Where I End

by Sophie White

I have known what it’s like to have delusional thoughts spread like mould in your mind. The thoughts spread among your ordinary thoughts, masquerading as reality until you don’t know what’s you and what’s It.

They know that religion is a pathetic performance, a plea for clemency by lost people.

Dada is the most alive of us I think. He hogs all the feelings in this withered house. He is swollen with guilt and pressed down with disappointment. He leaks tears like bilge water. It’s a relief when he goes.

‘You’re an artist.’ The word takes precision in the mouth: it starts in the throat, ascends the tongue and hisses to a halt at barred teeth. I’ve seen it written down but never said it out loud before.

The stories lacked detail, though. They were blank things. The horror was in the blankness. The horror was in the gaps.

How to say that I feel I have rifled through her hidden self and rather than feeling satisfied am only starving for more of her. I am unsettled by the beauty. Unbalanced.

(Hope, I’ve come to learn, can be a noose. When we hope, we willingly, blithely, put our heads in a sadistic coil and wait to be hanged. I hoped for things when I was younger—pathetic things—and was always left swinging.)

How does he still get up and put on shoes every day? How does he eat? How does he use those arms for stupid mundane things, the arms that lost his baby?