’t opened them in front of her family.

No, she was still at her grandparents. 

Yes, she’d let me know when she was back. 

No. Yes. No. 

Still, I clung to her. Her honey blonde hair, her freckles, her slight overbite, the scar just above her knee where she’d fallen off her skateboard aged eight because she wanted to prove her brother wrong about what girls could and couldn’t do. 

“I’m not strong.”

I knew this was coming, of course I knew this was coming. It hadn’t ever hurt this badly before. But then, none of those other girls had been Alex. What did I think would happen when I went over there in this January gloom, when I knew she was back home not because she told me, but because I saw her car parked outside her father’s bakery? My ability to wilfully ignore what’s right in front of me is unparalleled but even I knew that it was over when I saw the stricken look in Alex’s eyes as she opened the door and realised it was me on the other side. 

Coughed. Fumbled her words. Stared at the floor. 

Invited me in only to smash me into bits. 

In that minute, in that field, I hated her. Hated her shitting awful parents. Hated this damp, middle of nowhere wee village with one bus stop, nowhere open after 5pm and about forty B&Bs full of city dwelling hill walking idiots.  

My momentum began to slow, breath fogging in the air as cold began to creep in and my anger began to ebb, replaced with a far less welcome aching sadness.

I could hear my mother’s voice, comforting me as I cried on the staircase of my childhood home, heart freshly broken from my childhood sweetheart.

“She’s just scared, love. Her father’s the minister, after all. People do cruel things when they’re scared. Especially to those they care about.” 

 I stopped walking, suddenly aware that I’d known where I was headed all along.

The woods at the edge of the village were thick, a dense dark green which both welcomed and warned. I’d loved crawling through the torn, rusting iron fence and exploring around inside as a child. One time I’d gotten lost, horribly so, and had wandered around for what felt like hours before finally finding my way back. My mum said that I swore a “moss man” helped me find my way out to the fields, though I didn’t remember that part myself and it had always sounded like one of her tall tales. She’d always loved stories. 

I was at the heart of the wood now, the only sounds muffled bird song and whispering leaves. Everything felt different, somehow, now that I’d stopped to notice. I was aware of my breath, coming fast. The cold numbing my hands, the nettle stings covering my bare forearms, the feeling of my thin cotton shirt, sleeves rolled up at the elbows, the material stuck to my back with rapidly cooling sweat. I didn’t need to be told to know that this was where I’d gotten lost as a child. The moss man. Ghille Dhu. Friend to all children. Protector of the trees. I certainly felt like a lost child again, adrift and afraid, and I wouldn’t mind a protector. Just for a little bit. For a moment, whilst I pulled myself back together. It was tiring, being this lonely.

I tilted my head up to the sky, my view obscured by snaking branches and thick foliage. I remembered a rhyme taught to me in nightlight darkness, my mother tucking in my duvet as she told yet another tale.  She’d told me to turn anti-clockwise as I said the words and I found myself doing so, a strange sense of deja vu coming over me. I remembered it now, the time I’d been here before as a little girl. I wondered if the Ghille Dhu still lived here, what with the forest being cut down more every year. Perhaps he’d gone off to seek better woods, if that was something that faeries could even do. 

“Ghille Dhu, Ghille Dhu, don’t let the woods take me. Aon, dha trì…let me see what I can see…” 

I stopped turning and looked around, waiting for something to do…something. Nothing. I Tried to recall what had happened last time but it was still just a vague blur. Ghille Dhu was a spirit for children, after all, and I’d left my childhood behind a long time ago. I wasn’t meant to remember him, not now. A bad feeling began to twist in my stomach. I’d had no right to try and summon a faerie that wasn’t meant for me. A biting chill began to snake through the light breeze, the air turning icy. I realised that the wind in the branches was the only sound to be heard, now that the birds had stopped singing. When had the birds stopped singing? Shit. 

Too late I remembered my mother’s other stories about those who lived in the woods, the sorts of spirits that took children somewhere else entirely than back to their own safe beds. The sky was darkening now, the breeze turning insistent. Cynicism abandoned, I frantically fumbled with the buttons of my shirt, taking it off only to hastily pull the sleeves inside out and then put the shirt back on again, still outside in. I was about to unbutton my jeans to turn them inside out too when a voice startled me so badly I yelped, nearly falling over instead. 

“I see you’re not completely stupid, then.”

I jerked my head round to try and see the owner of the bored sounding voice, the wind whipping my short, choppy hair into my eyes.

“Hello?” I croaked, regaining my balance as the wind died down back into the soft lull it had been just a few moments ago. 

“I’m not who you tried to summon,” said the voice again. It was a voice made out of fog, of mouldering bark and three day old mud. 

“But I think you’re a bit old for the Ghille, don’t you?”

Without warning, she was there, standing right in front of me.

Moss stained hands and eyes like stone

The forest itself seemed to be whispering now, the words snaking around me like tree roots. 

Show me where I’m meant to go 

Woman full of green and gold

Show me what I’m meant to know 

I realised that my own mouth was making the words, with a voice which was not my own. I tried to turn, to run, but the forest had me now.

Hair like lichen, skin like bark, I promise I can pay your price

Promise once, I’ll promise twice, promise for a different life

“I’m not-“ I mumbled, stumbling back and tripping over my own feet in my desperate need to get some distance between myself and the figure standing in front of me. Or at least, almost standing in front of me; depending on which way I looked at her she was either there or not; she flickered and blurred round the edges, more a suggestion of a person than anything solid. 

“That wasn’t-“

“Those were the words you should’ve said, lass,”

The figure calmly strolled over to where I floundered in the mouldering leaves, trying to regain my balance but only managing to slide around in the mud. 

“But you’ve said them now so no ill done, eh?”

“Should’ve?” I managed, giving up trying to get back up on my feet and just lying there in the dirt instead, frozen in terrified confusion. 

“Aye. Well, it’s me you’ll be wanting. No need to bother my brother, eh?”

“…Brother?”

“Good goddess woman, are you a cuckoo?”

I had nothing to say to that, so just mutely stared up at her, my thoughts a jumble of hysteria.  

Surely this was it. What would death by faerie even look like?

How long would it take for anyone to realise I’d vanished?

Would Alex be suspected of something, being the last person to see me alive, my jumper and coat still hung neatly on the back of the chair at the dinner table?

Or maybe she’d just hide them, pretend she’d been alone all afternoon.

Glad to see me gone.

“You got a name, lass?”

The question cut through my panicked internal rambling.

The woman was peering down at me, more solid now. 

Her eyes were wrong, a flinty grey that belied her otherwordliness, but the rest of her now looked like a middle aged mother currently in a new age phase which probably included mushroom foraging and experimenting with weed. 

Her clothes were loose, draping folds of fabric in lush shades of green, brown and black. Her hair was salt-and-pepper grey and dark, dark brown, corkscrew curls which exploded out in all directions. 

She did not look unkind; she looked exasperated. 

“J-“ my voice had stopped working, and only a croak came out. 

I swallowed, and tried again. “Jessie. Jessie Macrae.”

“Aye, I remember you. Got a habit of getting lost in here, haven’t you Jessie?” Twice didn’t seem to entirely deserve the label of habitual behaviour but I kept my mouth shut. 

“What’s your name?” I asked, my voice still cracked around the edges. 

“You can call me Mairead. I don’t have time for all that pageantry my siblings love so much. Those that call me are too old for that sort of thing.”

“Who do call you?”

“There are many ways to be lost, Jessie. I’m here for those who need more than a lit lamp and a guiding hand. Come. Walk with me.”

Dazed with the strangeness of it all, I hesitantly joined her as she strode off across the forest floor, keeping pace as we moved yet further into the depths of the woods. The trees seemed to be blurring at the edges as we walked, a sensation of falling both simultaneously downwards and upwards making me stumble as I tried to keep up with Mairead. She patted my arm absentmindedly. 

“Don’t give it mind, lass. You’re in my woods now. Not meant for humans.” 

Before I could think about how worrying a sentence that was the other woman turned to me, a frown on her face.

“Now. Jessie. What do you need to find?”

I opened my mouth to say that nothing was lost, that this was all a terrible mistake, that I should never have come here, to beg to go home. 

Instead I found myself talking, talking like I’d never talked before, not to Alex, not to my mother, not even to myself. I spoke of sadness, the heavy blackness that sat on my chest in the middle of the night, too terrible to name. I spoke of heartsickness, of heartbreak, of loving without being loved in return, of the second-hand pride flag sellotaped to my bedroom wall, of quiet despair and mouldering dreams. I spoke of aloneness, of hope, of shouldering expectations and tiny rebellions. In that place in-between everything, nothing left apart from Mairead and the smell of moss, I spoke myself into the air until the air had heard everything, held everything. 

Until I was empty and hollow, and wanting for nothing but an answer.

“How do I fix this, Mairead? How do I fix me?”

She clicked her tongue, frustrated with me yet again. “The second question is a daft one, and you know it. Nothing needs fixing about you, except perhaps your sense of direction. No, the first question is the interesting one and that’s for sure. How do you want to fix it? You believe yourself to be lost. 

Which path do you want to find?”

And then, with a final blurred step, I found myself at the edge of the woods, staring at the rusty metal fence I’d crawled through… I checked my watch. Just a few minutes previously. That…couldn’t be right…?

I glanced down at my clothes, still inside out, my breath uneven. Then, with a briskness borne out of a sudden decision, I rolled my shirt sleeves down my goosebumped arms and struck out for the house I’d called home for too many years. Nothing had changed, as far as I could see; the fields still dimly stretched out towards the mountains, the air still icy with January fog. Nothing, except for me. The more I thought about it as I trudged towards the village, the more I wasn’t sure about what exactly had happened inside the woods. By the time I’d reached my front door I was fairly sure that the only unusual thing about that long, aimless walk was that I hadn’t died of hypothermia wandering around with no coat. 

But by the time I was standing in the shower, water turned to boiling, I knew what I needed to do next. I’d spent too long in this small life, holding onto small hopes. 

The village still talks about how I left the next day, just two suitcases and my guitar thrown in the back of my mother’s rusting Ford Fiesta and the house keys left with an elderly neighbour too confused to ask questions. Alex was coming out of her father’s bakery as I drove by, her face tired. I’d left her a note before I’d packed the car, slid under her door along with the DVD she’d leant me last November. Perhaps she would read it. Perhaps she wouldn’t. For now, though, it was time to look forwards, not back. A voice I wasn’t entirely sure was my own was whispering in my head, and I knew it was right. 

I had a new path to find. 

[theessaflett]

Zillenial 

Zillenial sounds like a furniture moving service but apparently it is my identity 

an outsider even when it comes to when I was born 

1996

the last year of millennials 

too late for spice girls and S Club 7 

just on time for that book series none of us can enjoy ever again 

born 12 months too early to be able to pull off a bucket hat 

I roll the word zillenial around in my mouth and it sounds like dial up internet connection 

keeee donnnnk ke donnk keee

nokias and thick white keyboards 

that one plastic pink Barbie tv everyone wanted in their bedroom 

the 2004 tsunami which made me avoid water for weeks 

a vague recollection of millennium fireworks and a stronger one of US politics 

Epic Rap Battles of HISTORYYYYYY

Pitch Perfect cup songs and casual homophobia 

Zillenials can remember life before smart phones, if they try hard enough 

battered blackberries, keys clicking with smug self importance 

I hear she’s, like, a massive dyke now

Omg that’s sooooo gay 

What a wee lezzo 

a chrome coloured cd player you had to hold on the bus in both hands like an ancient Druid making an offering to the gods of technology 

skipping that one song that never worked because of the massive scratch worked into the disk from when you accidentally stepped on it in your black Clark shoes 

I look so fat in this top it’s honestly disgusting, like, kill me now, I cannot be a size 12 this summer 

uggs worn in all weather

compulsory paired with Jack Wills or Abercrombie & Fitch 

oh my god that was like, so random??? 

I’m not being funny she’s actually such a wee weirdo 

it’s hard to know where you stand when you know what a fax machine was but you can’t read a physical map 

(it’s the cognitive dissonance for me)

we’re the awkwardly old cousin at the family BBQ who doesn’t know whether to sit at the kids table or with the adults 

the runt of the litter or the magpie in the nest 

Team Jacob?! Are you MAD? 

Eewwww no-one likes McFly

get in loser we’re going to primark 

but even though our backs hurt 

and we don’t understand Euphoria 

and we know our Gen Z overlords will never truly accept us as their own no matter how much we would love that for us 

when I look back on our youth 

nostalgia never quite works 

the rose tinted glasses slightly cracked for those of us who never quite managed to fit in 

[theessaflett]

Musician Wanted for Birthday Party 

In the upstairs conference room of an art gallery too famous to name I realise that hell is indeed other people if those people are glossy with entitlement 

the event manager has been trying to ‘fix my look’ for five minutes now 

(the reason I’m not fitting in with her brand is that I am neither thin or heterosexual but she hasn’t worked that out yet)

her designer high heels slipping on spilt champagne as she strides away to chastise someone holding a miniature horse sculpture 

grabbing oversized pastel balloons with steel in her eye

“have none of you looked at the vision board?”

I’m offered free alcohol and drink it like medicine 

the second half of the crystal glass downed in a cupboard because it turns out it wasn’t actually for me, the event manager pushing me up against the wall as she demands for me to “finish it before I ruin the reputation of this whole establishment”

(for two slightly inebriated people holding onto each other in a dark broom closet the whole thing is disappointingly unsexy)

later 

sharing whisky from a hip flask behind a potted plant 

the thirty-something princess for hire offers advice as she rearranges her bra and checks her lipstick in the reflection of her iPhone with grim ease 

“Stick with me, kid. It’ll be over before you know it.”

I look out at the candy coloured chaos 

designer children destroying everything in their sight as their parents ignore them 

busy instagramming a table of pink and purple macaroons no-one is actually eating because they all look like Gwyneth Paltrow 

a screaming toddler throws a shaker at me it hits me in the face 

the stinging bruise it leaves feels like rock bottom 

hardly anyone notices when I leave early  

the princess glancing over 

 a weary two finger salute shot my way as I snag another glass of champagne on my way out 

[theessaflett]

Two Girls and a Painting

we’re standing in the national portrait gallery when you turn to me

mischief in your eye 

I don’t know you well yet

I barely know you at all 

but that one glance makes me want to start 

to puzzle you out until I can speak your mind back to you without a single falter 

you say that the portrait reminds you of prose and begin to quote Shakespeare 

a love sonnet, no less

and I realise with sudden delicious terror that this is what it is to be wooed 

cheeks flushed as I stare at the floor 

unable to meet your beauty head on 

both desperate for you to finish and desperate for this to never end 

just two girls and a painting 

and the promise of something good 

[theessaflett]

sometimes I think about the robots

sometimes I think about the robots

the ones who can dance but are programmed to kill

tools of oppression twirling for the camera

legs reaching

body grinding

synchronised scuttling

flips

dips

bowing to applause they cannot hear

how human

to make something kind and then teach it to be cruel

[theessaflett]

ghost house

in the space between boom and shimmering explosion I turn to you and ask if you’ve ever seen anything this beautiful

you look at me

holding onto my half-eaten overpriced candy floss with barely concealed irritation as I unsuccessfully try to capture the fireworks on the camera of my 2016 mobile phone

I offered to share when I bought it

you said you don’t do refined sugar

now my mouth is sticky and I feel sick but finishing it has begun to feel like less like a treat and more like making a point

you say that plenty of things are more beautiful than an overcrowded late night carnival

you don’t add that one of them is me

we went to the ghost house

you wanted to

and I wanted to have a nice evening

we held hands in the dark

I knew your heart wasn’t in it

[theessaflett]

april 2020

the first time that the pain wouldn’t stop

I went looking for answers and was given codeine instead

I threw up for a week

dry retching into a toilet bowl bought by my parents as the world fell apart around me  

everything was wrong and my body knew it

the sky reduced to a postcard

the trees to twigs

I lay in bed and thought about reasons not to stay alive

netflix asking me to confirm my existence as shadows moved across the wall

a consultant who works out of an NHS facility basement room on the outskirts of Dunfermline writes confidently with biro onto cheap off- white paper that I am ‘prone to episodic depression’

at time of this diagnosis she has known me for exactly 43 minutes

she tells me to join an online anxiety and depression support group

(I don’t)

she tells me to find a different, more stable career

(I nod, politely)

she tells me she’ll get the GP to contact me about different procedures and that she’ll be in touch

no-one gets in touch

about anything at all

(I am not surprised by this)

I tell the consultant about the pain that never stops with words now slick from overuse

she asks if I’ve tried codeine and I laugh

that april sometimes seems like yesterday

[theessaflett]

Scissors

you advertise your stupidity with joy

a butchered pride flag held up high

scissors still in your hands

arms wrapped around one another like you think this is camaraderie

fierce bright smiles lighting up the photograph like a Halloween lantern

“LGB: stronger without T!”

I stare at your twitter post and think of a picture I saw once of fascists on a summers day

grinning as they gesture to their fabric armbands

the moment frozen in monochrome

and I don’t need to wonder where this all ends because I already know

has no-one told these fools the first lesson of being queer?

the one whispered at bedsides and spray painted on the underpass and warned about in that poem too famous to be taken seriously by the people who really need to reread it

once it starts

and it has already started

your pick me politics won’t save you when they come to your door  

policy pitchforks in hand

hate in their mouth

blood on their boots

no-one left to help you

so please

put down the scissors

before it is too late for all of us

[theessaflett]

Unfurled

Eyes wide, you ask me how to

keep despair at the door

your fire is dust and ash, your candle flickering

we both know it won’t last the night

the wind howls

hungry

as the two of us hold on against the dark

our feet muddy from walking the path so many laid before us

there aren’t many of us left these days

our faces still upturned

trying to see the stars even as the world crumbles to dust

I say what I always say, my fingers touching your hair in the moonlight

Despair is no match for the two of us

And as I watched you sleep

Hands uncurled

I almost believed it

[theessaflett]

Retrospect

“You’re never exactly short for words, are you?”

My friend laughs but it is not a kind sound

My body curling in on itself as I smile back in  response in the hope I can make her kinder by willpower alone

In the wish that this friend will stay my friend if I say nothing in the right places and everything in others

I always seem to need too much attention

Take up too much space

Desire too much affection

My efforts at fitting into my allotted slot never entirely successful

Something always sticking out

too loud

too clumsy

too big or too honest

Sit down

Why are you moving your arms like that

You’re being weird again

Talk quieter

That’s so embarrassing

Why can’t you just be… less…you?

Oh you know what I mean

you have so many fucking feelings

I tell my therapist about my younger self in words far from gentle and she says that perhaps I was never the loser

she likes my shirt in that photo

I seem fun

smart

brave

That I’ve made myself pitiable in retrospect to make sense of other’s cruelty

To give myself a reason

A cause

A purpose

she knows that I think if I just do things right next time around then the world will right itself too

she suggests that I hold onto the idea with too hard a grasp

we have been here before but today for some reason I am suddenly stunned by her kind harshness  

I open my mouth to explain all the ways I need to hang my hopes on my own failings

But for once there is nothing for me to say

[theessaflett]

Fox

it’s not that surprising you saw a fox

you say

eyes rolling

they’re pretty common you know

but oh

there was no commonness in the air that night

not in that breath

when I turned the corner and she did too

the two of us staring at each other

for a second

held in place by eternity

[theessaflett]

Sitting in the Second Row at a Climate Activism Meeting

we can all only hold a certain amount of truth in our hands before our sanity slips through our fingers

the Gen Z activist onstage tells us about soft climate denial and hard government policy and I nod along whilst thinking about the way that it took me until 2pm today to just get out of bed

the way that the shower water felt like a victory, clean clothes a triumph

how my body aches

how I’ve not really truly felt anything for a while now and how I don’t really want that to change

I look up at her

loosely tied boots and a vintage anarchy T-shirt

hands clenched around the mic as she tells us all that now is the time for action

that if we all work together then we might have a chance

I look around the room

people nodding

and I feel old and sick and sad and tired

we can all only hold a certain amount of truth before it starts to burn us

and I had to drop some of it a long time ago to survive

she come up to me afterwards, speaking of civil disobedience and non violent arrests

I hover close to her

hoping to catch some of her determined hope

she walks away before it truly takes hold