I wrote something about ghosts but it wasn’t ready so I took it away and carved it up and used the bones for something new. I can do that, now. I can show you something unfinished, something amost-ready, and not be so ashamed that it wasn’t ripe.
I didn’t know that, yet. That it would take bringing some things out on a platter - look at this, look at what I made - before I could look down and realise it wasn’t what I had wanted after all. That I could fling myself in one direction - this is it, this is what I want! - and later turn around, baffled and bemused at the force of my prior convictions. Not quite, nice try, go again.
Very occasionally someone I know, or someone I don’t know, or someone I don’t know very well, will tell me that these words make them feel comforted or less alone or perhaps even hopeful. Maybe all my mistakes and my flaws and my fuck-ups can mean something; maybe I’m not too far gone. They say people don’t change but they do, irrevocably, forwards and backwards, for better and for worse. It’s rarely when you want them to, but often swiftly after you’d lost all hope. You on the floor. You on your knees. You, begging for a different outcome. You, alone on a dark street.
Years ago, into my damp hair, coat still on, pressed against him in the hallway he said sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry, sorry for all the things he understood and sorry for all the things he didn’t understand yet. Later we broke each other unfixable. I thought I would never think of him without pain. But in time I forgave everything and I hope I was forgiven, too. Moved through the agony, endless and relentless, until I found myself somewhere different, someone different. Now I remember how happy it made me. Our mornings, our nights, his goodness, his jokes. I hope he gets everything he wants. I will almost certainly never know. But I don’t regret it. I don’t regret any of it, any of them, anyone I loved, anyone I wanted.
They used to say shrimps could see more colours than humans. It turned out to be a lie, or a misconception, depending on how you look at it. Your brain doesn’t reach maturity at twenty-five. The loneliest whale was never alone. Lightening can strike the same place once, twice, infinitely.
But I still remember a comment saying I went through nearly unbearable pain in my first heartache and now I see shrimp colours.
When we believed some impenetrable palette existed it was always positioned as a good thing; imagine the sea, imagine the sky, crystallised and refracting. A uniquely beautiful view of the world lit up in impossible shades. The reality of an expanded spectrum is neither good nor bad but frequently heavy, glorious, overwhelming, agonising, hopeful, ruinous. I have seen things I cannot unsee. I know things I cannot unknow. There’s no way back so I may as well keep going. Now I follow the dead down alleyways and into archives, trying to find the darkest colours imaginable. Trying to bring them into the light.
I want to say I’m sorry but I’m talking aloud in an empty room. I want to say I don’t know if I’ve ever fully learned how to get to know people without crashing into them and trying to get so close that our eyeballs could touch. I want to say I felt seen and understood because my dark didn’t feel so dark, in those moments, but rather like an understandable amount of dark. That drive to keep digging, to be unable to stop looking, to inhale at the bottom and try to find a way to breathe through it, repeatedly, achingly, until you found the path upwards and out again. I want to say it meant something to me, flawed and fallible and chaotic, resisting the same impulses.
I want to say if I get everything right next time, can you give me a good ending?
I don’t know how to stop having So Many Feelings All The Time. Even after all these years, all these words, all this navel-gazing, I’m still afraid that it is, at best, off-putting and grotesque. I can make a joke about it (I’m insane) I can be self-aware about it (I’m navigating my shame) but ultimately the deep molten core still murmurs: too intense, too emotional, too much. How embarrassing it is, to bleed in public. How excruciating it is, to grieve anything out loud - was it real, was it almost-real, was it really something, I guess I’ll never know.
Was I not supposed to grow out of this, rather than grow into it? I was supposed to become softer, less sharp, less dramatic, less mean, less moody, less judgemental. Instead of spinning out into solipsism, line after line. Woe is me, luxuriating in all my agonies; hard and addictive, dark and delicious. Mmmm. What a world, what a life.
I want to say lighten up, lighten up
it doesn’t need to be so fucking serious all the time. Tell me a joke. Make it a good one. Here, I’ll start.
Where do you find a spider with no legs?
Exactly where you left it.
My therapist once said God you really are so desperate for everyone to like you which was both very mean and very true. I complain to a friend about being so tortured and she says but you like that about yourself and it’s also very true. I say I want to be worshipped and I pretend I’m joking but I’m not. I have stress acne all over my back. This is not my real hair colour. I don’t think I’m doing a very good job at being likeable. Oversharing is too exhilarating.
You asked me what it feels like to share personal words and I said Honestly it makes me want to crawl into a hole and die while also feeling so freeing and cathartic. Something eclipses the shame and the fear, because most of all, more than anything, I’m afraid of meeting a version of myself somewhere in the future; the person I could have become if I’d only kept going. If I’d only cared less about appearing foolish or unlikeable or embarrassing. And what then? What if? You can always leave, change your number, change your name, begin again. Find another god, start another church.
In the end it’s hard to think of anything as being truly, debilitatingly embarrassing when you’re constantly reminded of the fact that you’ll eventually not exist. After that, there will be no opportunities left to embarrass yourself at all.