Tag / Relationships

by Isla

The glue

In which I figure out my purpose

I always talk about not having a real role – no jobs with my initials, no tasks that are mine and mine alone. The baby quite often doesn’t, especially when surrounded by Gods of Practicality. I’ve always pattered around and lent a hand where needed: I hold up planks, check ovens, weed unruly patches, carry washing, grab people when it’s time to eat. 

But I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that it’s okay for my role to be invisible rather than practical.

I am the glue. And occasionally, the WD40.

I trot from one workplace to the next – shed, garden, house – find a perch and begin my work.

I listen for the things that create frustration, the needs unmet, and when I move on to the next person, I carefully pollinate ideas to improve understanding. 

I translate when you’re listening wholly with your assumptions and pipette an appropriate amount of humour into the situation, defusing the tension. 

I acknowledge frustration and gently attempt to lend you someone else’s shoes to try on. 

I tease, peeling up the edges of sunken spirits until the hulking mass begins to rise upward.

I soothe ruffled feathers, am silent when you need it, and my arms are always open.

And in return, I am the recipient of such utterly uncomplicated love that it flows from heart to heart with no hesitation. 

by Isla

Aglow

In which I catch the sun

I struggle to exist when I’m out of sight.

When I’m with you, I’m lit by the blazing sunlight of your presence. Everything becomes more entertaining, more challenging, more exciting.

But I fade from your brain as soon as my footsteps recede, and I only buzz a mental alarm clock when you encounter an overt reminder.

I know it’s just the way you are – I’ve always known. It’s an integral part of you and it couldn’t be changed without everything else changing.

I learned to let go of expectations because there was only ever one result: I would get hurt and then the same thing would roll around and happen again. Expectations form a wedge of resentment that slides between your heart and mine, but I’m the only one who knows it’s there.

I catch myself now and then, caught between hope and waiting. Gilded with the bladed edge of bitterness. And then I remember that there is no decision between you or the lack of you. I cannot live without the sun. 

So I store up those glowing hours and let them cast light on darker times. I absorb apologies into my skin and know that they are completely sincere in the moment, for all that they may scatter into ashes in the next.

And when I walk into the sunshine once more, it will burn away all but the heart you hold in your hands.

by Isla

No cigar

In which memory stings

I’d never encountered anything that I couldn’t achieve so long as tried. 

So I tried.

I held smiles on lips that no longer worked, turned precognition to maximum to put things in place before they were needed, and tried to follow the rules spoken on a million forums (not too much, not too little, not too keen, not too distant, be less annoying, be less pathetic). 

I tried harder.

Helplessness began to claw its way up my throat over and over again, refusing to be swallowed back down. Wet footprints trod cheeks at first in darkness and then began to march in daylight. 

I tried harder.

My heart was rubbed raw with myriad microscopic failings. My ears began to ring with siren calls that drowned every scene with portents of failure. 

And when I finally cut myself loose, I still didn’t get it. I couldn’t understand that the problem was not one of effort but one of being:

I needed to not be me.

Stuck with me, as it were, I came to recognise the futility of trying.

And yet sometimes those sirens still whisper sweet nothings.

No matter how hard you try, you will never be enough.

by Isla

Soft spot

In which I feel uncomfortable

I’ve got a real soft spot for you. 

(Get your mind out of the gutter.)

It’s the tenderness of a piglet’s belly, the nestle of warm sheets, the helpless puddling of ice cream in summer sun. 

It feels like I’ve only just realised how stabbable I am, how all these knotted organs are wrapped in flesh rather than the spined armour I always assumed I wore.

Like the Emperor’s new clothes, once I realised it wasn’t there, I was left naked and flinching at how easily a word could slip between a rib to puncture or nick. 

Fear wraps his arms around me, holding me immobilised as I see your words approach. But they slip over my skin, loosening the clutch of those bony fingers and soothing the bruises beneath. They glide over ribs with the softest of pads, slow and gentle until the tide of anxiety is reversed.

Fear returns the next day, and the next, and yet your words never sharpen with impatience. A disgusted part of me watches the floundering and shrieks for me to weave back the armoured illusion I once wore. 

But then I look at you.

And I think that soft spot might stay.

by Isla

Unbridled

In which I count the ways that I love you

She’s a no holds barred, shits ungiven, unbridled pillar of purest sass. 

She’s got more eye twinkles than a children’s poem, a laugh that’s seen you without your trousers, and a tongue that can choose to dice you or nice you.

Mountains cower at her command and slink off at the jab of a finger; chaos parts before her, scrabbling frantically to order at a single glance. 

She’s got a heart that gives and gives and gives, and she writes no return address on the back. 

Her love feels like the rise of the sun on cold skin, a warm pair of arms after years at sea.

She’s hidden in plain sight so only the luckiest can see her. 

I’m so glad I could.

by Isla

Bad bet

In which I’m really appreciative

It’s a lot to sign up for: 

The cancelled dates, 

The midnight wakes,

The fact that there’s nothing to do but wait.

There’s the job I left, 

The dances I missed, 

Those times excuses were forced from your lips. 

There’s the rattle of medication,

The waiting lists marching in endless succession,

And the journeys made in a single direction.

It’s all in the knowledge that there is no, ‘and then’.

There is only this. 

You signed up without pause,

So for you, I’ll add the small print:

You’re signed up until ‘a lot’ is too much.

by Isla

Cracked chest

In which I reflect on changes

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.

by Isla

Close to the bone

In which I listen in the dark

I can hear the skeletons in my closet.

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. 

They’ve got spine.

by Isla

Isla’s web

In which we consider the nature of relationships

I stand on an island.

Isla on an island. (How satisfying.)

It’s around 30 feet across, covered in the springy grass that only grows atop really peaty soil. About two feet in from the edges are thick metal loops that have been hammered into the ground, each as thick as my wrist and veined with faint reddish streaks. They’re buried at one foot intervals around the circumference of the island, and while some lie empty, others hum and spark.

The one nearest me is barely visible beneath a mass of shining, seething threads, each stretching and intertwining with its sisters to form a single thronging rope that throws itself beyond the island and out into the mist. This is by far the busiest hive of threads.

It leads to my mother’s island.

Every thread is a message, a photo, a phonecall, a hug, a shared laugh, a rushed journey to comfort, a warm meal, an eye roll, a word to the wise. The threads dash from my end to hers and back, the rope between us now too thick to grasp in both hands and electric with activity.

A short walk away lies another loop. This one empty but for a single sparking thread that noses the air, then tentatively slips away into the mist.

Let us watch and wait.

After minutes-days-weeks, the thread begins to vibrate, and from beyond the island comes another line, intertwining with mine until it reaches the metal loop. As it does, the filaments grow brighter, stronger. This is the birth of a friendship, the tentative creation of a relationship that will grow stronger as the threads continue to weave between the islands.

On the other side of the island are the loops I avoid, letting my eyes slide away as I walk past and tend the others. They still have thick bundles of threads tied to them, but they are withered and grey. There is no spark, no movement, and if you stand and watch, you see only fraying and splintering. Some of those cords still stretch in vain out beyond the island’s edge, but others hang limply over the side, severed and flailing helplessly in the wind.

The threads of these relationships stopped flowing: one too many missed calls or failed replies, a long forgotten argument, a barrier of pride.

One too many cancellation.

Every time I cancel – a dinner, a birthday, a meeting, a concert, a rehearsal – I watch a nascent thread falter and fall still. For newborn relationships, it can be fatal; with established relationships, I can see a thickened scar of burnt out threads.

I tend to my island with love, haunted by the burnt out cords that flap failure in my wake.