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There is a pain – so utter – It swallows substance up – Then covers the Abyss with Trance – So Memory can step Around – across – upon it – As one within a Swoon – Goes safely – where an open eye – Would drop Him – Bone by Bone. –Emily Dickinson Curses are like processions. They return to the place from which they came. –Giovanni Ruffini
There’s only so long those who love you can dampen their own happiness out of sensitivity for your misfortunes. Eventually they must resume their lives. So
I clapped my hands when they got engaged, and I didn’t mention that a diamond was an unethical symbol of male ownership;
The most intoxicating and damaging relationships are often those that transcend us in a frozen state of hope – we can have a small part of that person but never enough to satiate our appetite. They will never give themselves to us so to taste them is to accept a perpetual pang of hunger. That was Freddie. He kept me perpetually starved.
He’s the character who appears in every piece of women’s literature ever written – the place where we always wrestle with you – the unobtainable and seemingly immoral character whom the protagonist will eventually realise is her one true love. But in this story, as in real life, we don’t end up with our Mr Bigs or our Mr Darcys. It’s a cruel trick that’s been played on women. Repeatedly promised that therein lies our happy ending, we follow an ill-written script. Those karmic partners who ebb and flow from our lives are sent to teach us a very difficult and painful lesson about ourselves. Not
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She repeats this movement as she stares at the floor, her long hair falling all around her, like a willow tree’s branches, concealing her face. Performing the universal female affliction: to hide.
He said shame was interesting because it was the place where the self and society cross. I know what you think of me, silly, narcissistic Ivy, a model embracing all the clichés. Taking drugs and shagging men more interested in being seen with me than really seeing me,’ She stares me in the eye until I turn away. ‘Don’t look so guilty. We’re all superior in what we think are the right choices. We all judge. Each of us has judged everyone in this room in order to feel better about ourselves. It’s only natural. But
‘We are the generation of women who have been told that we can have it all, raised in a time of Thatcher and Disney – well, what did we expect would happen? I don’t remember ever asking for it all – do you? I don’t want it all, I just want my portion.’
‘It’s so much of a cliché I feel embarrassed, but’s that’s what clichés are built on, right? Populist truth. My mother got plucked, waxed and facialed, preened, steamed and blow-dried, while he picked his nose in public and bored us all to death with right-wing politics. She went to Pilates five times a week while he lightly jogged up and down a pitch every Sunday with his paunch in his hands. What a fucking liberty.’ Her rage shimmers. ‘I’d go into her bedroom sometimes in the mornings and she’d be there in perfect matching lace underwear. What did he do for her? She starved herself into the
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You are in the water of the scalding-hot bath I deliberately force myself into. You are in forehead kisses and hard fucks. You are in the mouth of my six-year-old nephew, who asks why you’re not there at Christmas. You’re in crunchy peanut butter, Game of Thrones and Hackney; in fact, you’re the entire borough. If I were a sponge cake you would be in every grain of sugar, marching through me. You are sweet and salt, pain and perpetuity – inextricably linked to any semblance of hope. Another car flashes past, more water splashes up my legs.
Imperfection and broken pieces can define beauty. It became what it is because it was broken. Through its repair it is defined.’
The blue ceramic bowls we’d bought in Cape Town were missing from the cupboard and the last remnants of dignity were peeling from the lining at the back of my
‘But you can’t just leave me.’ The tears streamed down my face gaining momentum with rising panic. ‘You need to tell me why.’ ‘I don’t.’ You stood up and gathered the last remaining box. ‘I don’t know how to do this,’ you said.
The next time we push down harder and it cuts through the skin. There’s more blood. We look at each other in the mirror: she’s grateful, and me? I’m relieved. It seems like the only thing we ever agree on. I grate the razor against my skin again but this time she’s just watching. No longer with me. Snot runs from my nose and I can hear myself howling. Thick tears blur
you drank milk out of the carton from the fridge and whisky from a bottle when you thought no one was looking; the hazy drunken slurs, fists and tears and screaming replay in my mind when I’m still for long enough, or drunk enough to let them swim to the surface; oh, and you loved me, in an unsatisfactory and disappointing way but that doesn’t change the fact that you did. Good and bad.
left my dad alone too. In the end, I just couldn’t face going to see him any more. I couldn’t deal with the guilt and the shame I felt every time I left him. It was monstrous, the whole thing
People do strange things when they’re grieving. In Hamlet, after the death of her father, Ophelia adorns herself with flowers, sings maddening songs and drowns herself in a brook. Sylvia Plath followed in her footsteps singing her maddened poem to Daddy – four months later she sticks her head in an oven. You die and I cry dutifully at your bedside, etch the pain out on my arm with a razor and swallow a hallucinogenic vine.
We bond over the complex grief that comes with having alcoholics for parents.
