The Naked Branches are Getting Dressed.

It’s as though I’ve forgotten the joy in the tragic.  It was beautiful, it really was, and there was no one I could love.  The mess that you make is the best.  It’s perfect and you can really feel it, you can really lust after things and hate. 

I want to scream.

I have become someone else, and myself, and in doing so have realised how arbitrary identity is.  It’s not that I couldbe anyone, it’s that anyone is not real.  That I can only use my language and perception to define myself cancels out that definition, and is only fascinating becase I have attached and created the termfascinating.

So everything I write can be dismissed.

I work with the public, in customer service, and it’s my job, five days a week, to smile at whomever looks my way.  There was a man dribbling on the desk and staring at my chest, asking if I would like a lift home or his phone number, and I smiled through the sick in my stomach and politely declined.  Ever since, I’m scared to work on a Sunday, and I hide in the cafe across the road in the mornings in case he catches me.  He’s just a man, and so I’ve no reason to be scared. 

Occasionally I cry but no one notices, so I walk them to the cling film and smile and nod and leave again.  As I gagged uncontrollably into a plastic bag, a customer leaned over the desk as if to say “Hello, you!  I’m here, you silly thing, aren’t you going to help me?” And so I shot up and smiled and exchanged goods for money.

When I get home, and itishome, and itismine, I feel safe, but so lonely.  I sit inside of my box and I clean and tidy, I make food and I shower endlessly, and I just wait for company.

Eventually another half arrives, and we agree that we are like two parts of the same, that the gap between us is becoming hard to define, that it’s not a case of finishing one another’s sentences but a case of neither one of us particularly owning a sentence as separate from the other.  We’re the same brain in a jar, and this is our world. 

But the immaturity finds me, and all I want to do is fuck and fly away somewhere, quit jobs and bills and go to Argentina.  The longer you are in this sticky wadding, the deeper you fall, and the deeper you fall, the further away from what you were, you are. 

Sometimes I miss myself. 

It occurs to me that I could be a lie.  I am a nothing.  I have disappeared.  I miss you.

“Multiple orgasms ruined my life.”

I whisper to him in the middle of the night but he’s dead.  I should be dead, but I’m dizzy.  Rum rolls around inside of me and I consider this the comedown.  

We were together, laughing, blushing.  I was covering my face and squirming, holding back moans and yells, losing control of them.  

As I lay there, head hung over the back of the bed, I considered the next time I might feel that way, and found no answer.  

Thurs 29th Dec 2011
The year – arbitrary collection of days though it may be – is drawing to a close. It has been a year – almost – since Rosie and I laid drunken eyes on one another. My memories of that night are hazy. I remember before Shawn and Ruth arrived that evening, when it was me and her and Andy, sat around, talking, watching TV, met catching her eye, holding it for a second, almost to the point that it became awkward, then losing my nerve. We smiled at each other. I remember being palpably disappointed that other people had turned up to spoil our little dynamic.

Then eventually, they left, I stayed, and most of my knowledge comes from Rosie. I remember snapshots, a word, a gesture, an embrace. How awkward yet exciting it must have been. I can’t remember. We woke and nothing had been lost. We had given each other permission to indulge in curiosity and passion that had previously been repressed. And somehow after that, we turned it into a rising momentum, our little fears and embarrassments were slowly eroded, and we began to love each other intensely, but not blindly, not quite stupidly, although I know there were a few weeks, or maybe months, when I could think of nothing but her. Though now she is never too far from my mind, I can at least explore the universe a little without constantly being awed by her existence. Of course, given half a chance, the awe returns, but it’s nice to see without the sun in my eyes – even if it is only by the sun’s light that I see at all.

She just sent me a text saying she had a bad dream (I’m on the train to work), and she would like some good vibes. So here they are Rosie. I love you. I’ve spent a year being with you. Six months living with you. We’ve tenderly explored each other, we’ve made love, we’ve fucked, we’ve argued, resolved, cooked together, faced problems, enjoyed beauty, and now when I look at you, I feel like we have a beautiful synchrony, our minds, our patterns of thought and feeling are so intimately interwoven, that though we can be apart from one another, at the slightest subtle glance, we can once more enter into that wondrous harmony, and lose and find ourselves in each other. This is to say nothing of your beauty, which emerges fully at the most tender moments. The softness of your features in the dim light of a winter’s morning. Your sleepy eyes, the tangle of your soft hair, the indescribable perfection of your face as it lies, half shmushed into a pillow.

There are petty reasons for us to disagree or find fault, semantic arguments that indulge only negativity, but I don’t truly care about these things, for in the face of your perfect beauty, in the relation between us that somehow orients our bodies and souls to one another, none of that matters. When I look into your eyes, when I really look – right in deep – I remember, and everything is already perfect.

I used to think that love was just an intense form of like, that it could be thus defined and thereby neglected. But such a definition is like calling a waterfall, water falling down a hill, or a sunset, the refraction of sunlight by atmospheric dust. It’s true, of course, but does no justice to the experience of it. I love you. It is at once supremely lacking, and simultaneously the only thing worth saying.

As if by magic, he exists.  This is mine and his.  It’s ours, and we are we.  I remember the first everything.  I remember holding his hand in the kitchen because, for the first time, he looked so gentle and nervous.  I remember the doubt I felt as I leaned in to be kissed, and instead placed the tip of my nose onto his, in case I’d misunderstood.  I remember his face the first time we had sex, how he was trying to look at my eyes to find out what I was.  I remember the directions of the car lights rushing through me as I breathed into his shoulder and heard “I love you”.

I have to stop holding on to anything.  He his here, and he might not be.  I am here and I might not be.  

The sink is cold, and my wrists are leaning on it.  I’m staring at the plug-hole and contemplating.  

I consider it all.  I consider the mistakes, the actions, my hair falls around my face and brushes my cheek.  

“Hey!”  A voice from outside the bathroom.
“Hello.”
“I’m here!”
“Okay.”
“Okay.  I’m going back to the kitchen now ..okay?”

I just tap the sink and stare at the plug-hole.  A breeze comes in through the gap in the window and it feels like ice.  The door is shut and I’m waiting.  A few minutes pass and I see it.  

“Is everything okay?”

But I don’t answer.  I just tap the sink and stare at the plug-hole.
Yes or no?  Am or aren’t?
I stand up and wrap everything, walk slowly to the kitchen and tell him “No, and I don’t want to make a person with you, please.”

He pretends to be taking it all in his stride but as I hug him I feel a small sigh fall out, I feel his eyes shut and his thoughts settle.   

The stomach ache always comes back.  The same damn stomach ache.  Years on end.  It’s unmistakable as my eyes shut and I see his hands reaching for someone else.  Every blink.

I asked him why he was so happy, and it was cups of tea, it was the internet, it was the joy of having someone like me, it was everything except a chat with an old friend.  An old friend.  Someone else he’s loved, someone else he’s fucked.  

The sickness and twisting inside of me, as he tells me I’m in the way of some tall blonde beauty, some echo of everything else he once loved.  I move to one side and he watches her perform past him.  I hang my head and put my hands in my pockets.  I do not trust what he says.  He asks me to believe him instead of me and I can’t.  

I swallow dry dirt.  My mouth is empty and I stare at my body and hate it like I haven’t hated it for years.  I picture the photographs of women I’ve seen, I’ve stumbled upon, I’ve cursed myself for looking at, and I clench my jaw.  

He tells me he doesn’t like me and, before I can react, he tries to hug me, but I shove him.  I push him away three times before he lets me shut myself in the bathroom, but then he opens that door, too, so I leave and I sit on a bench.  I stare at an empty estuary and I cry to myself.

I hate.  And when I come back home he holds me and tells me he’s sorry, and I share the same sentiments, I ask him to be nice to me when I’m an old woman and I pray that I’m wrong about everything.  I sit on the edge of the bed and shake my head.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“stay with me.”

And I shake my head some more.  

I have nothing to offer up.  Nothing to give, nothing else to give.  I come and go and change, mostly change.  It’s all change, I don’t know when it happened.  I’m inside of something and it’s moving me, it’s making me— I can’t go on like this.  I, I, I, I, I, I, I.

There isn’t an I, but I’ve read too many books and I’ve seen too many ideas and the peace of my ignorance is falling away from me.  It’s been stolen by love, education, experience.  

Waking up at five every morning not because I set an alarm or got myself used to it but because I told myself, before sleeping, that I would wake up at five.  

So I return home, only now I’m full of caffeine and I can’t remember the taste of meat.  I take a sip of my brother’s can and everyone stares at me.  We all sit around a table and everyone stares at me as I sip.  They want to know what will happen to me, what Yeovil will do to me now that I’ve been changing for so long.

I step down the streets and remember the green ink on the pavement, and the way a ringing telephone sounds.  To a friend’s flat for five minutes before walking home in the rain and shutting my eyes because I know the walk and I can’t feel the rain if my eyes are occupied.

Home has lost all meaning and now I just follow the people I love around.  I never knew quite how much I loved until I left.  

All I could get to thinking was “no thank you”.  I woke up exhausted, well aware that I’d seen the last of sleep for the night, and sat on the side of the bed.  I should have had some drink last night.  I always feel better waking up hung over than waking up exhausted thanks to nothing more than genuine, warranted physical activity from the day before.  

My life is spending it’s time curled up in a train seat, to and from the ocean.  Tickets please.  Welcome aboard this First Great Western train.  This train is for Exeter St. Davids, stopping at— I forget.  But I never leave any bags or packages unattended because they will be removed, and if I see anything suspicious I will report it to a member of staff.  I wish that woman would stop walking by and looking at my sketchbook.  

I sat with the sun behind me, facing a train full of people who all seemed far too concerned with my face.  Looks.  Looks of confusion, looks of disdain, the occasional smile.  Just get your eyes off of my face.  I looked down at my hands, back up at them, still they were looking.  The obnoxious American with the fucking huge chin talked far too loudly about his feelings on homosexuality, the little prick behind me talked about the threesome he had the other night.  I almost turned around and asked exactly how he got his dick in both of them at the same time, but the assumption that he was fourteen and it was bullshit was the best way to end that thought process.  

Finally, the ocean.  I leaned over and read the Alan Watts book being read next to me, open on a passage about the ocean.  It was somewhat perfect, but I stopped reading to actually look at the damn ocean.  Why be next to the sea and read about it?   

As I came, I saw stars.  No, really, my head was tilted so far back that all I could see was a black sky, mostly polluted by lampposts and such, but framing a few stars.  The stars, I should say, the ones with a title, the proper ones, the ones that even you can see.  Not the manifestation of pleasure in my head making pictures in my eyes.  The beautiful stars.  

We slept for moments before he got up to leave, putting me under a blanket and watching me for a few moments.  Charming revenge, I’d guess, for all the times I’d watched him sleep.  I told him I loved him under my breath, it was too silent to be any louder than that, and watched him walk out the door.  

Now it’s dark, and I don’t know where my clothes are, but I’m warm and content and I can see stars, the stars.  

I know I’m supposed to grow up.  Another bead of glass falls across my nose, past my left eye and onto a pillow and I know it, I can feel it within me, shame rising up.  Leaking from my eyes.  For itself.  I don’t know how to control it.  

I love you but I’m not you.  

There we were.  Rather, there I was, exhausted and it was perfect and the sun was hurting my skin.  In moments like that, there’s such certainty, such solidity that I’d put everything I had on a bet that guaranteed some success here, or at least something worth expecting success but failing for.  

I know I’ve done something wrong.  Happiness sits facing success and they stare blankly into one another’s eyes, unable to see themselves or how they’re different.  

“What about me?”

Everything that’s happened so far has happened as though there’s no need for me to be scared but I’m scared, now, on days like today, days on which I get reassurance but quiet eyes, a thousand words for an audience and only one or two for me.  Absence where your presence was looked forward to.  

Love has been confusing so far, love has been exhausting, love has burst out of the walls at the most unexpected times and poured itself over my life.  I’ve no defence.  I’m helpless.

And every now and then, when glass tears fall across my face any which way, I wish for it to leave me alone and regret that wish immediately.  The worst part is not being able to hate the exhaustion or resent the tears, the worry, the sick feeling that won’t leave my stomach.  It all bundles together into some silly hope and as long as I’m held again at some point that hope stays up and alive.  

It’s not all doom and gloom.  It’s hard.  

I’m not easy with love, either.