The wind howls around the house. Sometimes the rain is so heavy I think the roof might cave in and I lie on my bed staring at the ceiling and waiting for the bricks to drop. The house is old. There’s a blue plaque on the front for a Georgian painter no one has ever heard of. The windows don’t fit in the frames anymore and the floor dips in the living room and we get drunk and dance too much and make it worse.
Time has stopped making any sense. I’ve lived in this room for a day, I’ve lived in this room for a hundred years. Perhaps I even lived here with the painter. Perhaps he left me for the scullery maid and I walked into the ponds with pockets full of stones in protest. Perhaps I moved to the countryside and raised chickens instead, woke up glad every morning.
Across the street a woman died in a stranger’s living room seventy years ago. I read about it in an academic paper on illegal abortions. In the crime scene photo, the room looks just like ours. There’s a Christmas tree by the window. I wonder if anyone ever danced in there, heavy footfall making the floorboards creak. There’s no blue plaque for her.
I’m sitting on the floor of the shower. I want to climb into bed fully dressed. I don’t know what I want. I want someone to take care of me. I want to stop holding everything so tightly. I want to stop trying so hard. I want to lie with my head in your lap as you stroke my hair. I want to be fed. I want too much, it’s always too much. I don’t want enough. Can you come get me? Can you hold my hand? I feel like a child. I feel unbearable. I think of you and fall two floors inside myself.
How much am I allowed to need other people? Where’s the line between being normal and being a black hole?
Yesterday I walked along the canal with a stranger and I said “I think I lost my mind during in the first lockdown” and I laughed even though it wasn’t funny. I keep laughing at things that aren’t funny. For months the only time I touched another person was during an illegal three second hug in the frozen goods aisle of an Asian supermarket with a friend who lived in the same square kilometre. It was more than a year ago now but sometimes I think my hands are still hungry as I reach out to touch everything without thinking. I think it broke something small inside me, a hairline fracture, and I’m not sure it ever fully healed. I think I need to be held for a long time but I still don’t know how to ask for that, still don’t know how to ask for the things I try and fail to give to myself.
Sometimes in therapy there’s a bad day and I come into it already crying and I say these are the memories I want pulled out of me, these are the memories I want scrubbed from me with steel wool, round and round until I can’t feel anything but smooth clean stone underneath. Even with her, even in this safe place, I still want to offer my memories like pearls on a string but they come out as muddy lumps instead, fistfuls of turf I buried in the fields of my mind. Some things I can’t make beautiful, not yet.
I want to start over again with a fresh slate. I want to turn back the clock and take my younger self away and hide her until she grows some skin, until the girl knows better than to walk around like an open wound. Sometimes when I write I think I’m trying to reach my hand back through time to hold hers.
We all have them though, don’t we? Chapters we’d rather not read aloud. I want to be special and unique in every way other than this. I want my darkness to be mundane and ordinary and normal, a single colour of the rainbow rather than the whole kaleidoscope. What it is to be human. What it is to live with your fears and your shame and your regrets and try to transform them into something new, something like a lesson, something like forgiveness, something like love. What else is there?
For a long time I was ashamed, convinced that I had failed as woman because as hard as I tried I was unable to burn off the parts of me that surely, in the idealised hierarchy of womanhood, had me floundering around the bottom; the parts that are dark, obsessive, intense, dramatic, embarrassing, melancholic, chaotic and at once both needy and incredibly avoidant. That flinty, hard streak that runs diagonally through me. I no longer care, which is to say I still care but I have accepted the impossibility of remoulding myself into something different.
For years I thought I was broken and defective and grotesque, and fought valiantly to hide this awfulness, to try and become whole and perfect and beautiful, not understanding that perhaps everyone is broken and defective and grotesque and that was, in fact, the point I’d been missing all along. I thought I had to be good to make up for it; always give more, be better, forgive faster. I had to make up for the things that made me inherently unlovable. I had to make up for the fact that it’s me.
If you ask people the right questions, it’s like tapping on a fault line; they crack right open. All I’ve ever wanted and all I’ve ever been most afraid of was someone asking them to me - someone wanting to see the shivering, twisted parts, the vulnerabilities, the shameful neediness of me. I want to exist open-ended and unfinished.
It took me forever to understand that I could not let myself be known, and so I could not let myself be loved. I think I want to be known, now. I’m still learning how to ask for it.