Where there’s a wool, there’s a way

This summer took a lot out of me. Acne-ridden and anaemic, I fell in love with both strangers and myself, watched my sister get married, discovered the ingenuity of nipple covers and spent more time dancing than I did asleep (you’d be surprised how many of those events happened simultaneously).

I’d like to compare this summer to a hurricane to demonstrate the sheer movement of it all, the devastation, the magnitude. And, although an amply chaotic simile, I realised whilst sleeplessly watching the sunrise from my doorstep: it’s me who is the force of nature.

I am invincible. I am loving every second of this. Who said millennials don’t have their lives together? I look great in this halter-neck. I really gave that guy a piece of my mind. I won’t take anyone’s shit. Why did I ever feel scared? I feel great. This feels great.

And it did feel great… until I got glandular fever and then everything felt much more swollen (aka significantly less great than before). Literally who knew a person had so many glands? As the reality of my status as an evidently non-goddess-like being came crashing down on me, it’s safe to say I was inconsolable. The world doesn’t look so pretty after being knocked from a high horse made predominantly of tequila-induced arrogance – and I learned that the hard way.

What gives? I thought I was invincible? I thought I was being rewarded for my pains by becoming halter-neck-rocking-heartbreaker for evermore? No one mentioned any obligatory inflammation as part of the deal. I want a do-over!

Yet, the engorged tonsils festering in the pharynx of this indignant white girl wronged by the world and the Epstein-Barr virus ensured that none did ever hear these shrill lamentations. Alas indeed.

From the get-go, I can tell you that I wasn’t taking kindly to being accurately described by the term ‘glandular’. Not only because this is possibly one of the most horrendous words to globule its way into the English language, but also because a number of things change when good glands GO BAD…

exit

Like an archipelago, I’m in pieces.
Strung out in the ocean,
I gasp for breath.
Open-mouthed
I gulp above the waves, my lips
Suckling at air bubbles.
I’ve never felt quite so
Alone.

Your words sweat hatred from every pore and the stench fills the air. Wild and wide-eyed, I dart for a way out, but it seems we’ve already left.

Did nobody tell you the world isn’t just yours? There’s more to a door than an exit and I feel like we’ve been here before.

Have I heard these words in an echo? Held them warm and moist in my own mouth, or was that someone else? I forget. But now I am spitting them at your feet, letter by letter. Vowels and consonants wet with my saliva and tears. You can take your sweaty hate and the fingers in your ears; take them far, far away from here because I can’t bear the smell and the silence.

Drummer Girl

Popped collar. Rock solid. She walks in sunlight.

Back at the flat and she’s throwing away unopened letters that look like they could be bills. She longs for the ocean. She winces while she plucks her eyebrows. She paints all of her nails and then picks the polish off again, deciding ‘salmon dream’ isn’t her colour. The room feels different when he’s not here. She thinks about the last time they spoke.

Pluck-pick-pluck-pick.

“Can you just give me one second to get my thoughts together without jumping down my throat the entire time?”

Just-one-second-slam.

She remembers tears welling up in her eyes as the door slammed shut.

Slam-slam-roll-crash.

She splashes her face with cold water, freshens her lipstick and leaves.

Splash-fresh-lip-leave.

Men roll down their tinted windows at the traffic lights. She pulls her denim jacket tighter around her porcelain shoulders. The music oozes from her headphones and drips down her arms and her chest, swallowing their catcalls whole. In an instant, their sweaty kisses are engulfed, leaving her alone with thoughts of music and moonlight.

Finally she’s drumming. She is all hair and drums. And they’ve noticed her, they’re in awe of her. They’re recording her on their phones and not paying the singer any mind. A crowd has gathered now, she catches glimpses of them through tresses of bleach blonde hair. Coins and notes drop into the open guitar case.

It’s like they’ve never seen a drummer girl before.

Soak

Naked, slicked-back and sliding into the bathtub, the hot water shocks her system like the day she had spent outside the hospital. Sloping her body, the steam rolls around her; a shroud. She is not drowned, she is a mermaid when her hair curls under the water. Closing her eyes, she lets the water soak into her and pull the memory from her skin, but it doesn’t lift easily.

Wrapping her fingers in her seaweed hair, she feels anchored to herself. She finds this comforting, and pulls tighter.

As she does this, his hands; calloused and sun-kissed, like his father’s, emerge through the steam and they cling to hers. It’s a trick of the light filtering through steam, she blinks and the hands dissolve into the muggy bathroom air. As soon as they vanish, she longs for their return.

She had tried to comfort him, but her words tumbled from her lips and onto the hard waiting room floor. The waiting room, where there was nothing to wait for; it had already happened.

“Perhaps stroking his hair would have been more reassuring”, the sound of her voice surprised her. She laughed at her own strangeness, finding haven in it. Knowing she was different made her feel stronger.

The bathtub is too small for her now, she can only submerge her torso when her knees are bent upwards and drawn in on themselves. She remembers the splashing giggles of Sunday baths with her brother when soap bars were battle ships and flannels were sails. Then, with bubble beards fizzling on their chins, they would pluck adventures from thin air. They were pirates against Vikings, making costumes from sponges and anything from anything; only snapping back to reality when their father pulled them from their underwater world, dripping and laughing as if, at that moment, they were the only things that existed. She often felt like that growing up. Everyone else was made from smoke and mirrors.

When she ran her bath today, she’d hoped the water would return her to her adventures. Of journeys across the seven seas, her brother her only crew member.

“This is a bit like a journey too,” the hopeful words echo in her head, but do not convince her. This wasn’t a journey she wanted to take. Today, she didn’t look forward to bathtime.

Amsterdam

I wasn’t in Amsterdam long enough.

A city that never sleeps; an insomnia that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and leaves you gasping.

The city rolls out before me like skin and makes me stumble. Before I know it, Amsterdam has me in it’s clutches.

It’s the kind of place that consumes a person – gobbles the bodies of men and women before they have time to finish  their beer.

Tell me, is there anything you wouldn’t do for Amsterdam? To feel Amsterdam wrap its cobbled talons around you – you struggle, but the last thing you want is for it to loosen its grip.

Is there anything you wouldn’t do to go running with Amsterdam; barefoot, its kiss still burning on your lips and its scent on your skin?

I wasn’t in Amsterdam long enough, but I saw how it enslaved people with its silhouettes and soil. Chewing gum stuck fast behind red-light tresses.

You knew the risks.

Yet still you come flocking to Amsterdam. The cool neglect of Amsterdam. The unfurling groans of Amsterdam.

Take the city and let it dance with you until midnight.

You won’t know your own heartbeat until you’ve danced with Amsterdam. There’s nothing I won’t do to feel its breath on my neck.

Without even a flicker of a doubt, I leap into its arms; star-struck and twinkling.

Brussels

Art galleries in Brussels take me longer to circle.

To let myself into the shimmer of charcoal dust on paper.

It takes time.

The charcoal she would have bought from the art shop we passed by yesterday, when visions of the underground were swirling in our heads.

It takes time for me to soak it in, to soak it all in.

I hear the steady breath, mine and yours and the paintings’.

The sigh of brushstroke on canvas. Hard, crackling coughs of graphite.

I imagine the artist, Monique or Gabrielle; grey hair tousled and pulled upward into ponytails. She sits, a self-portrait waiting to unfurl, perhaps in the very same square we ate our lunch in yesterday.

So it takes me time. All of this takes time.

Time I spend pinpointing each pencil mark, cross-referencing the lines on my postcards home with her silhouettes.

I see my footprints on the street outside echoed in her portraits. Is that weird?

Can you see that the light from the sun in Brussels hits my face the same way it hit hers?

Is there much more I can do to see the world like she does?

I have all this time and more space than I’ve ever had before. What else can I do to draw the world the way she does?

I’m in Brussels.

The light is hitting my face. 

I have charcoal and pencils.

So, Monique/Gabrielle; show me how.

Papa

There is nothing kinder in this world than my father’s eyes.

Scissor-like, but gentle, they snip away your selfishness, your jealousy, your armour, and you’re left; thinner now, but grateful for the change. I think that’s what they do anyway. Blinking, I lock eyes with my better self and silently, I pledge to meet with her again someday. For now though, I trace his worming veins and press them gently downwards into his skin.

Dad, whose flick of a tongue can make dragons see reason, turn cardboard into castles and pluck stories from thin air.

I remember sitting with him in our jungle garden; we would sit, me with my broken wrist bound tightly in plaster and he, barefoot, jeans rolled up to his shins. The sunshine suddenly retreats shyly in the presence of his gloaming eyes and throat. My story-teller. We sat together, slumped in the lazy, hazy afternoon light.

Somehow I wanted to be more like him. Somehow wanting more than just his way with words and his kind eyes, I decided to wear his shoes. Of course, my grubby adventurer’s feet are swallowed whole, but it makes me feel a bit closer to him; to feel my skin against the indent of his footprint.