I walk into the empty chapel and say forgive me forgive me, I’m nothing but sin and god whispers in my ear Go on your wicked way, my girl, you are still wanted in all your rot. I want things I shouldn’t want, I want things I cannot have. I’m trying so hard to be good, dig my nails into my thighs, stop imagining his hands (my neck), stop imagining his neck (my teeth). The ferocity of desire tearing through me, that white-hot heat searching for somewhere to land.
Instead we let our bodies touch to the limits and in the places they’re allowed - legs pressed together under a table, arms overlapped, brief hand on the small of a back - and I attempt to accept things that cannot be, not now and almost certainly not ever but which instead unfold on another timeline, in a version of the world where our choices had been different. And I tell myself that it’s just desire, chemical reactions and drinks and proximities, rather than admit the currents of genuine feeling running below the surface.
Because I’d let myself believe that it was just a game. Stretching and twisting that cord of tension, me playing with my power, you flexing your charm. But between the laughs and the grins and the glances there’s the quiet moments in company, where you see straight through the middle of me and I let you look. In the end, we pass the test. We do not fall; we are not doomed. The fine cobweb of deniability glitters between us again, a curtain on the threshold. I didn’t think that it would hurt, but it hurts all the way home.
Sometimes I still fall asleep remembering the way he looked at me across a crowded room.
Summer bleeds into autumn, a lingering heat that refuses to lift. We fall into giddy conspiracy, some reluctance to let the season go - screaming karaoke on a weeknight, quiet drinks that tumble into bars, frozen margarita machines and bags of dodgy mushrooms. I laugh so hard all the way back across the river that I keep having to stop my bike by the side of the cycle path to breathe. In the morning I find dubious souvenirs in the pockets of my dungarees; tickets, lighters, shrivelled roots.
These late weeks remind me of being a teenager, the way we hunted in a pack, dressed all alike and almost interchangeable. The intimacy of our inability to hold a front; just dumb kids let loose with an empty house. Even in our early adulthood we never fully lost that chaotic feeling, living half-feral in that crumbling terrace with a bathtub full of clothes all the same size.
Even when we grew up and grew apart, even when our choices scattered us, I still believed we would be forged together forever in some fundamental way. Some heartsick blend of optimism and naivety. I didn’t see the train pulling away from me slowly, moving into a world I cannot reach. On my worst days I believe all of their choices are a direct critique of mine, of all the things I tried and failed to achieve. On my worst days I believe it is because I’ve never been able to inspire the kind of devotion in another person that I imagine leads to rings and house purchases and children. I become envious of a life I haven’t yet attempted to pursue, a life I deliberately and wilfully turned away from time and time again. I wonder why they left me behind, as if I hadn’t done whatever I wanted all along, as if I hadn’t left and left and left again and expected everyone I left behind to hold the hole of my absence open forever.
I want every life I’m not yet choosing to be preserved in aspic, for them all to freeze in position like a playground game. I want to hold onto their ankles and tell them we still have time, there’s no rush. Stay with me. Don’t forget me. I’m not ready for us all to be grown, I’m still finding my way. Tell me you’re scared, too.
I moved to Paris for many reasons, including being depressed and twenty-four and in love with a man who had shaved off all his hair and turned it into a paintbrush. These are not ordinary choices. I don’t think I’ve ever been in pursuit of what might be considered a normal life.
If you could step back through a door and find yourself at sixteen or twenty-one or even thirty, would you still make the same decisions? It’s odd to arrive at a place where I think I would, even the worst ones - stupid and reckless and embarrassing, gutter choices. I rarely didn’t go after the things I wanted so my regrets are mostly in the rawness, in the ways I could have done things more clean, more cool, if I’d been able to be the kind of person who was capable of having tidy, comprehensible emotions.
But I still thought it was my fault, that I didn't have those things. Over time it became apparent that perhaps the problem was never the choices I made, but the person I fundamentally was; some reflection of my inherent lack. I thought if I could compress the dark parts of myself for long enough they might finally dissolve. I say I want you to appreciate me as a flawed individual but in truth I still want you to think I have no past. Let me be a blank slate. Let me be whatever you like, whatever you want. A universal puzzle piece. What might it have been like, to be surrounded by people on the same path, making the same choices? Instead of a heart always half-broken, trying to exist in multiple places at once. What might it have been like, to believe you were worthy of anything at all?
Come November the chill sweeps in and you’ll know cold in your bones until April. Smoking alone outside a bar I get that feeling again, where you have two drinks and want to keep going. The click, the click; that illusion of numbness. In reality it’s a cavern, takes you down to the depths, places you don’t want to go. You look into the abyss and the abyss looks back. What then? Go home, go home, go to bed. Close your eyes, flickers of unlived lives. Is it worth it? Is it worth everything that’s missing?
So I walk home and I wash the barbecue sauce off my fingers and I take off all my clothes and I lie on the floor in the dark and think, what now, what now. I take out my headphones and all I can hear is ringing so I put them back in and listen to Florence singing about starving herself at seventeen and think yes, yes, that makes sense.
I put the kettle on the stove and I return to the floor and the ghosts say it could be worse, you could be dead, and I say that’s not very helpful. I open the window. I keep trying to shuffle them out and mostly they go but it’s getting very busy in here. I miss a life I’ve never had. I miss a life where I come back to find love stretched out on the sofa, reading. I get in the bath and I lie down in the water and I wake up later, in something stagnant and cold. It’s just me here. Even the ghosts are quiet. No one else home. I dry off and go to bed, reality suddenly unbearable. I gave so many things up this year, trying to make space for something better. Now I’m just left with my loneliness, standing here head bowed, hands open.
It’s got me on my knees. It’s got me pleading, praying to something I don’t know I believe in. I’m no martyr but when the carpenter went to the cross did it smell like home? Rough bark under palms, light glinting through the cracks. Lift your face and embrace your fate. I invent gods who tell me what I want to hear. I talk to you in my head like an imaginary friend. I’ve never been more lost, I’ve never been more lonely. There’s no template, no plan, no path laid out for me to follow. I want to be saved but no one is coming to save me. I want to fall asleep in the passenger seat and let you drive me through the night.
For so long I have believed myself to be on the precipice of a life I wanted, rather than already inside it. I thought I had to have something tangible I could point to before I could join the dots backwards, something definitive and undeniable that would allow me to turn to the world and say: I made it. I’m not a failure. I’m wanted and beloved. A chorus of approval from an imaginary crowd. I put my happiness in some place or position or person so far away from today, forced it just out of reach like a carrot on a string. How much of our lives we construct in a desperate, convoluted attempt to minimise the possibility of pain. How much we lose with our muscles tensed, waiting for the fall.
Last winter, I went on a date with a man who told me he thought he was destined to watch my life from afar rather than be in it. I tried to explain that he could just be in it; that it wasn’t so complicated. A week later he texted to say he just wanted to be friends. I agreed and suggested lunch. We never saw each other again.
He’d read my writing; he told me I was brave. This was no great love lost - we would never have been right for eachother - but even a year later I’m still struggling to forget the idea of myself as someone who’s more desirable at a distance. The reality of me as somehow lacking, or complex in ways that had made sense in words and quips and semi-colons, but no longer did in the blinking daylight of a five-cocktail hangover. An echo in my head once again of that endless repetition, that relentless fear, that everything would crumble if you saw me as exactly who I am.
I walk in the park with a friend and I say I’m scared of falling in love again and losing all this peace. We talk about how you develop a sense for people with old wounds in the same places, can close your eyes and feel your way to their scar tissue, even across a room. You can’t tell them, of course - that would seem invasive, or like they weren’t hiding it well. They’re usually hiding it very well, being funny and charming and charismatic and curious, deflecting and mirroring, eating normally, drinking acceptably, no obvious scars. So it would be rude to say: I saw the way your energy splayed out because you were trying to manage the temperature of the room. I see how hard you are trying to be someone who has only ever known light.
But I want you in your mess, I want you in your rot. I want to see you step into your power and harness your pain and turn it into something new, to say look at what I made, look at all this beauty, do you want to drown in it? I do.
All this time I’ve been waiting for you to find out, for you to finally tell me that I’ll never be worth wanting. I spent my entire girlhood and much of my womanhood afraid there was something terrible inside of me, fighting to escape. Maybe there is. There are still so many days when I hate that I’m a person, I hate that I’m not perfect, I hate being perceived at all and yet here I am, pulling out my rot at the roots and putting it on a page. How hard it is to believe I could be wanted in my mess; to imagine myself as someone so raw and flawed and lovable, so real in my inability to be anyone but myself. What if there was no great terrible thing, no fatal, hidden flaw? What if there was no spell I was missing, or something missing in me that made it impossible for me to be loved?
The sun dips into the sea as we sit on a rooftop, having a conversation I thought we’d never have.
Tired? She laughs darkly. I was crawling up the fucking walls.
She thought hers was a terrible thing, too. But it was just shadows on the ceiling, childhood ghosts making marks like monsters. How these things travel down the lines, pass from body to body, blood to blood. How could I ever have thought any different? I needed her alive and I would have given anything in the world to keep her that way. I bargained with the universe, with every chip I had. Ran through dark streets barefoot, watched myself from above fragment into pieces. Knee to knee on stone floors, heart crawling up the walls. We get what we are given, we inherit, we absorb, we leak. Look at this capacity; look how much darkness we can hold and still look for light.
I don’t want to hide, anymore. I want a life that brings me closer to myself. What have I ever gained from feigning indifference? From trying to be someone more comprehensible, for wanting to bring you deep enough into my web before I pulled a bait and switch. Perhaps this will make me intolerable. I must run the risk anyway; I’ve lost my belief in a life lived carefully along the fault lines of aloofness, in thinking there is anything to be won from refusing to exist out loud.
All those years I was too afraid to be known. Now I want to be known inside out and upside down. I don’t want it from a distance. I want it up close. Gobble me up, swallow me whole. I want to be devoured. I want to dissolve. I want to climb inside your skin and wear it like a suit. There’s nothing more romantic than cannibalism. But also; lie on the sofa and let me hear your heartbeat thump through your chest. It doesn’t have to be bloody. That’s just metaphor. We can go to bed and spill no blood and curl around each other, your head under my chin, my legs around your waist. I’ll nibble your ears awake but I won’t leave a mark. I’ll read a book beside you as you emerge from the dark, soles of our feet pressed together under the covers.
I don’t know if I will ever find that, if I will ever be wanted in some fundamentally pure, undeniably good way; to be loved to the point of invention. I might always wish I could be someone with a little less scar tissue on the inside. But now I look at the world I’ve built around me and think, what missed chances? what unlived lives? what almost, what nearly, what not-quite? Every story, swim in the sea, cry in the bath, drunk walk home. My friends, my friends, the invisible net shimmering beneath me. I wrote so many letters for lovers who never deserved it but I never wrote any for you. Forgive me. What a tragedy, that if I’d found all the things I’d wanted I might never have found you.
I cannot regret the things that cannot be; there is no life for me other than this one, no universe in which I would be willing to give up all the things I gathered along the way. And if one day I stop wanting this world, I’ll create another.
And so alone I go, I go. Travelling light. Moving through rooms, shedding skins.