An anniversary of sorts

So I’ve been clean for a year. That’s 365 days. You need to be here, I said at the time. I was on it for twelve months, at least, or maybe it was much longer. You remember the exact day and time you put an end to it but you never really know when it all began, kinda creeps up on you. You need to be here, I said again. But he said, Don’t worry about it, you know, lets you know you’re alive, and hey, I’m not an arsehole. Fuck that, I said, I just need someone to hold my hand okay, please don’t make it harder than it already is. So he came looking for me in a hut with a rickety staircase, and stayed with me while I erased every last trace. Afterwards he kept me company for six hours and eighteen minutes, dragging me all over Chicago. He said he enjoyed talking to me too much to let me go, and he felt proud of me, he saw it sucking the life out of me. What a fucking cliché, I thought, but didn’t say. He took me to his mother’s house, right at the end of a cul-de-sac. His mother wasn’t there anymore, or maybe she was, I don’t really remember, and he made green tea in a microwave.

Stop

Thirteen, they said, it keeps growing in the corner of my desktop. No sooner will it fade than they will place it on an inkstone chiselled with sharpened metal, and with the palm of their hand will smash it, pound it, grind it, scorching with ultraviolet light. Can’t it stay that way, can’t they leave it alone. Stop feeding, stop holding, stop loving, stop trying so fucking hard, or it will keep growing, and I don’t want to be the one to tell it, to bend it, to mend it, to fend it, only to find it upending, depending, find yourself defending, fucking codepending ... codependence ... Who fucking said? There is no comfort in it. Stop pretending, stop looking at me, stop looking at me with your dark hollow eyes, an alien life form, I don’t want you guessing, knowing, smelling the core of me, stop it, stop, get your own fucking pain, a hammer, a mirror and your own three-inch nail.

Across the fields

I used to run ahead of you across the fields; across the wheat fields, mud fields, and across the grass baked crunchy by the afternoon sun. I would look back to laugh at you with hair falling between my eyes and across my face, taunting and teasing, stirring your indignity with the right words, like snow, like always. Your head would spin and your face would redden as you tried not to laugh. But you would always push yourself just an ounce more, stretch forward as far as you can for the tail end of my coat, and leave everything flying behind.

I finally found the courage to ask the doctor about you. She said you mustn’t have been paying attention. She said perhaps I should stop thinking about it. So I will try. But all I can imagine now is your hair flying across your face as you turn your head back to look at me lagging behind instead.

Most nights

Most nights I put on soundtrack music in order to drown out the noise in my head. That is why I am sometimes woken up in the middle of the night by a Spanish man telling me I need to go find my son. Other times it’s an itinerant question uttered by a man about a ferry ticket, the answer to which is on another track randomised elsewhere. Or on some nights, just some now, it’s these incessant thumps, now until the break of day, hammering out words I don’t want to hear, things I had erased long ago. Why didn’t it make any difference at all, that I deleted, obliterated all that was wrong with my life? I hear it still, time and again.

On a crowded bus

My arms have gone numb from being squeezed between a thickset man and a well-built woman on this bus steaming with acid indigestion. About three stops ago people started looking over their shoulders at the suspicious package in my lap as the smell started to penetrate the butcher paper, the sticky tape, and then the plastic bag. Soon the bus driver will ask me to step off the bus probably, maybe report me to the police, who would probably snicker as I walk the rest of the way to your apartment.

That would be just fine. I can walk, I mean – because I still have functional legs. You broke one of yours, apparently, in the middle of the night. Not intentionally, I assume, but you did not call me. It was too late to call, you said, full of spite as always. So you sat on the cold tiles and waited until morning. I asked why. You merely said that it was not unusual, this waiting for me until the morning.

Then you said you still want to cook for me but you don’t have the legs to buy the food anymore, nor the arms to carry it, so you asked me to bring it. I don’t really know how to buy fish, and even if I did you would not approve anyway because in your eyes I will never know my way around the kitchen. But I do know.

I know, for instance, that it is not a good idea to rinse the dishcloth in the cistern. I know that the toilet is not a stand on which to rest your frypan so you can scrub it, even if space is an issue. Your eyes can’t see that well anymore either, but I could tell you that there are sometimes cockroaches as big as dates floating in the sink. Others have in hushed voices told me what they have seen too, but I don’t have the heart to tell them what I have seen, and I don’t have the heart to tell you. And anyway you get annoyed when I try to help you with anything.

So when I get there I will just sit at the table and avoid looking in your general direction. It is easier that way. My hair is already standing on end and will be until the last frightful bite, and I will probably be sick for three days. But even if my stomach groans in anticipatory protest as sensory symphony to the smell rising from this plastic bag, I will bring you this dead stinking fish bleeding down my legs. You cook, and I will eat it.

Ask me

Ask me. Don't leave me alone with my head. You know and I know that these are only rubbish words. I am not even good in support. Without you, the words fall away into a landfill. Without you, the words refuse to roll in the grass. Without you, I barely even register on the atmos track. Without you, I am obsessed with holes in my fingers.

So splice me into your life. Give me but one frame a second, and I will give you twenty-four. Ask me. Ask me in French or Japanese. I know all the irregular verbs.

I am not a hoarder

I am someone halfway, and I am not a hoarder.

I am not defined by the things I have kept since the age of three. I am not explained by shoeboxes of the miscellaneous bound with twine. I am not these shelves of books, not the archive of ticket stubs, not ancient textbooks, not red and blue paper kites with missing strings. I am not bound by tired rules of evidence, or by contemporary trusts. I am not to be judged by love letters written on napkins, tattered notebooks, newspaper clippings, or by my thoughts ad nauseum breeding in their reverie. So I will stand back and let strange men finger my belongings, breathe in the dust, and box them up for therapeutic sealing,

I am someone halfway ... whether I like it or not.