She Was.

There are certain time places I will no longer walk through. Entire continents of seascapes and grey brown walls. These places sit neatly divided, cordoned off, wire walls, keep out. The boundary line is marked by signposts, these are my cautious cities. If I have to visit, if I am on my way to someplace else, when they cannot be avoided, I try to walk lightly, run without touching too hard. I keep my eyes closed and rub my hands over my ears so I don’t hear. Navigating with my eyes closed, sometimes I trip and fall. Puddle splash. Or mud. I always come away dirty, but I come away, and that’s what matters. Then there’s you and your time place. Sometimes it’s soft and fuzzy, the stop gap, and I want to wrap that time place around my skin. I want to dive swim through the water and stand on the shore, goosebump prickles, wind knot hair. The ponies in the distance, the carousel. The sun shines and it rains as the leaves fall. It is never too hot or too cold. The time place of you. I want to stay there, where I can land heavy.

The thought I have is how you and I are the blurry image the unjoined dots make. And how we need a steadier hand to connect us together. As dots, we can’t do line making. So this is where we stay, never a picture, just a bunch of dots co-existing on a white page. Our non-nothing nothingness is the stuff of my young girl dreams. Sick rooms and mopping brows, wet between my legs, the words we throw around. Protection. Hey, listen, don’t tell anyone but I think I’m in love with an inarticulate man. He beats people up, throws them against walls and tells them “no, not that girl, motherfucker”. And in my head, I think, that is no way to behave. We must not hit people that use their hands to make me uncomfortable. But in my heart, my never grown up heart, I think, how nice it is to be defended, to not have to do the fighting, for this one while. And somehow, though I hold you when you fall, and you pick me up when I am pushed, we are not together, and we are less than nothing. I cannot be, won’t be, in love all by myself. Even if you love me too.

Mama, you are not a happy woman. I think she was once, but not for a long, long time. I’ve watched you Mama, I can remember you happy, a long, long time ago. I wonder at the effort it takes Mama, to be sad, to be unsatisified, to doubt and to flip all the time, all the things. None of it is her fault. Mama, I think I’ve inherited your taste for the melancholy, for bitter without the sweet. I think I’m just like her. That I got caught somewhere along the hairbrush days.

I was going to say, that if you met me, outside of here, if you saw me, I’m not like this. I’m funny and quick to smile. I try for the best of sunny days. I like to laugh, just like most everyone else does. I’m quick and sarcastic and dark, and I like that. You would like that. They like that. I’m bright on the outside. And that’s the thing. Maybe I’m just like you Mama. You are funny and kind and quick to smile too. And everyone likes you, they really do. But under all that, you’re so sad Mama. And you tell me over and over and over and over and over again. And I wonder if I’m not just like you Mama. At my resting times, at my most truest times, am I just sad too Mama? Just tired. Is it the effort Mama? Am I making it too? I don’t want to be like you Mama. I don’t want to be like you.

Photo by lepiaf.geo

Something is rotten in the state of me.

You don’t want me – I cry.

You want me – I cry.

We don’t touch – I cry.

We do touch – I cry.

You love me – I cry.

You don’t love me – I cry.

We are – I cry.

We are not – I cry.

And I do not know why.

I think, that what I need, quite simply, and quite apart, is for this to not be this. For this to be me soft and pliable under your weight. I think, I need, for this to be dark and quiet loud breathing, yours and mine, and your voice pulling me this way and beating me that. And I need for that to last, and to go down in it for a long, long time, until I cannot remember and do forget any other way of being that came before. I need for you on me heavy, and, to resurface finally new with you wrapped tightly behind my back while I learn how to be breathe again.

While she talks she chews on the fingernail of her ring finger. Her nose wrinkles as she nibbles lower, deeper. It’s not her own “bad habit”. When I point it out to her, she half smiles and mutters “contagion”. Spoken like a question, it is not, afterall, an answer.

I know I’m hard to follow, but some things cannot be spoken in straight lines. At least not by me.  Some things have to be reduced, pushed down, disguised, transformed, hinted at, trivialised, made fun of. I don’t worry about wrinkles, or cliches, being the best I can be, the fittest, the fastest, the wittiest, the smartest. I think I am what I am and that is whatever it is and no more. But it isn’t true. I realised today, that if you think about it, however you phrase the words, whichever way you join them together, all of it, everything, whispered, shouted, smoked, is a disguise, a ruse, a dirty lie. Mostly, I was thinking, how in that moment, a lot of it came undone. The careful years of holding together, the balance between fair and self-loathing. I hated myself. Not him. And, before you ask, I don’t know why. I can’t count how many times I’ve described myself as ‘open’ in the last few weeks. Open. To lovers, to friends, to you. I’m not, you know. I’m not at all. I used to think that I had this deep belief in love, in two. But I think, I believe in the opposite of that, whatever that is, and it’s not what is most obvious. I think I believe that it ends before it starts, that it is not for me, that it is, in the end, alone and business like. I think I believe in sad and hurting and broken bones. Not for you, for me. That I am the exception, the dark thing, the last left thing. You know, telling you this, it doesn’t make sense, even to me, and it’s dragged out, it doesn’t come on it’s own. I’m so full of shit, mate.

When she’s finished speaking, she reaches out and I pass her a nail file.  I watch as she smoothes away the edges.

Afterwards, Cylence stopped caring about things like “fitting in” and “being pretty”. Cylence felt older than the older girls who were her before friends. Cylence did not care about perming her hair or wearing the right colors on sports day. Cylence spent a lot of time alone in her room. That first winter she would wait until the house was quiet and on tiptoes click shut her bedroom door. When she was sure of the stillness she would peel off her pyjamas and throw back the warmth of her quilt. Cylence would lie on her narrow little girl’s bed and wait to feel the rise of the goosebumps on her flesh. Cylence would wait for as long as she could, frosty puffs of breath, as cold as she could, before huddling back down under the covers. Cylence heard the words of the nuns – the starving children. Cylence wanted to be someone else. And Cylence liked testing herself. To see how far she could push. She liked being uncomfortable comfortable. Her hanging in the air breath evidence that she was living. Still.

The only person she told this to was the boy with the ocean in his name. He did not find it strange. He wanted to be someone else too, someone living. Together they decided on a future. A far off future in far off places, kneeling together amongst the dirt, they would sift through the remains of fallen cities. The knowledge of their endings bound the two of them. Endings creeped into every conversation and in that one hand-holding. Cylence realised how rare it was to be so tightly understood. She knew it would not come again. Cylence loved this boy, easily. He was her other self and so it was easy to love in him what she could not love in herself. And the boy loved Cylence in return, with all his tender fractured heart. There was no one else to love for either of them, no one else loveable. And in loving that boy Cylence learnt the love of two. Whole worlds of two.

A decade later, Cylence returned to the place where they had met. One, alone and lonely she gathered big as her palm leaves to take home with her – used souvenirs from fallen cities.