thesamemethewholetime

[thesamemethewholetime]

So, it’s time to pack up the sad poems, time to learn to be happy. Synapses firing again, just like old times. When I was younger, I’d stay awake writhing with growing pains.

But it’s time to stop writing sad things, time to be a better friend, better daughter, better person, that’s what you do when you get everything you wanted placed into your lap, tasting like squash and beer, smelling like dog.

Love looks like: the same walk, only the last time you took it, you were dying. (it kind of feels like you’re dying this time – skin splitting behind your ears, peeling off your lips, scaling over your eyelids. all this green tea nausea and the fuzzy outline of everything through half closed eyes. time cleaving and converging, collaging over itself,

the cut-up method)

When I was twenty, life was twenty-three hours in bed, sleeping and not sleeping, two dehydrated pisses a day, one meal, and that’s it (apart from the love pulled from your gut, apart from the shampoo and the pizza, all the best things in your life blurred with smoke, apart from all that time learning to be happy) but I dragged myself through that blissful haze to be a person that Shows Up.

I want to be the person that Shows Up for you, want to pack up sadness like little misery-shaped shirts that I used to wear, put them away like they don’t fit me anymore, like they never suited me, but she’s still there, blissed out, rail thin, bent up like a prey animal, like a crab, like a praying mantis, a collage of surgical tape and medical gauze, the cut-up method, still skipping meals and skimping sleep and sculling in the water - not forwards, not backwards, not up, not down - swallowing down all my wanting, whole platters of forgiveness and excitement, regurgitations of me at twenty.

But it’s time to pack up the sad poems, time to scrub that stuff out of your hair, off your teeth, time to reach back into that spiral of you and find the prey animal and make for the throat.

[thesamemethewholetime]

The Losing Reflex

I learnt how to be happy, but I learnt it from the TV, so every time there isn’t a laugh track I think I’ve failed.

(I panicked, she says, so I took off my shirt. I thought it would make me feel something.)

They call it the Lazarus sign, that moment of movement after death, the body crossing its arms, protecting the chest.

I think we were meant to fall in love, but I let you do it by yourself, and instead stored all that love inside of me until it curdled. I thought I was a pine tree, soft with heart rot, arms crossed over my chest.

I didn’t think I was dying at the time.

(I used to be brave, I say to my knees.)

I learnt how to do it through videos on the internet, I learnt how to do it through picture books, I learnt how to be happy but I learnt it from TV, so I can feel someone watching whenever I try.

I didn’t realise I was dying at the time, that came later.

All the people I knew three years ago felt more like splinters than friends and I kept them all in place because I learnt that you should never take the knife out the wound   it has to keep all the blood in your body, it had to stopper up all the love inside me.

They call it the losing reflex, the grabbing at the sides of the tub, the failing, the deny, deny, deny. The struggle when it’s over but you’re not quite ready yet.

(It’s not meant to feel like that, you say, you’re meant to feel like it’s over when it’s over.)

At the time, it didn’t feel like anything, it wasn’t able to - none of my nerves worked.

No Lazarus sign. No losing reflex.

I just lay very still for the whole thing, no flail no grab, and when it was over, I was still then too.

(I didn’t realise I was dying at the time, I tell you, I thought that was just how it was meant to feel.)

[thesamemethewholetime]

SUNDAY BREAKFASTS IN THIS HOUSEHOLD

(1) You make breakfast.

(2) You make breakfast this morning. You take a breadknife and you push it past the resistance of your chest. They say that the ribcage is meant to protect it – your heart – you find that it doesn’t. If someone is willing to try, if they want it enough, if they are willing to prise it open, they will find a way.

(3) You take the garlic press from the cupboard. You push a clove into that space between the metal and you crush it, scrape it into the pan, mix with a little oil, let it mature, let it blossom. The garlic press is discarded. You take one of the kitchen knives – not the breadknife, do not touch the breadknife – you take one of the big, sharp kitchen knives and slice onions into perfect half-moons. It slices sweetly through the soft flesh of the mushroom, crisply through the skin of the bell peppers. With the very tip, you run it down the centre of a chili, scrape the seeds out. You take the breadknife and you push it against the resistance of your chest until it gives.

You make breakfast. It hurts.

(4) No one notices you eating your heart at breakfast, not even when it has been dissected in front of them. Not even when they watched you cook it. But someone does notice the stain on your shirt. Red blooms on your chest in a misshapen fist and underneath lies a hole.

You ate your heart for breakfast this morning. You took a breadknife and you cut it out, levered it out of a gap in between the ribs and nobody tried to stop you.

(5) Your best friend will not forget about the idea of eating her heart for breakfast. She wants it diced and stewed in coconut milk and thirteen spices, just how her mother used to make it. She takes the breadknife (your breadknife) and the frying pan (your frying pan) and the spatula (your spatula) and she cooks it, smothered in coconut milk, hot orange spices, sharp green herbs. It tastes better than your heart, you know this because she lets you try a bit.

(6) You make breakfast. Your best friend makes breakfast.

You both feel hollow afterwards; you are both waiting for someone to stop you.

(7) You take the breadknife from her clammy hand, wipe the blood away with your sleeve. Let’s buy us a new one of these, you say, I think we deserve to own things that have not hurt us, you say, and the three of you gather up everything else in the kitchen that have done so: the meat cleaver, the carving fork, the dented kettle, the toaster, the garlic press.

(8) You make breakfast – pancakes. You pour out milk, fold in the flour, crack the eggs open on the worktop, scoop the shards of shell from the mix. A tablespoon of oil, a drizzling of vanilla extract.                                                                                                                                        (you would use fresh vanilla, scraped straight from the pod with the tip of a blade but you have all agreed – no more sharp objects).

[thesamemethewholetime]

My hair’s dried curled, a soft wave, I’m wearing a linen skirt, I’m glittering like snow grit, my shirt is the colour of a bay leaf. You look nice today I am trying to ignore the fact I don’t love myself anymore. My wrist cracks when I twist the tap, a loud pop as it rotates.

The river is quiet this time of year, no one splashing in the shallow bed or picking at the rocks on the bank. There’s blood in my mouth, blood all down my shirt, and we’re washing it out                    washing it out                    washing it out and I’m asking you to forgive me for the effort.

No one was around last summer, there was a solar eclipse that we watched from my back garden, laid on the lawn and looked through plastic film It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before It’s still burned into my retinas that thin circle that halo of light.

I’m trying to be more digestible for you. I’m trying to apologise for being so ugly. I’m trying to ignore the fact I just don’t love myself anymore, I’m giving you permission to realise you don’t love me either. But sometimes the truth is as is:

I’m taking my belt of this evening, I’m toeing off my shoes, unclipping my jewellery, and beneath it all I’m still not naked and I’m still not pretty and I’m still not worth your time.

I’m scrubbing my front, the water pink and frothy. I’m melting like sand in the current. I will never be clean, never be clean, never be clean.

I still see the circle of light, and I’m still holding my breath. We’re full of shock and awe and the crippling cosmic horror of the universe and it lasts forever, but what I remember is us on the grass.

[thesamemethewholetime]

You know your way around here even though everything’s changed, even though they’ve built over more car parks with housing complexes, and the shops have switched out, and they’ve made the roads a one-way system. You still grew up here. You still sat on that step. You still drank in the park and cut hair at that picnic bench.

It’s all about love and forgiveness, it’s all about letting it go. The house where your first kiss lives. The bedroom you died in. The home you grew out of.

It’s all about love and forgiveness, but it becomes about guilt and shame. None of this was punishment, none of it required atonement, yet here you are, supplicating on your knees. What was meant to be all about growth and adjustment and shared blood earth also becomes about grit and salt and self-flagellation.

I want to pick you up, wipe the tears off your cheeks. I want to take you home, wash your hair, kiss the back of your neck. I want to drag you out of the lake and put you in warm clothes again, just like the poem says. Because it is not supposed to be about pain or resentment or the desire to be punished, the unfaltering belief in your self-blame. No. It’s meant to be about kindness and gratitude and nostalgia. Coconut shampoo and milk in plastic cups. Bread and poster paint and killer whales.

I know that it’s too late to stop them from filling the parking spaces next to the pharmacy with an apartment block, but I want you to know we can still walk to the pharmacy.  I know that it’s too late to stop the wound from happening, but I want to stop you from picking it open.

It’s not about debt and punishment, but between you and me – if it ever was then it doesn’t matter anymore. You’ve already been punished. You’ve already paid the balance. It’s not about debt and punishment, or guilt and shame, or pain and resentment, but if it was then it already has been and now it can become something else.

It’s all about love and forgiveness this time. I promise. It always has been.