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).
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’.
It was the retching that woke him. That, and the feeling that his lungs had been set on fire and scoured out with sand. Kilter dragged in air between strained coughs that spattered the ground black.
It took him a few wheezing minutes to realise that the hacking sounds weren’t all emerging from his own mouth. He opened gluey, dirt-filled eyes to see five of his staff were similarly occupied.
They were in the Blue Dining Room, sprawled on the well-polished boards – no, Kilter thought muzzily – what should have been well-polished boards, but these boards were clouded and dusty. The room looked peculiarly dark, the window panes letting in only a small amount of grubby light.
They’d been in here to discuss the upcoming gala in celebration of the princess’ sixteenth birthday, when whatever it was had hit them. His body felt weak, his legs barely kept him upright. He stared at the white faces in front of him and abruptly dragged himself together.
‘Right. We need to check room by room, if we were affected by this sickness, perhaps others have been too. I’ll head to the Royal Chambers; split up and work your way through the ground floor. Get others to help -’ He broke off.
Wailing screams were coming through the open doorway.
Kilter wobbled his way into the Great Hall, having sent the others on their way. A few serving staff were slumped against the oak length of the table that ran through the centre of the hall. They turned blurred, puzzled eyes to him as he walked toward the huge fireplace that dominated the far wall.
Mrs Napfas, the head butler, was crouched in the fireplace, skirts streaked with black smudges as she held a small figure to her breast.
Kilter knelt and reached out a hand to the woman’s shoulder. Her cries had become nothing more than a rambling, aching string of denials.
She pulled away from his touch with a moan, and clutched the body tighter. And it was a body, he saw. Limp and still. With a head that resembled a burnt match end. The boy’s name was Tallo, and he had been so very proud to take on duties last autumn, lighting lamps and fires. It appeared that he had been tending the Great Hall fireplace when the sleeping sickness had fallen upon him, and he had tumbled forward into the fire he had so lovingly built up.
Tallo was not the only victim of this strange sickness.
The gardeners had suffered more than most, their skin had been strangely beaten and burnt until it was curiously grey leather, and most had lost fingers and toes to what seemed to be frostbite.
It had taken hours to find the master gardener. A kitchen boy spotted a limb buried in the bizarre wall of thorns that had sprung up around the palace circumference. After shearing away what they could, the man’s body lay pale and punctured on the lawn, drained of life by the myriad thorned snakes that wove in and out of his body.
Two washermen had been found crushed beneath a curiously crumbled wall. The head cook had been found dead with a terrible slice to his wrist. The bodies of two bathers were pulled from copper bathtubs. At least five of Kilter’s staff never awakened, presumably due to the head wounds that they seemed to have incurred through violent falls. And several of those who had awoken in one piece were now coughing blood.
He’d done his best to keep the staff functioning, but there was no way to hold back the murmurs of fear: this had been retribution, they must have done something to deserve it, the deserving had lived – Mrs Napfas had nearly gouged the eyes out of the sanctimonious chamber maid who spouted that last one.
The royal family, meanwhile, were uncharacteristically quiet. When Kilter had attended them earlier, he had been ordered to depart and to take the chamber servants with him.
He returned that evening, wearied by the deaths and the increasing fear that this sleeping sickness might have spread beyond the palace, that his wife and daughter might –
The door to the Princess’ chamber opened and the Queen stepped out, shutting the door behind her.
‘Kilter! The floor is disgusting, get someone up here to clean.’
Kilter’s face remained blank, ‘Yes, Ma’am.’
From behind the Queen, the door rattled and the sound of furious shrieking slid around its edges.
The Queen pursed her mouth and tapped her fan against her hand.
‘I trust I have your complete confidence, Kilter?’
He gave another nod, managing not to wince at the sound of pounding fists on the door.
‘The Princess is going through a difficult time, Kilter. The, er, gentleman prince who awakened her, and indeed awakened us all, did so with unexpected vigour. Vigour that resulted in his leggings being around his ankles, shall we say,’ she fanned herself as a flush rose over her cheekbones, ‘My daughter, hysterical madam that she is, has refused to marry the young man.’
She paused. The door gave another thud as something broke on its opposite side.
‘The King is ensuring that the gentleman does not leave our company until the matter is settled. And I dare say confirming his pedigree.’
The Queen sighed. ‘Still, we’re awake! Curse broken, we can put it all behind us now. The staff are expected to return to their duties, Kilter. No more unseemly hysteria.’
He gave yet another nod, then hesitated, ‘Curse, Ma’am?’
‘The sleeping curse, Kilter.’ She said it as though it were a stupid question. ‘All rather tiresome but there are worse ways to spend a hundred years!’ She gave a thin laugh, ‘A rather extended beauty sleep, one might say.’
He watched her glide away to the royal chamber. And clamped down on his own rising bubble of hysteria.
One hundred years.
One hundred years.
Impossible.
Kilter put out a hand to grasp the wall (tapestried with a rather fetching myrtle tree).
He had kissed his wife and daughter a fond farewell only yesterday. They were only to be away for a week.
One hundred years.
***
There was no escaping the truth, once the first carriages of curious city dwellers arrived. Their declarations of welcome for the slumbering palace were an unconvincing veneer for gossipmongering.
Kilter broke it to his staff bluntly and gave them no room to mull before assigning them to their duties. They would grieve later.
The thorn hedge was torn down, popping with cherry red sparks as treacherously springy bundles were heaved into the burners. Dirt and dust were chased from room to room, blackened silver laid out for polishing, the mummified contents of pantries replaced with fresh produce from the city.
And then the Governor arrived. She was attended by a full coterie of officials who wore identical sneers of derision, their garments impossibly bright against the drab greys and faded browns of the castle.
Though her staff made it clear that the palace was a pathetic remnant of a former age, they seemed rabid for gossip. The city was simply desperate to know the truth behind the palace’s disappearance and awakening.
The city had assumed that the palace had been swept by plague, and thus the thorn hedge had been secured as a no-trespassing zone monitored by the Governor’s guard. An eager courtier admitted that the current Governor had made multiple attempts to get through the thorns – a palace would have been a useful tool in the battle to legitimise herself as ruler of the kingdom.
She had been white-faced at the word that someone else had succeeded, let alone a prince of the neighbouring kingdom that had been toying with annexation plans since the palace had fallen.
The Governor had no intention of ceding control to the Queen. Her family’s influence had kindled in the days of confusion that followed the disappearance of the palace. There was no way she would allow ancient, dusty, and unnecessary monarchs to take back power.
The Princess meanwhile, such a child! To refuse a marriage with the only man ever likely to want such a poor match. And they’d heard that she was still refusing to leave her chamber. Didn’t bode well for the fate of the kingdom.
Kilter watched the tales of intrigue spool out across the Great Hall, gritted teeth held behind a smooth facade. His eyes never moved from the haunting mass of the fireplace.
These men and women meant no real harm, perhaps, but how could they lust after a story such as this? One of death, rape, endless loss.
He allowed himself to drift into memories of his family.
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].
Or if not magic, then convincingly futuristic sounding “medicine”.
Or if not futuristic medicine, then convincingly ancient sounding “medicine”.
This is the gap that bleeds hope.
It exists in our minds alone. The world gives little care for concepts like ‘unfairness’ or ‘undeserving’.
The world just is. And sometimes we cannot trace our patterns of meaning over its contours.
The gap is vulnerable. It wants to be filled. Like a child it reaches for anything that comes into its vicinity.
And there are always those with a shark’s sense for blood.
They will circle when hope cries out, carefully brewed oil of snake or poisoned apple in hand. They wear a mask of utmost sympathy, and speak with the zeal of one with absolute fact at their back.
And what can hope do but reach for a taste?
Charms, crystals, prayers, herbs, mysterious energy reading machines – just a little more, just a little longer, one more day-month-year. The cure lies just around the corner.
‘Lies’ being the operative word.
The gap hungers, whimpers, so tired of the ache of hoping yet never quite fulfilling.
Yet if we let gods, magic, mysticism, or alternative medicines pass us by, what balm can soothe the gap?
I fill my gap with my own absolute insignificance.
With the scale of this planet, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe. With the incredible statistical feat of my existence. With the duration of my life against the age of the Sun. With the breathtaking beauty of a world that will continue to rotate uncaring and unaware of the motes that scatter its surface.
It is here that I find comfort. Meaning in the absolute meaningless of space. For all that humanity builds or destroys, our wars, our discoveries, our loves and joys, those we laud or despise, we are but a blink. Everything we know and discover is incredible, and yet utterly insignificant against all that we do not know.
My gap overflows.
And though this may not find cures or solutions, there is a peace that comes with perspective. Yes, I am insignificant. But how wonderful it is to have the capacity to think that thought.
Medically Unexplained 