juisce

And they’ll never know how deeply I hurt.

           Somewhere there’s a television showing Watersons and your mother is folding your school clothes. Macaroni cheese bubbles in the oven, the real kind her hands laboured over for a couple hours to get the consistency right, to melt the two different cheeses, and of course she won’t say “I love you” out loud but this is her own language. This is the liturgy of being a mother. And parents always lie in bed at night and imagine The Horrors, but it’s always the wrong sort.

I’m sorry I’ve unforgiven you. I’m sorry they bricked up the river, that the waves buckle under the weight of wood. I’m sorry that everything I thought to be replenished, unwound, found its way back to me. I’m sorry I started from the very beginning. 🌺The beginning where there is no edit between night and day and someone asks me a question but I can’t respond and everything is filled with lead. Cashing a cheque at the bank or sitting on the beach with friends as their laughter ripples around you, asking an empty silence what’s for dinner. I’m sorry I kept the curtains shut and evaded sunlight, sunsets. I’m sorry nobody told you you couldn’t treat someone that way. I’m sorry nobody told me, either. I’m sorry that sometimes wind still yells through the broken window downstairs, and my neighbour and I had to heave it shut together before the thunder cracked, and it was the closest to intimacy I had had in months, and I thanked her so much she looked uncomfortable. I’m sorry I deleted the text messages but kept the pictures, and then wished it was the reverse. I’m sorry I had to see that, and that, and that, and also that thing from last week. I called my sponsor to say I had missed the fifth step and I wasn’t even sure what it was, or what the fourth step had been as it had been so long.🍹

           It feels. I want to hold him and cry. I want someone to talk about it with, over and over until the blood runs clean. I want to reach the point when stories like this become a memory someone else has to jostle awake. I want someone to tell me they did the same, to share that understanding look between sisters, strangers. It keeps going, is all I can say. I wish it stopped.

Now, girl.

GOD MAKES NO ACCIDENTS was slashed across the sunset in violent red lettering. We had climbed up the hill to gaze at the vista, viscous with heat, and all the veins of the city sprawling out beneath us. The dynasty of the Gods came here to fornicate and raise kids and die. Popping Xanax as the most important meal of the day, performing the liturgy of a bimonthly juice cleanse as a semi-religious act, naming their dogs after French directors. This was Mount Olympus for screenwriters and washed up actresses and architects who liked to unbutton the top three closures of their Acne shirts. The unofficial history was, of course, that it was built on pure artifice. All of the noises melted into one insect hum in the evenings, save for the sporadic incendiary shriek of invisible teenage girls. We smoked and passed around a bottle of peach schnapps that sweated against our palms, we laughed about the year gone by and our collective memory. The one where we had grown up beneath the same sun together, sitting in school buildings the colour of slate, where teachers and guidance counsellors drilled the same self-taught platitudes into our skulls and asked us what our plans were. Plans? Felt good to dream. Felt good to roll my sleeves up and smoke illegal cigarettes with my friends on the advent of our complete separation. Everyone dispersing across the nation to wind up in new circles, studying at college and leaving behind this sinkhole city.

The middle of my mind is all black and blue from where you left it. I scrubbed the surface of my soul until it was bleeding raw. I took you out with the rest of the dirty laundry, rinsed you in the swell of river water that flowed around my ankles. Before the advent of each new romantic misadventure, I sat with a grapefruit pressed to my mouth and promised the lattice of my bones: this time, I will get it right. Winter tamed gusts of white wolves out of the clouds; a thick, embryonic season that incubated my childish softness, my want for something rough and raw and real. Nobody talks about how, for some, love is a straightjacket you bind yourself. Morning light came in knives through the cracks in the trees’ hair, I watched lone birds (left for dead) circle the sky. Thought I rose from the dead a hundred times in the past, trailing my dead self behind me in the lip of water. That’s another thing nobody ever talks about – how you never get used to climbing out of darkness.

Your halo burns with sacrificial embers. They weren’t ready for you, skin like milk, nails sharp as razors; a woman/girl, offensive to the eye, offensive to the vein of men who were never taught their voices were not akin to God’s. You learnt: woman is smooth. She is silent. She smiles. She walks in their direction. She doesn’t fight back. They are always born to watch you, glimmering like spoilt jewels in the afternoon sunlight in spaces where you should not belong. You had to learn for yourself that there are wolves hiding in all the places you never thought to look, all the places you called your own : the world welcomes the wolves.

A hundred pairs of hungry eyes searched a moth-bitten sky for their God. The blush of late afternoon crept in over the rooftops, as street lamps began to blink rapidly and glow through the teal and grey wash of filth that clung perpetually to every building. All the innocent blood spilled and coalesced beneath the veins of city pipes beneath our feet. A naked woman leant out of her window with a cigarette for company. I prayed for monsoon weather. A Travis Bickle type of flood. Mosquitoes fat with blood wheezed their way around the carts of fruits as Old Salvador sweated his labour, selecting engorged globes of grapes and cherries for the elderly women who he called Sweetheart. A little boy sat with his legs folded on the street corner, raising a conch to his hear in order to hear the echoes of the ocean. It was madness. Structural genocide. Nothing could have convinced me that the men in suits hadn’t merely colluded on a new systematic shadow of death to engulf us all in. Lacing our canned foods with poison. Inventing new gas chambers, a constantly polluted metropolis to kill us all slowly, sincerely. I thought of the red-blooded moon watching over us all, hearing our children die. The whole land was rife with mania. Trigger-happy and unloading bullets into people’s dreams. Parents burying their children. Speaking of the dead in whispers. Soon, all we say is in whispers. The stutter of gunshots rings louder than Zeus’ cry. You were born dead, he told us gutter children.

The airport glowed beneath the moonlit night, the sparkling aquamarine tiles and deep sea colours radiated off departure board screens and the neon lights of the last kiosk open. I had picked little more than underwear and some (mostly) clean t-shirts. Crises were never my strongest point. Counted off the remaining hours of the delayed flight on the tips of my fingers and hazarded a glance at one of the other passengers, his body slumped into the chair with another polystyrene cup of coffee pressed to his lips. Home was a wasteland; the vacant parking lots and desolate streets made it look as though a nuclear bomb had wiped out all of its civilians. I remembered how the fog inched over the Scandinavian roof tiles, engulfing everything in its wake. Thought of my father in his leather jacket, inspecting the mangled body of a murdered cat lying dead beside our front porch. I didn’t like to think back on my childhood, it magnetised all myriad of troubles. My tin can bedroom with its tiny window, how I felt permanently imprisoned. Everything reeked of destitution. The streetlamps burnt through the empty nights as foxes screamed in the darkness. Occasionally, a reckless individual would drown in the great lake. Boys put their hands up beneath my tennis skirt and smirked when I protested. My mathematics teacher twirled a strand of my hair between his fingertips. I studied the lore of MTV and American movies, always saturated with colour and drugs. I knew that that was life.

Winter’s bone unleashed pure hell, a muted kind of chaos that slithered in beneath the door silently, filled in the cracks and broke the walls the way ivy does. I stood in the kitchen, tinged with the grey light of early morning fog, staring through the greasy window at a city choked with pollution. Straining a tea bag; futile attempt to introduce healthy vitamins into the body. Max’s body was decaying faster than milk left unattended, and yet. I counted out the vials of medicine, bathed his feet in Epsom salts and squeezed the pulp of fresh lemons into a concoction that a herbal bible promised would radically improve one’s health. I don’t care for God, Max told me with his eyebrows furrowed behind a copy of Sartre. Voice clipped with cynicism. It was horrible to admit it, and I did, once, bellowing out my feelings in guttural sobs over the phone to Annelize. How the whole apartment stank of death, how the veins were beginning to surface beneath his translucent skin in a cobweb of lilac threads, the way the coughs shuddered his whole body like an exorcism. I fed Maisie, who spent her days curled up on Max’s belly, purring him into a seemingly endless slumber that only ebbed when I rattled his shoulder for soup or, if he was in the mood to exercise his jaw muscles, some chilli fries and steak. Jackson phoned me, his voice electric with panic, to tell me Max had been taken to the emergency room but I was not to worry, the doctors had assured him it would all be fine yes yes but would you mind picking up a few things for him you know his Goethe and his Kafka etcetera yes oh and his mint thins you’re the only one who has the key? I stood in that empty flat. As noiseless as before, but somehow more empty. Ghostly calm. There were his gold-rimmed spectacles. There the mint thins he actually never ate. There was the depression in the pillow where his head had been lifted by paramedics.

My young heart shot open; wires exposed, synapses firing. YOU DON’T KNOW HOW LOVE FEELS, my whole body wanted to scream. We blurred into the colours of London as the sky unzipped the velour of darkness. Street lamps flickered into vision, floating orbs in the inkpot night. In the archives of past lovers, I knew only of dirt… of sporting their muddy footprints as they trampled over my softness. I knew of men whose love existed in glass boxes labelled FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY! I started smoking for these men, men like serpents slithering between my ears, hissing nonsense. Then he appeared, smoke on water. Open shirt, effeminate laugh, languishing over unromantic drugs in his spare time. Ah-ha! A man I could merely lie in the sun with, no questions asked. He picked flowers in Hyde Park and brought them to me. Love was always my wound. Crown of thorns/ Achille’s heel. My jarring kryptonite. My mother had raised me with the lore of sagacious women, I’d grown up reciting I am Bold, Beautiful, a Boss in front of the mirror with utter conviction. Had never found myself unattractive or unworthy. But the second a man turned his back on me, the confetti became a nuisance. The faucet ran dry. And then… myself. Is that just it? I cannot stand the noise of my own voice. The screaming of my own thoughts. Cannot stand to be alone with myself, must always have a man to warm my bed and melt the solstice of my own self despair? I prefer not to imagine this is the case.