words that ache

i. the story of my year is: my marriage didn’t work because i’m a lesbian. a tale i told myself, looking at the shredded pieces of my life. it’s about words, it’s about narratives, see? and there was a story of me, the story of a good wife who tried really hard to make it work, and that story was a lie.

i am a paper doll person. cut myself into the right shapes. draw a smile with a sharpie, leave it there, the ink like poison in my veins.

ii. the story of my year is: i’m in love with my best friend. or i’m not. or i’m just scared of being alone. or - i’m shards of glass, tied together, too sharp and senseless to be loved. but they love me, and that feels like my one chance to be happy.

i cut myself on my own sharp edges. why would anyone ever get close?

iii. the story of my year is: i don’t let myself feel things because feelings are huge and terrifying. emotions rise up inside me like eldritch horrors, and i fight them down. i’m in love and it’s like suffocating, it’s like being dragged into the sea by monsters and drowing.

i made up that feeling, of being so deeply in love it hurts. or did i? i’m the sea and all the horrors are mine, rising up in the darkness.

iv. the story of my year is: we shared a dream, briefly, born in spring. run away with me. we picked out furniture; i bought dishes for the kitchen we said we’d have. you reached inside me and broke something, and it never healed. like a bone not set right, the scar of that summer love lingers. unspoken. undefined.

we never called it what it was. taylor would be proud.

v. the story of my year is a lie. a stack of lies. words i weaved to make sense of senseless things. i’m writing a memoir and i keep ripping it all up and starting again. i’m the main character of this play and i don’t even know what i am.

vi. the story of my year is: sunlight through trees and thinking about death and hilarious injokes and games and meeting new people and dancing in the dark and long walks up steep hills and getting a cat and dying my hair and getting my first tattoo and hurting and crying and laughing and the smile on your face like summer.

the story of my year is you. it’s always you.

vii. the story of my year is: i broke into pieces and put myself back together into a new person. not a wife. not a lesbian. not afraid to feel. i shattered like glass and found a stranger hiding inside. there’s a man i need to be and a story i need to write.

the story of my year is me, miles from where i started, and i am rising from the sea, i am rising, i am rising.

it’s nothing, really it’s best friends it’s secrets

it’s your husband’s voice in the background of the call it’s only you will get this reference, i included it just for you

one of us is in the background, and i can’t figure out which

we fight and it hurts like knives and i cry because i can’t hold you afterwards i question everything we are to each other it’s him, in the background of a picture of your pets and i feel myself sink into the scenery, just another moving part, meaning nothing

and then it’s us, it’s i love you, it’s i’d do anything to make you happy it’s you’re the only person who knows it’s hours of conversation and i still know nothing about him he’s like a ghost in the background of your life

one of us is haunting you, and i can’t figure out which

what will they do to him, these secrets we share? when he finds out about the story we wrote together when he finds out i know all your kinks but i don’t know his name what will that do to him?

it’s everything it’s stolen moments it’s i don’t know what love is but i know i love you it’s nothing, really

what will this nothing do to him?

you ever think about how friendships can turn sour?

i know you’re jealous. you think i stole a friend from you. but the truth is, you fucked up big time. you can’t take no for an answer, you can’t listen, you can’t respect boundaries.

i didn’t steal anyone. i was just there, being a good friend when you weren’t.

we used to be close, you and i. i told you secrets. you helped me grow and stand up for myself. and now... i don’t know what happened. i know you guilt tripped me when i was suicidal. i know you ghosted the group to go hang out with new people.

did you ever really care?

sometimes i think you like the idea of friendships more than the reality. friendship as performance, on the big stage under lights. it’s so important to you that people see you as a good friend, that everyone knows how close you are with someone. but you can’t treat people like that. like props for your popularity circus.

we used to be close. but this is a friendship on its last legs, rotting from the inside. and you did that. and i can’t forgive you for it.

sometimes, i count how many messages we send each other in a day.

on the quiet days, it’s 200 or more. these are days when we don’t have much to say to each other. just a thousand words or so. how are you and here’s a funny picture that made me think of you.

most days, it’s about 600. is that a lot? someone once told me that’s a lot. but when i’m in the middle of telling you that the way your brain works is amazing and beautiful to me, i don’t think of counting. i’ll use however many words it takes to make you happy.

once, it was 1000. we just talked and talked and talked. but i could talk to you all day, every day. i do, in fact. the words prove it.

i’ve said every word to you except the ones that count, i suppose. 1000 messages. and not one of them is “i’m so in love with you it hurts”. like a hero of legend, held under a curse, i can say everything to you, but not that.

love is a tender little curse.

i know all the lines of a lover. i memorised the script.

i’ve sent you enough veiled confessions to piece together sonnets. i’ve written you soliloquies and then erased them, words here and gone. i have rehearsed the scene where i kiss you, a thousand times, but never performed it.

you have someone else in your life who plays the role of the lover.

he is on the stage, under the lights. he makes the speeches. i stand backstage, in the shadows, and i whisper the lines to myself - to you. but he takes the curtain calls, and you step out in the lights to take his hand and bow, and i’m still here.

i shall play understudy, for as long as you need me. i give you my heart, and you think it’s a stage prop. you have heard all the lines from me, just rearranged. shuffle them into the right order and here i am, in love with you, unable to touch you.

you should leave him for me. i have rehearsed the scene where i kiss you, a thousand times over. i have seen the way you smile when you think of me. take my hand. run out the stage door. love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. i look upon your tempest and all i want to do is dance in your rain.

i know all the lines of a lover. let me kiss them into your skin, over and over, and you will never feel lonely again.

i'm a woman so i dress femme (please god let this work) make up and hair and skirts and heels and low cut tops. look at these curves. i am going to get a good grade in female, something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve.

{shuffle}

it's not working so i try being a grown up tomboy. work out a bunch (please god please let this work let this work) and take up boxing and don't care what people think of me. short hair, even shorter fuse. i can be a woman with muscles. women have muscles. i've connected the two dots (i didn't connect shit)

{shuffle}

maybe i'm the type of woman who dresses conservatively. cover up. act demure. i'm no longer being relentlessly sexualised and... this might be working (please god please i'm begging please let this be working let it work let me just make this work). i tell people i feel empowered. narrator voice: that was a lie.

{shuffle}

this card says 'wife' on it. i can do that (please god oh god please) i can make this work! i'm not good at it but marriage is about negotiation and compromise (god please i'm begging i need your help make this work make this work). i'm bad at wifeing but maybe with practice i'll get better.

{shuffle}

maybe i can be a lesbian. butch lesbian. wear shirts and hats and trainers. (god if you're out there if you can hear me i need your help so bad i have no one else to turn to please god please let this work let this be it let me be happy). a lesbian calls me hot and it should feel validating but it doesn't. (god. god is this a joke. am i a joke to you. i don't get it) butch doesn't look right on me and i don't like the word and (oh fuck oh god this was a mistake are you there god it's me again your favourite fuck up) is lesbian a gender. is butch a gender. why am i bad at every type of womanhood i try. why can't i get this to work (god? god?? hello??)

{shuffle}

hang on wait this card just says 'man' on it. huh. (oh thank god).

i'm in the borderland of my soul, roaming its edges.

there is a version of me that i show to the world, and i constructed it piece by piece, according to a blueprint i did not understand. this is how i'm supposed to be. i'm a woman and women do this, that, the other. it's scrubbed-clean concrete, big shiny glass panels, but the buildings are empty and the smiles are fixed and forced.

i itch at my skin. it does not fit.

head out of town, away from the lights and noise. drive out under neon signs that say things like YOU SHOULD PLUCK YOUR EYEBROWS MORE or BE MORE DELICATE! BE MORE DEMURE!

beyond the fragile facade there's dust and wreckage. the borderlands. i'm lost out here. i don't belong in the sparkling high rises of womanhood but out here on the edges, i find things to cling to. be a woman but turned sideways. be a woman, just slightly to the left. but my skin still aches and i'm not in the right place.

i drive on and there's a rusty sign by the road, Now Leaving The Town of Woman, population: billions. uncharted roads stretch ahead of me, alive with possibilities. womanhood in the rearview mirror, with its glass and flowers and carefully manicured streets. i lived there for decades, a stranger to myself.

i don't know what's ahead. but you don't need to know where you're going to know that you need to leave.