I used to form relationships with a locked chest, living in fear that the lid might open or a rib might crack to reveal an uncurated and unsanitised heart.
That heart still had expectations and needs, but they were tattoos etched invisible under my skin. Those who failed to read these imperceptible instructions were subject to imperceptible resentment and anger – thick jagged lines that boiled beneath my skin’s surface.
It took pain to unlock the chest and strip away the opaque and callused layer that covered my feelings. I emerged raw and vulnerable from my shed skin, tattoos meeting the eyes of others for the first time.
I began to form relationships with my ribs spread wide open, the catch broken and hanging by a single rusted screw. My inner self was finally congruent with my outer self and my relationships were no longer rent by disparity.
One sharp tug by a pair of knowing eyes and my heart spills onto the table with a wet thwack, pulling itself toward those eyes with a hundred bloody arms.
The extremes of life scrape and soothe more loudly than they did before, and sometimes these tattoos cause burning shame or fear of rebuff.
But that old skin with its suffocating shielding would never fit me anymore.
I think my plants have unionised against me. They’re smuggling insects in after dark, conspiring to contract as soon as my back is turned.
Spidermites curl the lemongrass.
They watch me investigate, their leaves a masque of solemnity. They eye all sprays with unimpressed buds, and shrug the liquid to the floor.
The geranium is laced with caterpillars. The mint opted for thrips.
Maybe it’s a masochism thing. They get a kick out of having their veins sucked (too much Twilight?). ‘Bite me harder! You know how I like it!’ The Very Hungry Caterpillar obliges, handcuffs in tow.
The spider plants alone, take no insect companion.
They’re the cockroaches of the plant world, capable of surviving a nuclear incident or asteroid impact, and they clone themselves at a speed that might one day lead to world domination.
Dubious allies, to say the least.
Or possibly they’re back-stabbing members of the plant race, eliminating all competition through insect collaborators before triumphantly supplanting (ha).
I can’t get between my ribs to that stuttering heart.
(I think there might be something wrong with it, but the warranty ran out a while ago.)
My brain seems to have turned into one of those big glass bubbles with ping pong balls of thought flying in every direction.
New thought: utterly irrelevant.
New thought: completely nonsensical.
Lungs still seem to be working though, focus on that.
There’s familiarity, sure, but also a realisation that there’s so much unknown behind the line you toed. Familiar never felt so strange.
In air cooled by rain long due, risk marries possibility and spins excitement into anxiety’s arms in a nauseatingly glorious waltz.
I can’t find another footing, the next handhold is in the dark, and it’s a bit of a bloody nightmare for someone who likes to satellite view every journey before she takes it.
That’s life, apparently.
I’m not sure I’ve been designed to the necessary specification to cope with it.
Consciousness hits the tar. The pitch layers catch hold and drag it down, ignoring its floundering mammoth cry.
I’ve got lines of concrete channelling through my face – temple to brow to nose to cheek. Those lines must have been laid in the night, crystals forming come morning.
Gravity got turned up last night. It wants me to ram my head against whatever ground lies beneath my feet, press myself into the dirt until concrete meets concrete.
There is no world outside the gritty throb that laps and overlaps from scalp to chin, bleaching all sound into a vacant whine.
My eyeballs are first to turn inward, burrowing into the meat of my brain. My brow threatens to collapse behind them, pulled toward the sucking black core that yearns to subsume my entirety.
There’s a constant skittering, hollow clatters, the gentle knock of a skull against the door.
They’re pretty well behaved really. There was this one guy in the building next door who had a mammoth skeleton that he couldn’t close the door on, so it used to just follow around behind him. Man, you’d know he was walking down the street by this constant knocking sound, loud enough to shake your knees. He went crazy, that guy. Always screaming for the hulking thing to leave him alone. That’s what happens when you don’t deal with your skeletons.
I took time to get to know mine after I saw what happened to him. That one, the one that’s scraping on the closet hinges, it hatched that time I turned someone down while in queen bitch mode. That one, with those elongated digits, it showed up when I didn’t send a message to someone I once loved.
Skeletons hate being shut away, they want to lick up every drip of negative emotion you leak. That’s how they grow, tastes of guilt and shame and fear and regret. Sometimes mine escape the closet and run cool and smooth over my skin, chittering with delight when guilt blooms over me. They’re a bloody nightmare to get back in until they’re fed. Once they’re high on emotion, they slump into snoring piles on the mattress. I can scoop up a softened handful of bones and dump them back in and close the door.
Sometimes I pull open the closet door to take them out. It’s kinda perverse, I know, but there’s something about staring right at the scabs of your past mistakes and wanting to peel them off till they bleed. Probably not so smart anymore, some of those old bones are getting hefty.
Some folks say they don’t have anything in their closets, that you can beam pure positivity and starve those skeletons till they shrink up and die. Seems pretty unlikely to me, seeing as they’re dead to start with.
But I do know that one of mine once disappeared.
It had been made up of all these articulated segments of regret, they’d click one after the other against the door when it slithered free in the night. I’d first heard it after I’d lost someone I love in a messy puddle of pride, confusion and misery. It was years before luck struck and healed the heart wound that had brought that skeleton into being. And then the next night there was no click of coils in the closet.
I don’t know if I could heal those other wounds. Don’t know if I’d want to try either. That might just land me with something bigger clawing its way out.
And there’s something to be said for my skeletons.
I have a box in my mind labelled ‘Mouth Fail Recordings’. The lid is lovingly worn from the number of times I’ve rummaged through and replayed, ad nauseum.
I am not good at being put on the spot. My tongue tends to flap and flop like a beached whale, spewing the absolute crap that my brain frantically throws at it from its blowhole. A delighted part of my subconscious grabs popcorn and records it all in high definition, preparing for inevitable slow-mo reruns.
My brain reacts to most unannounced phone calls with a violent urge to flee for the hills and throw the buzzing grenade as far away as possible. I don’t have any extra information to stop my brain from short-circuiting: no warning, briefings or body language. So mostly I ignore the call, gird loins, and call back… Which I also loathe, because phone calls involve interrupting someone, shouting (or vibrating) into their lives unannounced. It just feels rude.
I would possibly have been better off in an era that relied on handwritten missives. And networking by carrier pigeon.
I’m also a bit pants with on the spot face-to-face interactions. It took me a long time to be able to interact with cashiers or bus drivers without an ‘I carried a watermelon‘ moment. And then they introduced contactless payments and self-checkouts, so I assume the future is on my side. (Though they’ve also introduced recorded video interviews, which seems to be even more whale-tongue inducing for me).
Technology has yet to throw pouncers with clipboards onto the scrapheap of a bygone era. I get that charitable causes need people to donate and need to find a way to make themselves visible, and I also get that most people aren’t me and probably don’t have a problem with the whole thing. But clipboard holders feel like lions in the long grass. I get stalked because I look approachable, and then I get savaged with guilt because I’m too polite to cut short the spiel.
I assume the only people donating to charities are the really nice ones who can’t get away. Ditto with cold-calling. Which doesn’t seem all that charitable.
I don’t know if this kind of anxiety is heritable or a learned behaviour, but I’m not the only one in my family who views innocuous interactions with abject fear. And I definitely did have a toy telephone as a kid, it didn’t help.
Aside from exposure therapy, my only recourse is to await the development of mental grenades that can obliterate that box of mouth fail recordings, as well as those other boxes labelled ‘Social Awkwardness’ and ‘Shameful Misdeeds’.
Don’t disclose they advised. I have no tidy disclosure to make, no Latinate phrase to impress or Wikipedia page to authenticate.
I am unfranked.
I have a messy mouthful of words that stutter their way into the world. A tendency to tail away.
No it isn’t great, yes it does affect my working patterns.
Don’t read their expressions, don’t downplay.
I’ve got two-pilled dexterity of mouth, should have taken one, but the fear of pain was worse than a clumsy tongue.
I’ve got weevilling cramps riddling my face, eating into my brow.
What did she just say?
How can we make this role work?
Focus on outputs not hours in the office, let me pick my brain when it’s ripe not rotten, trust me, respect me, realise that this is worse for me than for you.
Anxiety was small and wrinkly when he nestled into my chest cavity.
Two giant eyes goggled outward at the world beyond my body, decided it wasn’t for him, and he settled back inside.
Now full-grown with a handsome sheen, Anxiety makes himself felt.
He doesn’t like breathing into armpits on trains, or overhearing people who roll anger around their mouths. He doesn’t like navigating new places, or new people.
Sometimes he doesn’t like leaving the flat.
Two unsteady feet hold my stomach in a death grip, with a squeeze-claw-squeeze when he shifts.
He flutters gusty wings in agitation, fluffing against lung and making it harder to draw breath.
And then there’s the head bobbing. An endless tapping that fills my gullet and knocks again and again on my chest wall.
He’ll calm when he’s talked to, sung to, or breathed at.
And he’s as greedy as his out-of-body brethren, deflating when fed.
There’s so much love there. Two people who will literally sandwich me when I’m howling and bathed in eau du vomit. They will hold me fast against the strange forces that wreck my body. They will feed me, comfort me, walk for me, and help me scrape the bottom of the barrel for sticky dregs of laughter.
Home.
Time stops there. Away from the life I have built for myself, the people I have collected, the places I call my own. There live the ones who knew me first, from knee high upward. There are the ones who taught me, inspired me, keep me in their hearts even now. It is there that childhood memories are unpacked.
Home brings summer flowers and cool rooms, new grown frogs and an old purring lap blanket.
And yet a part of me asks, what then?
Is this forever?
Am I letting go of this life I’ve been building and falling a decade backward? Acceding to whatever it is that tears at my body?
Perhaps home must be given new lines to speak. I must dust it off, wipe away the sepia and see it in the light of the present.
Safe harbour in the midst of this ship-wrecking storm.
Enamel worn by the acid of life and the fracturing punches thrown by fate.
To you, who life has rubbed until all loss devastates, I’ll tell only tales of romance before it cracks, never stories of the broken pieces.
To you, so weighed down by clouds of darkness that you cannot carry mine too, I’ll give only the gossamer and tuck away dragging tendrils of sadness.
And to you, for whom feelings are glowing iron between icy teeth, I’ll give only carefully cultivated words to amuse, shorn of the emotions that tumble alongside.
I’ll brick away my broken pieces, my tendrils of sadness, my tumbling emotions, and keep each of you from harm.
But remember, there is more to me than meets your tooth.
I was carrying out the arcane and unusual hobby of pulling on my pants – knickers, not trousers – on Thursday, when one of my sacroiliac joints gave a forbidding clunk.
Possibly a(nother) sign from the Universe, this one telling me not to wear pants? (On previous occasions I’ve been putting on trousers, reaching for things, drying my feet, playing catch, or plugging something in, so I guess those are all out too.)
I’m now marooned on my mattress like an upturned turtle (or like a beached walrus as my mother flatteringly suggests). Walking is currently a spine-drenching shriek-inducing slow drag. My neighbours must be thinking I’m having quite the time of it, given the gasps, moans, swearing and thunks I’ve been making when trying to get to the loo. At least alternate reality me is enjoying herself.
Notes for Future Self
Keep the loo roll holder topped up (or else no loo paper for you).
Move all necessities to lower cupboards (but not too low). Or raise the entire floor of the flat. Or get taller.
Stock more painkiller packs by your bed, ditto emergency food for stomach lining. Don’t eat emergency food in non-emergencies, idiot.
Keep antiperspirant next to your bed. For the love of all the gods.
Those fan remotes you thought were stupid? Turns out, not so stupid. Dig those out.
Take the rubbish out whenever possible so it doesn’t fester for days when you can’t move. Adopt a zero tolerance policy for flies.
Rig charger cables to loop over the top of the bed so you don’t spend fifteen minutes wriggling millimetre by millimetre to reach them.
Keep instant edible things in the flat that aren’t just raw tomatoes and celery.
Get a bottom buddy. [NB. Not what it sounds like] [NB2. Not much better than what it sounds like].
Medically Unexplained 