Down In Me

I can’t worry about your Greek tragedies and your Shakespearean proclamations. Give me an hour in a room with rainbow colours and a warm sensation any day. When you wake up to your frozen toes in a sea of dark, dank moss, you’ll see, you’ll find me, beyond that marker in the field, across a clichéd ocean and a sky of blue, beneath a white awning with a fawn and a flower (cherry blossoms or maybe tulips), sipping pear cider and remarking on how sweet.

I have a song in my head that dictates the words to me. Those in turn dictate the thoughts. I’m not wild, not cool, not pretty, nor fresh. I barely speak, I mumble, I think, I react unduly. But you don’t know me, no, you don’t know me. I’ll be wearing a sundress when it rains and a coat in the summer. When you’ve shed your expectations (shed them beyond doubt, not on the surface, but of it), my gleam may flicker in your eye, blindsiding you. Resist the urge to soften your focus. Stay sharp.

I can’t worry about your suicidal tendencies or the fact your life is ending. Hoops and cartwheels and floggers mean nothing to me. Well maybe floggers. But. Give me a second in a life as a six year-old girl with but a doll to care for. Because I’m still small, still balling about bearings, still agitated from my trip through the birth canal (yes, I’m admitting I took that flight). I exist. Okay. But I have no energy for anything else tonight.

Let’s finish this act with a picture of a beagle in the thick of spring. Lolly-gagging, tongue flapping in the air, butterflies landing on his bottom. His high-pitched bark far from annoying, soothes. The sun feels excessively warm, yet no one perspires and in its glow you can see dandelion sperm floating on the breeze. But you don’t feel the urge to sneeze so inhale the grassy waft and make out groovy. Pretend you’re a hippie for a time, before you miss the chance. Fuck war and war-makers. Nothing can touch us the day before we die.

I want to be free to say stupid things and not be taken for stupid.

From my diction and inflection it will be clear that I’m being ironic even when I’m not. My sarcasm will flow through you unabated and my ignorance will not spoil the emotion. When I pronounce words incorrectly and tongue-trip incessantly, you will find it endearing without being patronising.

When I pause to think, not because I don’t know what to say, but because in the presence of others I often forget how to say it, you will realise that I’m thoughtfully articulating instead of internally gesticulating worries about how best to come off to you, so I can come on to you, in the hope of coming all over you, when I come over later.

Your suspicion of my inhibitions will be laid to rest once you’ve engendered every sense of the word confidence in me, because rather unfortunately, my confidence isn’t innate; it’s slow shy land turtles that poke their heads out only when it’s safe. With minds in full view and thoughts made of glass, our lives will switch on like gaudy crystal lighting. This shining combination will blind you to what I desperately need you (not) to see.

When I speak, jet-stream rainbows will shoot from my mouth, my candy-coated tongue will stimulate your salivary glands, and your blood-sugar levels will skyrocket.

I want you to be free to say stupid things and not be taken for stupid. Because stupid has got a bad rap through overuse. Girls are not stupid by virtue of being girls. Some are stupid by virtue of being borne. But this has fuck all to do with being girls; it has all the fuck to do with being us.

There’s a part of me that I keep hidden, that I just can’t talk about. I pride myself in being open and honest, if not with others, at least with myself. But there’s this… thing, this thing that’s been bubbling beneath my surface for I’m not sure how long - maybe for always - and I simply haven’t been able to discuss or even acknowledge it until now.

I like when she speaks in those universal tones because it makes me feel less alone, less desperate, because when I say it, well it’s just me and I say a lot of things, but when she says it, I believe her. Because she speaks with confidence, because she can see things that I can’t, because she can see that I can’t speak, because she’s proved herself only to me in ways that only she and I know.

Sometimes, in my more reckless moments, I try to negate my trust in her, to rationalise it away because of worthless questions like, if I don’t trust myself, how can I trust someone else? A ceaselessly questioning mind coupled with a high susceptibility to the judgement of strangers. The truth is that she gives me hope. It’s small and fragile, soft. A small puff of cotton wool, but it’s something.

I can’t think about it too much. There’s much that I won’t say. I’ll unravel it though, slowly. Until it disperses and I come unblocked; until it comes undone, but I, thankfully, remain whole. In the meantime, I’ll stuff some white fluff in each ear, with a view to drowning out the noise between them.

In a rare moment of clarity and putting things mildly, I must confess to having spent the last three nights restless in fitful dreams, waking in starts before relaxing slightly to watch the light streaming in through the window and determine the time. Two, three, four, five a.m. I’m adept at this guessing game. Switch the mobile on to corroborate my story (yes, I sleep with the phone next to me on the bed or sometimes clutched in my sweating palm, what of it?) and it turns out my natural time-telling ability is surprisingly accurate. I detest clocks, but I always long for time, so I make excuses for telling it. Don’t ask after the days of the week or month, those artificial constructs, I can only measure time’s passing in bits by studying our daily revolutions.

So I return to that restless half-awake, half-dreaming state and the fanciful flights I’ve heard we all share: making war with the hairy monster of a thousand heads or running from the chimera in the slow-motion, thick honey air, always wearing that pair of cement-block shoes that’s so fashionable in dreams. Later (or earlier, one never knows) I’m communing with snakes and as they slither across my torso, herbivorous dinosaurs sniff my skin with idle curiosity. Clearly, I’m some twisted Snow White, loving all the mind’s creatures she attracts. And surrounded, always surrounded. Surrounded by everyone I’ve ever known or wanted to know or thought I knew or heard of long ago. I’m naked and must urinate desperately, but I’m trapped in this godforsaken primeval garden without proper plumbing (I guess there are still some limits to my love of nature). So it is, more or less, that I’ve spent the last three nights carousing through my own delightfully perverse (I haven’t told you everything) version of a Hieronymus I-can-spell-you-but-could-never-pronounce-you Bosch painting.

Now, normally I’d find all this nonsense of the mind most agreeable to pass the time, dwelling upon and analysing for hours, seeing as I (somewhat pretentiously… oh, alright, completely pretentiously) fancy myself some sort of uneducated surrealist. The thought that I’m meant to be resting, however - escaping for a few hours from the horrors that crowd my mind all the waking day - this thought hangs over the entire dreaming landscape dark-clouding it.

Finally, ten minutes before the alarm clock on my mobile signals the end of this designated ‘restful’ period, I freefall through darkness and wake at the point of impact. The irrevocable loss of these invaluable ten minutes sets me off worse than any alarm bell ever encountered and I rise in the foulest of moods; arguably the perfect way to begin any day. Cross me at that moment and a single sleepy half-look will send you six feet under quick, electrified and turned to dust.

Fortuitous, we find it then, that I don’t usually experience tempestuous nights in the company of others. Not this particular brand, anyway. I’m far too preoccupied with you - or more precisely - what you’ll think of me, to allow certain small aggravations to prevent our enjoyment. One day, when I soak my nightmares through your sheets and I bolt upright awake and spit and curse this wretched body and diseased mind, you might say you know me and together we can balk and sulk at this sudden realisation.

Who are we? 

1. Mutilates her body in a show of feigned control
2. Wearily pushes a baby carriage through the throngs of her mistakes
3. Cowers in the black shadow of her father and the powerlessness of her mother
4. Is afraid to say
5. Hides her soft core behind a stern, pallid mask
6. Carries her heart around in her throat
7. Hauls home large plastic bags filled with designer goods to plug the holes
8. Is very, very tired
9. Buries her nose in a paperback and prays for invisibility
10. Walks purposefully with the wisdom of experience she could have used
11. Scurries a few steps behind him in a show of mock deference
12. Pretends that she can see
13. Creates a tiny version of herself, hoping for a second chance
14. Flaunts perceived assets to approximate fertility
15. Holds her nose up high to elude the stench of her own refuse
16. Is convinced that she can sing
17. Hides a multitude of painful wounds beneath thick, black sleeves
18. Gives her body to anyone who asks in exchange for not much
19. Slowly lost herself along the way
20. Despairs that she’s become a cliché
21. All of the above
22. Other _______________

I am easily misled, mishandled, mistaken. Described as gullible, naive and yes, at times, innocent. (I know. I don’t see it, either.) In truth, my usual instinct, suspect as things may be, is beyond and by far wholesome acceptance. But don’t for a moment think me ignorant. I am decidedly aware of this suspension. Conscious and purposeful because I need to:

Feel that there is meaning still to come
Experience agonising truths
Believe in alien encounters and other far-fetched ideals
Understand that death is more than just stalking me

If I don’t feel, experience, believe or understand (which I don’t), I have a double mind to put a full stop to it all right here and right then, in this place and the other immediately. Sans notes or regrets or regretful notes.

But (beside and besides fear) an intangible lingers. Akin to a thin, imperceptibly silver thread that keeps me connected–no, bound–to the earth and its shepherds turned hunters. So, I will continue to hand you my undying belief, think it over, twist it through and gladly pass it along with all the innocence reserved for only this. I do it willingly, wittingly, I premeditate my immolation.

Partake or don’t, as only you can see fit. But go on, in all and any case: push me down the rabbit hole and take me by surprise.