Ten o’clock is a carmine that has a mind of its own, eleven o’clock an aquamarine that I never quite mix enough of, twelve o’clock is a delicate pink with an unsuspectingly tenacious stain on my palette.
Daylight momentarily resists, then crumbles under pressure and feathers the bottom of a milky jar. Time pours into a stained yoghurt tub, pours out, pours in, pours out.
There is barely a moment spared for eating, cleaning, or rolling sore shoulders: every second needs to be channelled into pigment.
When the last of daylight has been scraped from the jar, the colours begin to warp.
The colours of the night like to deceive. Ten o’clock is a deep purple that looks black under the electric lights, I know eleven o’clock to be a light limey green but I can only see yellow, twelve o’clock refuses to blend smoothly, chunks of burnt orange floating in a tangerine base.
The canvas sits and waits for time to dry upon its surface. I scrub minutes from my fingers, seconds from beneath my nails, and an unruly moment from its attempted escape onto my shirt.
I discharge time from its monotonous polytone task, and release it to transform into other things.
A poem written a few years ago about the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, formerly featured on Ma Kennedy’s blog. These sculptures were made to remember children who had passed away.
Dismembered heads seem entirely Innocuous until the Object in question is a Child. Pale lips an eternal moment from speech, Locks of hair unmoved by chill breeze, and Eyes never carved to completion. They loved this face enough to make it marble. While the laughing boy Is now forgotten, love Anchors to his every Nick and fracture.
There are heaving queues of sweaty people outside ticket booths, long snakes made of shouting and shoving.
She moves along them. Short, thin to the point of brittle, with old apple skin and grey hair pulled tightly back.
Her voice cuts through the shouts, an endless lament of need that sends eyes to the floor or the ceiling with unerring aim.
She has him on her back. He must have at least two feet on her, his limp legs drag the floor behind her, while his head lolls above her shoulder with a vacancy that suggested he is spared the wail of her voice. He is thin too, but his body is soft, cheeks hanging down and jolting with each of her steps. His arms hang loose across her front, strapped to bony shoulders with frayed blue cord.
She moves steadily, for all his apparent weight, up and down each queue. Her calls part the crowd effortlessly but she draws no coin from any hand.
And when she moves on, the shouting picks up again in her wake, snapping back to fill the void.
She never really left that train station in my memory. She just keeps walking through those queues over and over again, steps never faltering.
It might be a better fate than the one that reality actually holds for an aging mother dragging her adult son on her back in a country without a welfare state.
When I love I leave sticky fingerprints on every surface: remembering something forgotten, picking up something out of my way, gifting small joys like a cat dragging in half-battered birds.
My mother has always said that love is shown through actions, words are too easy. I took her belief and buried it in my heart, folding it again and again until rippled metal shone.
My mother and I, we love in absolute balance, action meets action in a constant clash of sparking steel hearts. But not everyone forged their hearts this way. I run the risk of bruising or crushing, or of suffocating others with a barrage of gestures that I watch unfold with impotent horror.
While it is easy to keep words under body arrest, it turns out I have only clumsy control of my actions.
This steel heart consistently runs the risk of stake raising. A gift for a friend that’s more extravagant than warranted, repeatedly putting yourself out until the other person feels a keen imbalance, giving when someone else feels unable to give back.
I’ve gathered ruddy rocks to smelt chains that can wrap this heart of mine tight and slow the pendulum swing. And maybe one day I’ll figure out how to wield it without wounding.
Rationally, I accept that most kids go through a phase of being selfish, whiny, demanding bastards.
Somewhat irrationally, I find it really hard not to hate them for it – quite possibly because it’s like looking Past Isla in the eye.
Past Isla was what polite company might call, ‘head-strong’, and what people behind closed doors might call, ‘a pig-headed, smart-mouthed, amoral princess.’ She was determinedly unwilling to accept that she might not be the centre-point of the universe’s orbit (she was, after all, much more right than anyone else), and she made sure to correct anyone who failed to recognise her supremacy.
Backing down was for lesser beings. Lies would escalate, piling on top of one another like teetering blocks held only in place by steely belligerence. The universe fell into line with a whimper when she demanded that it be just so. And when something failed to align with her plan, her wrath was terrible to behold. Eardrums shuddered at her rage, skin burned under laser stares, and smoke crept from beneath doors as she smouldered.
It didn’t take her long to learn that there were other ways to force the universe into line. Sweetness and light was a new one, all wide eyes and shy smiles, obedience that went beyond the letter of instruction, liberally slathered in butter that made it all the more likely that she’d win. She continued to smoulder underneath, of course, but learned to tuck the smoke inside and stop it from pouring down her nostrils.
The sheer humiliation of being told off sent rolling waves of scorch down her face and along her arms, blew deafening white noise into her ears. This was unacceptable. She adapted, it was imperative that no-one find out things that would lead to a bollocking. Instead, she hid those infringements, honed her lies, and began to work in earnest on her outward facade. She needed to appear perfect from every angle, no gap to reveal the complex calculations and mechanisms that clicked and clunked beneath.
Eventually, the facade was perfected and the smouldering child lived wholly within its walls. As that facade grew more familiar and those actions and reactions became second nature, her fires banked and her hackles gradually lay smooth against her spine.
I remember her when I watch another child give the world a hard kick in groin, reptilian eyes showing only satisfaction and menace. And I wonder if Past Isla’s still in here somewhere, if I’m unwittingly carrying Versuvius within my skin.
I feel this need to gobble things up. Consume them before they disappear from existence, seize them in a spasmodic clutch that crushes as much as it holds.
Why the rush?
I suppose the future feels empty in its uncertainty. The potential it holds seems like so much Fool’s Gold when compared to the sure gleam in the seam of the present. I seize the day, uncaring that my clumsy grasp might cause a hundred futures to wink out, wriggling threads extinguished without a second’s thought.
I get told to relax a lot. Chill out. Go with the flow. See what happens. It turns out that this doesn’t really have any effect on a mind outraged by the paucity of knowledge available when told to make decisions.
And so I hold onto today like the Earth might turn its back on the Sun, refusing to bring it back around. I feel everything now, in case the future is a burnt out carcass hosting only maggots of misery.
Sometimes my grip releases. Hands go slack and shaky with the fear that those terrible futures might mean that there’s no point in consuming or clutching. There’s no point in holding on.
On those days, when my brain coils tightly around itself and digs its jaws in deep, I need someone to slip their hand in mine and clutch me as though the Earth might spin no more. As though those future threads mean nothing compared to the need for a clumsy grasp today.
And on those days I’ll realise I don’t have to rush alone.
Being truly listened to is like standing on the edge of a sudden void, lit by thunderous sunlight and held in a silence so keen that moisture hesitates to evaporate.
I fall into that void, cold fingers fluttering behind me like wings.
And for the first time, I don’t curate my stories. I don’t shape tales to coax forth smiles, I don’t polish my thoughts to present their best side. And I don’t tuck the things that cut me out of sight.
I keep tumbling, tears creeping into the corners of my eyes to burn at skin.
And then there far below, I see light blossom in the darkness.
Strands dance on lightning feet, orbiting each other before flying outward in a new direction. They hum with pleasure at the feel of the listening: words suddenly caught by an ear and held in the brain with the touch of gentle but curious neurons.
Those strands weave as they go, forming a billowing net with edges that ever expand as words of understanding and tenderness wrap warm arms around my own.
The void becomes a safe place to fall, the silvered net a constant assurance.
Someone very wise (and unbridled) once suggested that I should send messages, letters, phone calls, and love out into the world without worrying about whether anything comes back in return. The act of sharing and giving is whole and complete in and of itself, it requires no reciprocity to be worthwhile. There may be joy when something is received in return, but there is no pain or shame when nothing comes back your way.
I tucked those words into my heart and gave up paying out my emotions by inches.
I started writing messages to people just because I wanted to say ‘thank you’ or let them know I’d been thinking of them. I drew my feelings up from my gut into my mouth and spoke them without being stifled by fear of silence. Sometimes something came back, sometimes nothing did, but my feelings were no longer exalted or diminished based on someone else’s actions.
And somewhere along the way, I remembered that someone has always got to go first. I think perhaps this was something I chose to forget, always waiting for a sound to hit me before enthusiastically echoing in return.
I am no longer the echo.
I’ve traded in pride to lose guilt and anxiety, and it seems like a pretty good deal to me.
I can never find the edge where we stop and illness begins.
The line that divides personality from disease is fractal, endlessly complex and barely perceptible. And the closer you are to someone, the more you realise that their illness invades every action, every reaction.
I wonder sometimes who you would be if it were cut from you, leaving only the pieces that are actually you behind. Would your soul buoy upward with every sinew sliced apart? Would a rose tint engulf your vision after a lifetime of grey? Would all those barriers and obstacles and weights and troubles clatter to the ground with a tremendous roar as you finally shook free?
I suspect the shadow shape left behind by the carving would continue to whisper. It goes too deep now. Its flesh is your flesh.
And so I learn to love what has become you. I watch my own flesh begin to entwine with illness and cannot stop decisions from being nudged by this poisonous pairing. A scorpion’s sting lodged in its own back.
We have become one and the same. Fraying at the edges.
The division was pleasingly symmetric, although it got a bit wonky along the spine (it’s not all that easy to do with a kitchen knife).
My left side had finally had enough of being the silent partner, the good one, the better half, always held back by its troublesome twin. All those shows it had to miss, the dinners it didn’t get to eat, and the sleep it could never recover.
My right side is the problem child. It throws tantrums until the whole body has to vomit, and it ruins everything. It gets all the attention: ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Do you need anything else? Shall I get you some ice?’
My left side just watched all the while.
I’m not sure what pushed it over the edge. Maybe the conversation I had with the doctor about having to wait even longer for another referral. Maybe the paddy my right side pulled that meant I missed Hamilton (left side really likes musicals).
It’s free now in any case. A bit wobbly on its newborn single sole, and with half a tongue poking through half a jaw of teeth whenever its hand tries to do anything fiddly. But it’ll get there.
No longer hidden backstage, my left side finally has the spotlight.
I’ve opted to donate my brain to the public. I slice away a wafer of grey each day, and post it for consumption, dissection and deliberation. Reassemble all those slices, and the shape of my thoughts starts to emerge – every normalcy and abnormality revealed.
People talk about the ‘courage’ it takes to paint the internet with the contents of your head, I suppose because there is a worry that others might take your weaknesses and wield them, or that others might view you to be less because of your revelations, or that you might discover that you’re unacceptably abnormal and a case for social exile.
Mostly nobody’s all that special. There are millions of brain spatters across the web. Each slice sets off a bell in a similar slice of someone else’s brain – commonality results far more than rejection.
I feel like most of us watch the world in the hope of finding others like us, people who make us feel a little less strange and alone. Some of us keep our brain firmly locked on the inside, lest it give away our less palatable selves. But that only serves to make us more afraid that nobody else is like us, we are alone in the universe with a bitter brain.
I find that sticking slices of brain on the web gives me an extra step of distance – I’m better able to look at myself and reflect on that complex lump of neurons. The shadow self that emerges looks different from my assumptions, visible in all its objective glory.
And so I keep on serving another slice. Bon appétit.
He’s stood at the end of an aisle with a backpack the size of a 1990s television hanging loosely from his shoulders. He’s getting repeated glances from those nearby, presumably because their teeth are rattling from the sound of the bass vibrating from his incongruently tiny earphones. Or possibly because he sniffs every three minutes, with a lengthy snarfing sound that makes it seem entirely possible that the entire carriage might disappear into the damp recesses of his nostrils. It’s possibly due to his cold (or allergy, or drug habit).
He’s doused himself in enough aftershave that nail varnish on the hands near him is starting to bubble and peel. A spark could result in conflagration, tearing through the wavering field of scent that surrounds him like a boxy Christmas pudding.
He’s got both hands out to grip a span of three hand holds, butt swaying back and forth with every crash from his thudding accompaniment. His backpack has been ramming repeatedly into the man behind him, who has apologetically slid closer and closer to the seat in front whilst attempting not to thrust his own crotch into someone’s face. His gymnastics have not been enough to save him from those hip thrusts.
Maybe backpack guy’s got rubbish sight. It would explain the blank way he ran his eyes over the woman next to him who’s been trying to reach a hand hold but has been forced to stretch on tiptoe because he’s still holding on to the grip in front of her. She’s too polite to say anything, she just keeps on stumbling backward and forward while he keeps right on looking through her.
He finally gets a seat, much to the relief of the guy behind him and the woman next to him. As their frowns fade to relief, backpack guy plants his bag on the floor and promptly flings his thighs out to the sides. His elbows follow suit.
I fear I’ll be transmuted into a millstone – rough around the neck, with an interminable grind that erodes temper and tether.
I’ll become sickly sweet, cloying and claggy even as the mouth gets rinsed again and again.
I’ll be a duty, one to tick off each day with a plummeting stomach and stiffening shoulders.
I’ll be an unreachable thorn latched in a once smooth flank. A ball and chain without a lock. An albatross that was shot without understanding just how heavy it would feel once wrapped around the neck.
And mostly I fear that all the while, I will know.
Medically Unexplained 