To Froth

I bought myself a milk frother. Actually in today’s language that isn’t quite true. I ordered myself one. It’s a little machine whisk, the handle of which contains a battery. The whisk part is a small circle of wire with a curly wire going all over it, and it vibrates or spins when you press the button on its handle.

You can froth milk, or cream, or in my case, a teaspoon of instant coffee and a teaspoon of sugar in a tablespoon of boiling water. Froth that right up until its thick and foamy and double the size of the liquid. Then add boiling water and a teensy splash of warmed milk and there you have something delicious.

Something like a cappuccino, but lighter, frothier, tastier and way cheaper. You can have it as many times a day as your jitters will allow.

Early in the morning before your kids wake up and drag you backwards through a hedge.

Late at night when they are asleep and you’re desperately typing away at your laptop keyboard trying to get this big project done.

In the afternoon, at 3pm precisely, when a wave of deep exhaustion slaps you on both cheeks and then parks its bottom on your eyelids. Heavy heavy, limbs like lead, but you sip from that sweet foam and you’re mildly awake again, setting about to finish off the rest of your day.

I don’t know what it is about life that feels so alien.

I want to write stories and describe things and delve into humanity’s mind, I want to talk to people and explore their minds and learn things and thoughts and opinions. But I find myself on the daily repeating a tedium that is almost set in stone. Written into my soul by the generations before me.

Duty? Law?

My grandmother and her paper thin skin and brown, wrinkly hands pop into my mind often.

I was having a conversation with my husband and mother in law about something to do with children growing up and leaving and I mentioned my grandmother and my husband said, out of the blue,

‘She was very lonely, your grandmother, wasn’t she?’

It felt like a punch in the gut. I thought about her, raising three children alone in London in the 70s, divorced and heartbroken, hardworking and efficient. She packed them all off to uni and waved goodbye as they got married and travelled across the globe and country, and there she resided in her big old Victorian house on a side street in South London.

And yes.

She was incredibly lonely.

My sweet, kind, warm, loving grandmother.

And she is no longer with us. In fact, on the 22nd of July it will have been 11 years since she passed away.

And when he said that a deep sadness rose up so suddenly that I could not control myself, so I got up to go to the kitchen under the pretext of clearing the dishes away.

‘Are you doing to cry?’ he asked me.

‘No,’ I said, as the tears gathered thick and fast in my eyes and threatened to spill out onto my cheeks. I shut the kitchen door behind me and began to wash the dishes to compose myself.

My son ran in a few moments later and his eyes were huge, ‘Mama are you sad?’ he said. He had interrupted his play to check on me.

I turned and smiled at him.

‘No sweetheart, I am not sad.’

He searched my face with his eyes for a few moments and then went back to his game, evidently appeased.

And I remembered searching my own mother’s face like he did. In fact, I still do. I search her voice and her eyes and the way her chin moves.

And I thought about how she too, would do the same to her mother. My grandmother.

I don’t know what all this means or how it relates to a milk frother and being overwhelmed.

Image Credit

Roadkill

Nothing motivates me. Not the knobbly edge of a cucumber, not the smooth roundness of a fresh tomato, not the creamy ripeness of a fresh avocado. I just chop all the ingredients up and throw them in and…

I don’t even wash my dishes afterwards.

Yes, they are piled up in the sink at home, as I speak. The washing has been in the machine, washed, since Saturday morning. I know it. I see it daily. But I don’t spin it for another wash, nor do I hang it out.

I am, quite simply, drained of energy.

I still get up quite early to go to the gym. I attend every spin class, but avoid eye contact. I push and push and push until the sweat runs rivers down my back and my muscles shriek in anguish. My fat jiggles with every push and my sports bra struggles to maintain a stationary chest. I need to get tighter sports bras else I will become saggy.

I lift weights after the classes. I can lift about 89 kilos in my glutes now, and 20 with my chest. For squats I can only do about 35, but I can see myself becoming more shapely and smooth. Lines and curves where they were always meant to be. Is it bad to enjoy the look of your own body?

Lately I have been noticing a lot of roadkill.

Yesterday it was a badger, lying warped on the verge of a tidy little country lane. The black stripe running through the middle of its little head was muddy and bloody.

Today it was a partridge, the bright green and brown of its coat brilliant in the shine of the morning sun. Last week a rat, on the pavement. Before that a crow, dead and limp and lifeless. A squirrel, a chick (where did you come from, little yellow soft baby?), a shrew (inhibit gardens, not roads, sweet misunderstood creature).

Today also it was a pigeon, lying smack bang on the corner of the space I park in daily at work. As I swung my legs out of the car (literally, I swing them out, and swing around the car to grab my bag from the passenger seat – lots of swinging) I thought to myself, ‘what if I killed it yesterday?’

In moments, the pigeon was forgotten.

What is roadkill, anyway, in the grand scheme of things? What is a dead cat in the face of a murdered Russian asylum seeker? What is a bloody and muddy badger in the face of the death and decay of minds and bodies that thought and did and said.

Don’t animals think, too? Won’t they be mourned by other animals? Ought we not to be kind to them?

You see, I say all these things, in a way that appeals to your pathos, but I feel no emotion. I don’t care for roadkill.

I feel a pang of sadness, but then it is quickly forgotten. It makes me think of rotting bodies and graves and sleep and heaviness and the physical vessel holding life – heartbeats in a chest that could stop and with them all sense of hope and happiness and dependency…

On Friday the friend of a close friend was on her way home from the park with her husband and child, when she collapsed and fainted. Moments later she died. She was fit as a fiddle, completely healthy, happy, laughing, smiling, planning, doing.

Today was her daughter’s first birthday.

I don’t know this girl. But her death has shaken me to my core.

See, she wasn’t a pigeon or a badger or a cat or a shrew. She was a mother and a wife and a daughter and a … a person. Thirty minutes before her death she sent a video of herself and her daughter on a swing, laughing and happy, to a group chat consisting of her closest friends.

Thirty minutes.

And thirty minutes before the death of the badger, did it leave its sett, say goodbye to its wife, and plunge through the undergrowth in heedless joy?

We are all meant to die. Human or animal. Some deaths mean more than others. But at the heart of it, it is the same thing. A heart stops beating, life lifts away from a body.

That is what I take from this.

I want to be loved. Not romantically, not just by my mother. I want to be loved by my Creator. I want my death to be a ‘return’, not a departure. Do you know what I mean? I want goodness and kindness and comfort and peace to fill the space I will inevitably leave behind.

We are not roadkill.

Touch some hearts, maybe?

Be kind? Smile? Help people? Make a good impact on the world?

Be ‘loved’?

What do you think?

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Love Letters #26

Did you know, you can remember things you have never experienced?

Or that sometimes, you can have a ‘false memory’, where your brain mistakes things you have imagined for things you have actually experienced? It’s amazing, some scientists did an experiment about it a while back and they managed to convince a group of people that they had a similar traumatic childhood experience when in actual fact they did not.

Sometimes, I think that our story was a false memory. Something that never really happened. It wasn’t so long ago that we were walking down the cold autumn streets, your fingers warm inside your red leather gloves. You convinced me so artfully that spending £100 on them was a great investment.

The minute we left the shop, with the gloves wrapped delicately in expensive tissue paper that you would only throw away, you turned to me with a smile and said, ‘Ooops.’

I remember everything in such vivid detail. The way your eyes looked when you were cross, and your mouth would set in one corner only. The way you would shove spoonfuls of cream into your mouth when you were mad, or sad. Pour it into a big mug and squeeze chocolate syrup on top. That was disgusting. I remember it fondly. I remember when you used to sleep sometimes, you would curl your fingers like a child. It was so odd. Maybe you felt safe?

I remember when you used to write, you would press the pen down so hard your fingernails turned white with the pressure, and your face would go right down so your nose was touching the paper. Sometimes you would come down and there would be ink spatters dotting your face like literary freckles.

When autumn came you blossomed. Cheeks red, hair alight from the summer sun, you would stay out for hours collecting leaves, and be so disappointed when I didn’t want to come with you. I wish I came with you, and collected leaves with you until my fingers were raw with cold.

I can’t see the dying trees outside now without curling into myself. I can’t look at all the leaves you collected and framed and piled around the house without my heart breaking into a hundred dead pieces. Over and over again.

You were so warm and full of life. I don’t know how somebody so alight with fire and passion could be so cold and still. It makes no sense to me. As all these thoughts rush through my mind, I begin to think we never happened. I just dreamed you up.

But the red gloves dangling over the edge of the dressing table, where you left them by mistake before we left home that fateful day, are a stark and painful reminder of what I have lost.

Kai Gajoum

Love Letters #23

All the odd things started to happen when Damon Ludwig moved in next door. Things at home had withered away into stagnancy. Nobody celebrated birthdays properly anymore, and Father was constantly in his study or making important phone calls. So when the Ludwigs moved in, and there was all that commotion outside, Laura darted out of her cold and empty house to investigate.

Everything was a façade. Their smiles were a façade, every time they opened the door to greet the outside world. Their speech was a façade, in its bizarre normality.

‘Pass the butter.’

‘Did you finish your homework, Tristan?’

‘Laura, let the cats out please. They’re doing my head in.’

‘Father says to please shut up, he’s trying to work.’

Such normal sentences, Laura thought to herself, in such an abnormal situation. Does life dissolve into normalcy after an integral piece of it has been painfully removed? And yet she carried on buttering her toast, and everybody else around the table carried on getting on with their days. What else would they do, though, really?

‘I don’t have a mother,’ was the first thing Laura said, the moment she clapped eyes on Damon. She sat calmly on the low stone wall that separated their front gardens. He stumbled up the front garden path to his front door, sweating under the weight of a massive crate, red-faced, only just noticing the small child with the wild chestnut curls and distinct little voice.

‘You what?’ he blew through his teeth, and dropped the crate onto the porch with a loud thump.

‘I don’t have a mother,’ she repeated, then offered to help him with the crate.

‘Nah, you’re alright.’  He waved her off, then bent to push it forward over the wooden floorboards of the porch until it was just inside the front door.

‘So what this about your mum then?’ he said, seating himself next to Lemara outside, as they both watched the moving men carrying in a grandfather clock between them.

‘She’s dead.’ Laura said, matter of factly.

‘Do you always introduce yourself by talking about your dead mother?’ Damon asked bluntly. Then he held out a brown paw, his fingers were dirty and dotted with tiny scabs and scratches.

‘Damon Ludwig.’ He said. She shook his hand.

‘Laura,’ said Laura, ‘I’m ten.’

‘Well hullo Laura who’s ten.’ Damon laughed, jumping off the wall and walking down to the lorry, where a man who looked very like him was emerging with a cardboard box.

‘Sorry about your mother,’ he threw over his shoulder. The sun threw dappled rays over Damon’s shock of black hair; he was wild and brown, an exclamation mark of a human. Laura watched him darting in and out of the lorry, lugging things to and fro, leaping down the porch steps and cartwheeling back to the lorry to get more things. She wanted to get up and dance around too. But she sat quietly and watched them slowly turn the empty house next door into a home. Men came in and out, carrying chests and mattresses and rugs. Curtains went up in the empty windows as the sun sunk lower and lower in the horizon, a great big orange orb, its edges wavy as it hung between the hills in the distance. Warm golden lights lit up the house next door one by one, a golden palace next to the drab darkness looming up behind Laura’s back. A cold breeze made the roses Mother planted in their front garden nod at her, as though they were telling her to go indoors. She wasn’t ready yet, to go indoors.

         Everybody cried at the funeral. Alex with her black dress that was too tight around her blooming chest, her arms halfway out of the full length sleeves. Laura secretly thought she looked stupid, but so pathetically stupid with her puffed up face and tear stained cheeks that she felt sorry for her. Tristan blond curls had been attacked with a wet comb, by Aunty Nora no doubt, and he sat demurely in a corner in his little black suit, sniffling over a sausage roll, his fat cheeks soaked with tears. George stood with Father by the door, almost as tall as Father now, hugging people and nodding sadly at their quiet condolences, his eyes wet and desperate. He was looking into their faces as though they would resurrect her with their sympathy. Laura knew better. What did they know, any of them? What did they know about the gaping hole in her chest that she tried to fill with pastries and devilled eggs. They hugged her and told her she was a poor thing to lose her mother at only eight years old. She ate and ate and ate until she felt quite ill, then fell asleep in a corner, her hole still as wide as before, a gaping abyss in her chest. And not once did she cry.

The first odd thing that happened, of course, was that Laura stopped growing. It didn’t happen right away, though. The Ludwigs settled in first. Damon and Mr Ludwig built a shed at the bottom of the back garden for Damon’s workshop. He made the beautiful wooden patio rocking chair that Mrs Ludwig put outside her back garden French windows. Mrs Ludwig called it her ‘forty winks chair’, and brought it inside when it rained. It sat in her warm and cosy kitchen throughout winter, and Laura spent many an evening in it as she watched Mrs Ludwig potter about her kitchen preparing dinner for her family. She never stayed for dinner when they asked her, though. She always said,

‘No thank you, Mrs Ludwig. George will be looking out for me.’

That was a lie, though. George stopped looking out for her a long time ago. Sometimes Alex would look out for her and give her a scolding for staying at the Ludwigs’ for too long. She would shove her down at the table and dump a cold plate of something congealed on the table in front of her. George, however, was generally nowhere to be seen. Mind you, he was working double shifts at the shoelace factory in the next town. He had to catch early buses, and generally left the house while it was still dark and everybody was fast asleep. He returned home long after sunset, and quite often missed his bus and had to catch a cab home. He started smelling of cigarettes and sweat, and on his late-missed-the-last-bus days Laura steered well clear of him because his mood was appallingly sour.

Extract from the book I am writing. 

19.08.16

My mother doesn’t like to talk about things. I don’t know why, she is just like that. My mother is half blind because of an accident leading to a retina detachment. It hinders her greatly, because it would anybody – to go from being able to see just fine to being part blind.

She still carries on with life, though. And she never ever talks about it. And she gets very annoyed when I ask her about it, so I don’t.

I respect that she doesn’t want to talk about it. Maybe that is her way of dealing with it.

I don’t think I understand my mother very well. I think we are very different. She is more similar to my sister than she is me. They are both very stubborn, which is why they don’t get along most of the time. It isn’t pretty. It makes me very sad.

Today I accidentally found out that my mother might have cancer. She would never have told me. She doesn’t know yet. She is still waiting for results. But she has cysts in her uterus and a high number of white blood cells. But the specialist will be able to determine if she does or not.

She did not want to tell me because I worry too much. Which I understand and respect. But I wish she did tell me. I told her I was not worried and will only worry when the time is right to. I don’t want her to worry about me worrying. I want her to be relaxed and peaceful.

So I left my mother’s home and came to where I live and I have sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Which is so ridiculous because nothing is definite. But. I just. I just thought about all the suffering she goes through. And how rude and disrespectful my brother and sister are to her. And how upset that makes her. And how nasty I used to be back when I was a rebellious little witch.

And. How I can never forgive myself for putting her through hell.

And. How she sacrificed EVERYTHING for me. For us. Her health. Her happiness. Her stability in marriage. Her life. Her career.

And. If it is bad. And if she is sick. I want her to be happy. I just want her to be happy. I just want

her

to be

happy.

I am really upset. And I shouldn’t be because this is not about me, it is about her. So I am only going to show her happiness. I am never going to cry in front of her because that will hurt her. I am only going to be good and kind and make her laugh with my ridiculous stories and listen to her and take her out and treat her to a John Lewis facial because those are super luxurious – and I am going to make sure my siblings buck up and move their sorry asses and help her out.

If they don’t they will have a furious big sister to deal with.

And I just want my mother to be happy. Did I mention that?

My mother is everything to me. She is my whole world. She made me who I am today. I hear her voice in the background of everything that I do. I hear her encouragement and her soft support behind all these words that I write. My mother is one in a trillion humans. There is nobody like her on earth. I know she will love me when all my hair falls out and when I am a fat blob of misery. She will tell me to dry my tears and stop being so silly. She will stomp on my self doubts and tell me I am so beautiful and wise and interesting.

If I don’t have my mother, I don’t have the earth at my fingertips.

 

Can I Buy a Jar of Mental Regularity?

I have pushed and pushed and pushed.

Everyday is a battle.

I have come to the point where I have to mentally prepare myself before I do anything.

Mentally cheer myself on before I walk into the gym. Mentally tell myself I have five seconds. Then five more seconds. Then five more seconds. Each day my energy wanes more and more.

I really don’t think its physical.

Mentally force myself to summon a grimace before I enter the house.

Mentally stop myself saying anything cutting to my family who love me.

Mentally assemble my thoughts and mould them so they are in a position to study and analyse.

Mentally absorb the fury and frustration towards my husband. He tries. But not hard enough. Sometimes all I need is a few moments of eye contact.

Today I smelled a perfume I used to wear up until a few months ago and suddenly I am back in a place of pain and shock and I know it was only five weeks old but I didn’t really talk about it or think about it, I pushed it to the back of my mind and carried on because that is what Damian did but smelling that strong white musk reminds me of the little blob that caused me so much pain and I am not mourning its loss, I don’t know what I am mourning, but I need to mourn. I need to cry. I need to… something.

I think the scent of this perfume is triggering all sorts of thoughts that I have kept hidden without realising, and I am not thinking these thoughts but my emotions are in tune with them.

Mentally push myself to drag the remaining congealed dregs of physical energy to play with the baby. Last night I collapsed in the bed and cried a little, and after a few moments I heard her little feet patter into my room as they frequently do.

I heard her pause for a few moments.

Then I heard her tiny feet patter cautiously, slowly, towards my bed.

A little clamber.

I felt her warm chubby cheek on mine.

“You otay?” her baby voice whispered. She then proceeded to stroke my hair and give me sloppy two year old kisses. I couldn’t open my eyes. I felt as though lifting my eyelids would make me topple over the edge into oblivion.

My stomach was a ball of slowly unfurling knots. I was queasy and weak.

She stayed with me for a good half hour, lying next to me and tracing the outline of my face, her tiny finger going over my eyebrows, along the bridge of my nose, along my lips and over my ears and hairline. Her little voice rose and fell as she told me stories of monsters and spiders and Peter Rabbit. She told me about not hurting spiders and holding them gently. She told me she went to the “libey” with Mama and “dot lotsa books”. She analysed my face and told me I have “flee spots” (three spots).

She soothed me, this little two year old ball of love, with her fluffy golden hair and her pink cheeks. She told my husband he was “bad” when he walked in at 9pm, and said he should leave me alone because I am tired.

She can be very observant and compassionate. She let him kiss me, though, then pushed him away and pulled the covers over me, tucking it just below my chin.

All this while my eyes were closed.

“I love you baby,” I murmured.

“I lub you too” she said, patting my nose.

How I long to be tranquil.

 

Of Buns and Ovens and Dictators

A lot of my ‘friends’, or perhaps I should say acquaintances, now that they know that I have been married for quite a while now , keep asking dreadful things like, “Is there a bun in that oven, yet?”, or, “Any good news to tell me yet, Lenny?”

Or perhaps the worst, “When will I be an aunt, Len?”

It is the worst because it comes from a young lady who I don’t like, and who isn’t even remotely related to me.

You must be aware, of course, that these young ladies are not frugal with their vulgarity. They find it perfectly within reason to ask me distasteful questions about intimacy and deem it more than appropriate to speak about my sex life as though, now that I am married, it is a completely open topic.

It just puts me under such pressure.

I think it’s wrong for people to ask questions like that. I think it’s completely inconsiderate of their feelings, because you don’t know what is going on with them. You don’t know what their situation might me.

I won’t lie, folks, I feel a little sad when I see pregnant ladies walking by, their hands resting on their protruding stomachs protectively. A little twinge of pain rustles in my abdomen when I see a mother picking up her child kissing said child on the cheek. It’s not that I think I will never have that. I think, and hope, that I shall someday. It’s just that I haven’t yet mourned my loss, no matter how small it was. It was so early, and so tiny, just a ball of cells really, but it gave me so much hope for life and to lose it is to feel like a small candle has been blown out, never to be relit again.

There will be other candles, of course. Hopefully small flames that will grow into roaring fires of life and hope and vitality.

But in the meantime, spare your questions. Spare asking people things that don’t concern you. You don’t know what they are going through, it is not your place to pry.

On Matters of the Heart

I think Downton Abbey ‘triggered’ me yesterday when I watched the *spoiler* scene where Lord Grantham’s ulcer burst while at dinner, resulting in an explosion of blood-vomit all over the table and the shocked diners.

It would have been quite a comedic scene, if it wasn’t for its sobriety. It was quite uncharacteristic of Downton Abbey, and then when Lord Grantham lay in a puddle of blood and his wife told him she was there for him, and not to worry, I began to cry uncontrollably.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t upset about Lord Grantham, I am not so invested in the characters of Downton Abbey that their fates would bring me to tears.

That scene made me think about things which are very close to my heart. Namely that my father who is 53 (which isn’t very old, but he is an overworked gentleman and it shows) lives abroad and works very hard to support his wife and children, his mother and his widowed sister. He works at all hours, and lives alone in a lonely country.

And if anything were to happen to him, like what happened to Lord Grantham, nobody would know, and nobody would be there like Lady Grantham was for her husband. We wouldn’t be there for him and that hurts so very badly, so I spent the rest of the episode sobbing my heart out. I called my father straight away, and didn’t tell him how worried I am about him, but we spoke of cheerful things and it was lovely, but my heart hurts.

I think that enough is quite enough, and it’s time he came home to his family.

 I miss him very very much, and it’s been five years of hurried glimpses, a two week span here and there, and I just want my father back now.

Some Thoughts

I have a most peculiar headache, dears. I had two tablets of sugar coated ibuprofen about an hour and a half ago but it just seems to be getting worse. Nothing a good night’s sleep and a herbal tea won’t cure, I expect.

Damian has either tonsillitis or strep throat and I have been playing nurse, plumping up pillows and making teas and I made a chicken broth today. It had green things floating in it and little pieces of vegetables and strips of shredded chicken. It was flavourful, despite the lack of bones.

I know a lot of things that would seem highly unlikely if I spoke them aloud, but I do earnestly believe that magic exists. It isn’t like the magic that we speak of in books. It is more surreal, and well out of our grasp. I think it is more beautiful and exquisite than our brains can comprehend. It exists in the seas and the trees, in the harmony of the sun and the moon, in the way everything on earth is connected, as though by fine threads that our plain eyes cannot see. It turns the cogs that the universe runs upon.

This world cannot be a happening, folks. The probability is too high, the detail too intricate for it to be the work of pure chance.

The magic is that we exist in this wondrous beauty, and when the world is enveloped in the cold darkness of the universe, one’s eyes are opened to the vastness of it all. One feels so incredibly small and powerless.

Sometimes I wish the veil would lift.

I can’t wait for a clear summer night, when the world is illuminated by moonlight and the stars twinkle merrily in the sky. That way I will be able to go for walks in the fields. It’s so dark otherwise. One wants to see what they are walking into. I want to see how changed the world seems in the absence of sunlight.

Sometimes I grieve for people who haven’t died yet, as though they have. My imagination runs away with me and I start to worry and feel anxious. Sometimes I find a frown on my face, and it is a surprise, and I wonder how long it has been sitting there for. Like right now for example. Other times I stop myself when I realise I am rocking back and forth, like somebody from a mental institute.

I think I have far too much time on my hands.

You know what they say, though. Time to occupy oneself with things that will move one forward and better one’s mind and improve one’s knowledge. When I am busy, I shall look back on all this free time wistfully and wish I had done something better with it. We make our own lives, dear folks.

I keep telling myself that, you know. I fear my words speak louder than my actions these days. Must rectify that as soon as possible.

Goodnight dears. I wish you all very well.

Crests and Troughs

 

I don’t feel too good.

I spend too much time in the shower. I enjoy the torrid water beating against my body, I think it is hot but if it were to be cranked up a degree  I am afraid I would burn. I hold my finger poised over the power button on the electric shower and contemplate it for a good five minute before i press on it with a sluggish finger. Everything feels weakened. Even after I have slept.

I lay in bed yesterday for hours, and when I got up it was 4pm. I got in at 9:45am. I didn’t want to get dressed but I did because Damian did and I wanted to make an effort for him. He told me I seem like I am carrying a heavy burden and I smiled at him and whacked him lightly with a towel and told him not to be so silly.

I wish I could tell him. I wish I could tell somebody. That somedays all I think about in bed on my own with a growing feeling of fear and disgust is everything that happened for two years and ended a year ago. I am constantly reminded of it. Sometimes smells waft my way and I am jerked back into a time and a place and my throat constricts and the world shrinks and shrinks and shrinks and I want to escape but I can’t because the world is too small. There’s nowhere to go.

I was standing outside the flat yesterday, and it opens right out to the high street of the little town I now live in. I was leaning against the wall because Damian went in to get the car keys and while I was waiting the faint music from the pub down the road wafted my way. Rihanna. Singing something. I’d know that cow’s voice anywhere. He always had her blasting. He always spoke about how he would fuck her senseless if he got the chance. While I was sitting right next to him. When I complained he slapped my thigh. My thigh. My thigh. I don’t know how I could have let such a disgusting thing touch me. Why did I let him touch me. Why. Why. Why.

Or Rihanna blasting out in a rickety old car as it sped down a quiet, pitch black A road. Rihanna wailing about how she would drink to the frickin’ weekend. Him singing along. Me giving a fake, forced smile. Him telling me not to be such a moody cow. It was such an ugly song. Her moaning voice drags me back to bleak places.

I did not want to be there.

You know those times when your soul isn’t happy? When you have every reason to feel joy but you just don’t? When everything you thought would make you happy, help you escape, is in your grasp but you just want to go back? When you keep being told that you are free, you are better off, this is you being an adult, living your life… but your mind finds it increasingly difficult to relate those facts to the agony you are feeling. But I’m not really living it, am I? I am a frightened little rabbit doing your bidding because I am scared to death of you. That’s what the voices in my head were telling me.

I looked out into the darkness and blocked everything else out from my mind. I focused only on getting it over and done with and going back to the safe haven of my home again. Where nobody knew anything. Where I spent hours late at night glued a phone call I really didn’t want to partake in, tiredness cloaking me like a heavy, hot blanket. I glanced listlessly at all the work I didn’t do because I had to spend hours talking to a madman.

A madman. A mad man who rambled and shouted and raved and told me despicable things about my mother. I sat there in the dead of the night listening to somebody insult my mother and call her a fat cow and a selfish bitch. MY MOTHER who sacrificed everything for me, who still does, who spends all her time and energy thinking of me, doing things for me, planning for me, researching for me, and never spares not a second on herself. My mother. And I sat there listening to it. I took it in and I nodded and sighed and yawned and tried to make excuses but to no avail. Egotistical manipulators  don’t understand excuses. They think of nobody but themselves.

I thought that period of time would be erased from memory once I escaped it. I thought my dabblings with such a force would have no effect on me later because.. why would they? I am alright, aren’t I? I am fairly normal. Average. Happy-go-lucky. I have never suffered with any mental illness. I am fine.

A whole year ago yesterday and why is it still bothering me. Why am I still terrified? Why  does my heart beat with frantic panic every time an unknown number calls me? Why do I feel like I will never ever shake the disgusting, terrifying, menacing, monstrous feel of him off?

I want to step out of this heavy burdensome skin.

Sometimes I laugh so loudly at the things Damian says and after a while I am still laughing, but I am no longer in the moment. I have stepped away from it, and now my laughter is a deafening echo and my face is doing all the motions but I am really crying so heavily I have melted right into the ground.

So, I don’t feel too great. I have stomach aches in the evenings. My limbs fall heavy and I don’t seem to be able to breathe so well anymore. My chest feels too tight. I take off my bras and still, my deep breaths aren’t so satisfying.

It’s crests and troughs, though. I am so happy one moment in the park swinging on swings, sailing down slides, letting the wind whirl through my hair, opening my arms wide to embrace the forces of this beautiful nature. But the next moment I can hardly move for the pain inside. It just hurts. I cry for no reason. I cry when I tell Damian I love him. I cry when I hear my mother’s voice on the phone. I cry when I look at my hair in the mirror. How can somebody feel so happy, and yet so sad?

I just don’t understand it. Why do I feel so poorly, and yet so alive? How could I feel so nauseous and yet dig into meals like a ravenous pig? I want to look forward to things, get excited about things, sing and dance and laugh honestly again.

So I am just waiting for this trough to turn into a crest. Today was better than yesterday. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.