Jason Purcell

First the belly wakes you, groaning and heaving sounds up at you. You wake but don’t listen. You eat what you think is good and some things you know are bad. You leave your apartment to meet friends, order a tea with almond milk, and notice the waves of pain becoming more pronounced. You return home after only an hour, movements increasing, sounds of ruptures and a searing that comes in ripples. You still aren’t sure where the origin is. Then, when the belly has swollen so much, when you have only been able to sit straight up, when you have been moaning, “No, please,” to no one for a length of time you can’t trace, do you admit to yourself that this is more than just pain. You are still sick. Even after five months of dormancy, save for a pain that has flagged you intermittently, it rears itself again. Your body betrays you, reminds you that you are alien to it, that you have no say, and that it will keep doing this and you or your doctors won’t know why. You try to hold back the vomit because this will mean confronting the fact that you hate: you are still sick. It lives in you. But it can’t be suppressed, and you give in, shaking and crying, weak. A rush of acid on your already soft teeth and then

She told me, in her office, days before my defence, that she didn’t doubt that I would have something to say, but she did doubt whether I would say it. How to feel comfortable taking up space, owning a voice and perspective? How to access confidence? Where does that come from, and why do some have it and others don’t? A flaw in my upbringing, or else something inherent, but either way, the result is a shyness that this world can’t make room for, and a shame in being a person in this only way I know how.

Now in my own life, the things I pick up that didn’t register before and now crowd my sight.

Duncan Campbell photographed in bed by Luke Edward Hall.