weirdthingtosay - Tumblr blog

[weirdthingtosay]

I am imagining my father.

As I sit here, he is alone, in his cold but beautiful small farmhouse an hour from the nearest city. His house is filled with heavy, dark-wood furniture. The floor completely concealed by Persian rugs, overlapping each other and bumped and bruised from being trodden on and chewed by dogs. Intricately oppressive golden incense burners, the kind you find in a church, swing from the lowest of the beams, vomiting scent clouds into the room at head height which never quite dissipate into the gabled ceiling. They remind me of how I would play when I was three or four, jumping up into the smog-cloud of his cigarettes, visible, always, just above me in the living room - I used to imagine it was what being in the sky was like.

His walls are lined with books, mostly history, some philosophy of science, and almost all bound in linen with gold embossed titles. He had an obsession with the Folio Society for a while, he spent all of my mum’s money (the only income, until she fell ill) on those books. We shared cheap packets of pre-stuffed tortellini between four of us for months. The same happened when he was obsessed with weight lifting, model trains, motorbike engines, guitars, mosaic making, handmade shoes, Rolex watches, pipes, bonsai trees, wooden canes, belt buckles, and Toyota XR2is. Currently his obsession is making walking sticks and leather items. Buttons, bags, collars, whips.

He has always liked canes and whips. Once he brought home a blackthorn cane, and told my sister and I it’s illustrious history, and how we should respect and fear it, and that he was looking forward to using it. We knew what that meant. He wanted to put it on the coffee table to be seen at all times, but our dog wouldn’t stop trying to run off with it so he angrily hid it behind the sofa and went upstairs to sulk and sleep. We took it out and fed it, piece by piece, to the dog. I told this story, laughing at how clever we had been and how funny it was when he couldn’t find anything as good to beat us with despite being so angry, at school the next day. The silence of my friends was embarrassing, the silence of my teachers even more so.

I went to visit him two weeks ago, for the first time in a long time. It was still too soon. He showed me his ‘workshop’, a small space between living room and kitchen which has been filled with mandrels, hammers, materials, and tools I couldn’t afford. He’s making a walking cane with a tiger’s head on it, he says a rich ‘Indian’ wants it. I’m sure this is something he has imagined. He asks me what I think of his work, this being my ‘area of expertise’ (it is not), I play along. Yes, it’s nice (it is not). Yes, I think he might be able to sell some (I do not). He asks if I want to see the whips. Sure, I say.

Leading me back into the living room, I am instructed to sit down on a deep, musty armchair. In front of it I see a tapestried footrest which he hounded me for two years to restore for him as I ‘know about these things’. I eventually rinsed it under a tap and coloured it in with Sharpies and gave it back to him, to much praise. He takes out two long, poorly made whips, one tan, one black, and hands me the tan one. As I lift it up to look, the three dogs he owns who had been resting on the floor in front of us jump up at once. They back away, quickly, hiding their tails and cowering. I drop the whip down and say “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”, my heart is in my intestines and I’m at once aware that I mustn’t apologise and I mustn’t show I understand because he will punish me for it. I became everything in the room, for a split second, I became me - the adult runaway returning to him, me - the child hiding from injury, the dog - cowering and looking up at someone they trust, expecting to be hit and trying to minimise it, and him - the old man, who knows what he has done, who knows all of this, and sees.

I pick the whip back up, he shouts at the dogs to stop their nonsense, I tell him its very good and feign inspection and approval. I go off to cook us all dinner, the oven breaks, he wails at it like it can hear him and rants and raves into the door. Eventually we eat from a  camping stove. I’m not sure how he is surviving out there. There was nothing but spices in the cupboard. Nothing in the fridge except hallucinogenic mushrooms. Eventually, I’m going, I make the mistake of looking him dead in the eyes before I do so. He cries instantly, tell me he wishes he was a monk, he wants to be locked in a cell. I make a joke about it, tell him to commit a crime then, the rent’s cheaper. I leave as quickly as I can.

A week later he calls me. He has had the most traumatic day of his life, he says. He’s crying. I’m at work but I step out into the car park to listen to him. I don’t want to. He tells me a long story about how he walked with his dogs to the bottom of his garden in the morning, just as the sun bled into the clouds (his words), and that they had begun to fight one another. He tried to break them up. They wouldn’t. He hit them all with a spade. He dragged one of them, the smallest, back into the house and passed out, eventually waking from cold. He said he went back outside, to find the last two dogs and bring them in. They are still fighting. He reckons its been about four hours. He says they all ended up in the pond. He says there’s a man inside him. He says he hit them all with a spade again. He says he had to ‘make a choice, kid, I had to choose’ the dogs were ‘going to kill each other’ and that he’s living in some kind of parallel universe ‘the younger dog or the older dog’ and he can’t get out ‘he was going to kill him I had to make a choice I chose the younger dog’ so he grabbed the spade and smashed it’s head in.

I nod, and ‘mhmm’ at the right places. I’m numb and blank in a car park, white walls from the surrounding kitchens making the sky black. It is so clear it’s like water, a black mirror, and I can see where my face should be reflected there is a solitary dog, an animal I felt I was, an animal I have been, on it’s back outside in the cold under that same infinite yet smothering darkness. I’m dead, it’s dead, we’re all fucking dead. There’s no life-as-it-was after this. There’s no forgetting how he kicked our childhood dog to death, how he dragged my mum out into the street when she had her stroke, no laughing at disposing of that cane. It’s here, it’s back. It is not the past. I am not a runaway, I’m just running in circles and now we’re all fucking dead.

I spend the next week deep in phone calls and decisions about sectioning and police and ‘has he shot himself?’s with my sister. We don’t know what to do. Why should we? Why should anyone know how to deal with this? We can’t get him sectioned, he’ll attack anyone who goes there and end up arrested. We can’t call the RSPCA, the dogs bit him when he attacked them and they’ll be put down. Something has to live through this. We ring him constantly, eventually he picks up. He’s not shot himself - good, I say (I’m not sure if it is), I can rehome the other dogs, I just have to go and get them. He seems calmer now. Maybe we should check on him, we say. And then the universe replies - and snows us in for two days. We were supposed to be driving to get the dog and to take it to it’s new owners, for a test run. They can’t make it and neither can I. In the days between these events my heart has softened. I’ve thought of taking him in, of helping him, of closing us off and of my duty and putting all of my self preservation aside - sacrificing myself to this great man, just as he’s always taught me. I phone him to tell him I’m sorry but I can’t make it today, I’m snowed in, we’ll have to reschedule. No, he says. He needs me to come down. He can’t face going outside. He wanted to bury the dog in a circle of saplings, to give it eternal life. He’s a psychopathic murderer, he says. He can’t look at the dog he killed a week ago. Can’t look at it’s ‘slit throat’. I thought it was a spade, I say. He says he killed his best friend. He slit his best friend’s throat. I have to go and move the dog. He’s phoned the college I work at and is enrolling. We’ll live within 15 miles of each other. I’m a good kid. I need to move the dog. No one else will understand. I’m the only one. I’m a good kid, not like the others. He’s got the blues. Life is hard to him.

I told him I’ll come as soon as a I can, but it won’t be this week. Maybe after Christmas. I can see the chain of events now. I opened the door again, I let him back in. He managed to get his nails in a crack and is ripping an opening. ‘You’re stupid for animals’, he used to say to me ‘they don’t have feelings, you let them manipulate you’. I said, maybe, but I prefer it this way. I’m naive. Probably, but I’ll live with that. I am dismissed. ‘Well I’m busy too,’ he says ‘the man is coming for the walking stick, I need some advice about pricing…’. I have no interest in talking to him about his walking stick, or how to apply for student loans, or how much they are, or whether I can use my contacts at the college to get him some extra financial aid. I say sorry, but I’ve got to go. After I hang up I’m wrung out. I don’t know if I’m good, or bad, or I’m broken or righteous. I know that whatever I do or say or think I’m making a choice, a moral choice, a choice with huge implications, I’m paralysed by the responsibility for something 60 years of trauma in the making, something I only have the privilege to know about because I was stupid enough to visit twice in two years.

I am imagining my dad. Waiting with his badly made walking stick for a man who may or may not be real. Filling out his student loan forms. So high he doesn’t know he’s hungry. Shuttered away from the bloated mutilated body of his dog outside the only door to his home, which he can’t pay for. So fragile but so powerful in destructive ability. I’m imagining him waiting for me to call. I’m imagining him lining up his next strategy if I don’t. I’m imagining him thinking about me, who I am, how to manipulate me. I’m imagining me, 11 years old, sitting on the step outside my house in the morning, waiting for him to arrive on his bike like he said and eventually going inside at bedtime. Me, 18, running away to an Art College in the country which would be my home and safe place for the next 10 years. I’m imagining me, six months on from now, the life I have built to escape from him, fully flayed open - bloating and stinking, because everyone is too afraid to bury it.

[weirdthingtosay]

I’m finding them all. All of the ‘me’s. The ones who broke off, or had the door shut on them. The one who stopped breathing when he hit her sister so hard she shit her pants all up the inside of the skirt she was borrowing from my mum, the mum she was borrowing from me. The one who runs the show, all teeth and spit and dryness. The girl who sees blood pulsing in grass, more wonder than flesh, more hope than corpse. The one who lies drowning on air at the bottom of the river, reeds clinging to her thighs and cheeks, watching ever upwards at morphous lights from the numb bed of crushing water. The one who slaps her patches onto leather and howls laughing as she orchestrates tomorrow’s stories of chaos and absurdity.

They are all me but none are me. I am a narrative spectre. If my skin had a voice, this one on paper would be it. I am a temporal container, filled with abstracts, so therefore empty. And now, my job, to seek them out, to break down the walls between them, to fertilise the young and to shroud the dead. My body will become a landscape, with school and graveyard, and the infinite internal expanse of black and green earth. I will be populated, not split.

[weirdthingtosay]

Dissolving Black pulsing, throbbing heartbeats White noise Static flesh Words a mash of teeth and bloodclots Hands knocking, one two, wrong places, too many fingers, not enough fingernails Eyes showing double visions - click clack click clack over and overlaid An ink blot spilling into wet paper

[weirdthingtosay]

I can make it better. It's down to me. I am the tool for this ritual: I can cut the seams of flesh, wash the innards, rearrange and refit and stitch oh so delicately, down the parting of hair so no one will even notice the join. I know I started this, again, because I want someone to perform upon me.

[weirdthingtosay]

I need to have a strong word with myself: Stop running away. I can feel the spittle flying and sticking about my face in my hair. What am I saying? I don't have any hair. I shaved it all off. But I can feel it's ghost, when I rub my temples in solemn catharsis. It drags between the webs of my fingers like long ragged legs. Like his hands. I pull back and back and back and they never run out and let go. There's a throbbing in the centre of my house, a hot beat. My room is cool with the window open, rain on the roof below, cats laying in the hall. I am anxious amongst all its placidity, its sense. When you stop, you die, don't you? It's over? But I must remember, when the right cogs fit together in one space the motion begins and continues. Static energy.

[weirdthingtosay]

A knife for dis jointing the feet of the brace of pheasants which brought you to tears. A knife for removing what remains of your left ovary. A knife for cleaning out your rib cage once you have already been gutted, to prevent further rot. A knife for quarterising energy flow, when you are bleeding out. A knife for extraction of doubt when blind hope is your only option other than oblivion. A knife for when your only option is oblivion. A knife for when you need to change your mind.

[weirdthingtosay]

How do you judge when patience is worthwhile,

when your entire experience of devotion has been feeding a black hole with cut pieces of your own hair, waiting with absolute certainty for it to fill up?

I couldn’t stop loving if I wanted to.

Ask me how I know.

[weirdthingtosay]

Do I still hold your attention?

I’m not a glowing screen, or something you have made - I’m not a stranger with an accent or good hair, not a thumbs up or a positive review.

But I adore you, wholly, in a way that makes me solid and fragile at once.

When was last time you reached for me, hungry? When did you last carry me, lay me down, rub my aching feet.

You don’t want to be a burden - I know. But you can’t just ignore me. Smoke and sleep. I’m still here, even if you are not, and I see and I feel.

I want to work so hard, not just for you - for myself, and you are part of that too - because we share a fair portion of life. I can grind myself down with love. But I need to be adored, too. It’s what refuels me. Without it I am just digging a lonely pit.

I need you to nurture me, because I am tired, and I am in pain, and I don’t like the way I look right now. How can I be better? Enough?

Why did I become so a part of the background noise.

I wish I didn’t care so much.

[weirdthingtosay]

When our edges falter, And we're too tired from using our defences to keep them up, instead of the monsters we remember, crawling through our open windows... We tumble across the thresholds, And tend each other.

[weirdthingtosay]

It gets dark

The fire cracks

You shuffle your feet in the crisp, red leaves

You hear a voice, describing this to you.

It’s mine.

You are briefly distracted by the thought of me, the voice, as a human being with a full life - not just a narrator.

but it passes back, into the dark, into the cracks - as all sudden insights do when we have not the time to make use of them.

[weirdthingtosay]

I’m still learning who I am, and who I might be, without the sadness. 

It is tempting, to regret shedding it all. But then - I already knew myself as I was. There is no learning without fear.

[weirdthingtosay]

Your vulnerability is sacred. Crack like an egg, dissolve into the ground, let your sadness feed the mycelium of your joy for the universe, and grow again from your progressive understanding of pain, pleasure, power and fragility.

You smell of mud. Milk. Metal. Blood.

You are not one thing, you are a thousand things, and watching all that you are fill you up and shine from the pores of your skin is my own great treasure.

[weirdthingtosay]

I feel most whole, most full, most strong, when I am loving you. 

When I am failing, snapping at you, hiding - I feel weak and tumultuous.

I’m too scared in that moment to turn around and love you again, even though it’s the only way out. But I’m afraid it will be too late, or too jarring.

Let me, please - always let me.

[weirdthingtosay]

We know ourselves through watching others react to us. 

When you chose to be with someone, you are choosing to invest in their view of you. And they, yours - we choose whose life we want to watch unfold in tandem with our own. 

It’s a privilege a lot of people don’t realise they have. It’s squandered by the removal of agency, by fear, by insecurity. It's tempting, to try to change a partner's life to mirror ours, mould it into an object of no resistance, another human to carry on with you in your pocket. 

Is it possible, to not be pocketed? I think so. But only if you, too, can bear to put your own malleable future in the hands of someone else. 

That’s what it is to trust a partner - not to believe they won’t leave you, or make love to someone else, or lie - it’s having faith that they will live well. You are their window in the world to an outside view of themselves, and they yours. 

Make sure they are compassionate to you, and true to themselves, not afraid to let go, nor to hold dear - and know that your great responsibility is to offer the same in return.

[weirdthingtosay]

Sometimes I think - God just let me be alone. Let me be alone with my skin ripped off, rolling on my bed without you sticking to me, sticking in me, concerning yourself at all of this thrashing 

I say you don’t know me so don’t look at me and you say so tell me, and I shout I don’t want you to know me - but you do 

I think, ‘it wasn’t meant to be this way!’ I wonder when we went down that turn where you can’t go back. Was it me? No - no! It was you it had to be you I would never. 

Are you there too? Do you even see me? Don’t fucking look at me without my skin which you took and hid in your house. 

I want to be deep in the water. In salt. Preserving myself like a lemon. 

Don’t look away. 

I only know I’m here when you look at me. I’ve no way to feel my edges so I have to feel yours to know space - 

I’m imploding, 

This rage and fear and fight and despair are dissolving and the shame is setting in. What did I say? How hard did I fight? Are you still reaching for me? You are. You are. You are. 

I’m breathing again, I can focus on your eye, I can see colours in the right order almost - sound and hardness nearly match up and if I had the strength I’d wish them away so that I didn’t have to know you as someone who knows me so well. 

Is it better to be loved in spite of the state I am in or to be adored for the good I can present, and live waiting for you to notice? 

It’s a comforting fallacy to think that I could choose. 

You are always there, holding my skin, and waiting for me, 

softly.

[weirdthingtosay]

I want to say to you “you don’t want me to write again”, “I write when there’s nothing else I can do”.

But you know that. You can see me drowning; you know I’m so desperate to appear calm that I’m standing like a pencil and puffing my cheeks up like buoys.

So I’m here, writing in the dark. Your back is to me and I can hear you puffing little breaths and odd words in your sleep.

I’ve realised lately how much I deny myself. I have a list of things which I deserve, and things which I don’t. Bad things, good things, saintly things, shameful things. I act as though there is still someone handing out my options to me - if you don’t eat that I’ll leave you, if you weigh this much you’ll disgust me, don’t take up space, don’t act like you expect people to waste their time on you, don’t be selfish…

I want to stop all that. I think I’ve denied myself my creativity, too. When people need me I shut down all self care except the bare minimum.

I’m trying, though. Yesterday I bought pasta, today I made myself a cup of tea for the first time in months, tonight I am writing whilst you sleep instead of staring at your back feeling guilty for not sleeping whilst you are, as though my wakefulness will interfere with your peace.

Tomorrow I’m going to eat breakfast and walk the dog. One little thing at a time until I’m back on my own side again.

[weirdthingtosay]

There has been a great turn since I met you.

I'm rounder

subtler.

Skin thinner and the breakthroughs evidenced

with

my tongue, sigh, languish.

You have misread me a many times, and I have misbehaved -

missed myself, my intention.

Sometimes I wish that you would cut my hair.

Just fucking hold me down and cut me.

I'm so tired.

Thrashing and howling against what I'm too scared to validate

don't look don't smell don't rub against walls expected to be there, no -

just writhe and twist within the five by five by five feet which I presume to hope to be gifted.

Silly, silly. Not constrained any more, not berated. Loved. Loved. Always loved, always cherished.

A great turn has come, and is coming,

a three sixty of freckled constellations.