What a Shame

by Abigail Bergstrom

‘Because when someone makes you feel like you’re not good enough for them you become completely consumed by the task of disproving their theory.

‘Have I heard from the man who ripped out my heart, mindlessly sat on it, compressing the thing until it burst, disseminating into the wider atmosphere like blood-red confetti?

‘I just wish I didn’t remember him as so … I don’t know, good and handsome and just, bleh!’

Performing the universal female affliction: to hide.

I don’t remember ever asking for it all – do you? I don’t want it all, I just want my portion.’

‘Do you know what keeps us so contained, ladies? Do you? It’s shame. Your shame and my shame. It keeps us tempered. We perform a role – a lot of us learn that performance from our mothers.’ I sense Ekua flinch. ‘Well, fuck that.’

It seems you are woven into the fabric of me. 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.

But perhaps you miss me, perhaps you don’t feel we got the chance to say goodbye.

Sometimes it’s mutual trauma that draws us to our lovers. The scars on our hearts draw out the same patterns. The way you left broke the most delicate part of me. You knocked this child down on your way out, smashing her into tiny pieces, and I sit here with her, mouth full of shards, and bloodied hands that snap, crackle and pop as they clench around the sharp edges of her pain. My pain. So what if the vase breaks?

‘You can’t just say it’s for the best and go. That makes no sense. You need to tell me what’s happening.’

We were going somewhere. But now you are gone. What frantically irked me was the permanence of this departure: are you gone for ever, or will you be coming back?

To leave so suddenly and without cause somehow held the door ajar.

Gone remains inconceivably inconclusive.

Georgia puts out her hand and takes hold of mine. We stand, rapt by the fire, breathing in the hot fumes of the future that was no longer for me.

‘This pain was imposed on you. It wasn’t your fault.’ She looks at me to convey this message. ‘They want you to know that it wasn’t your fault. You haven’t done anything wrong. These things were imposed on you, but you need to stop looking for affirmation in others and find it in yourself.’

Don’t look at anything as being lost – change your perspective about this man who hurt you. You need to be able to look at that situation and think, thank goodness!

‘Gulp down that pride and have the strength to love the ones you love – even if you wanted them to be not who they were so much that it destroys you.’

Why do you deny and writhe against the pain? A pain that will turn you into the person you begged for, a person you convinced me you wanted to be.’

Grief forces you to face yourself, and if you cannot do it, a part of you will be rendered unavailable to you. This is the worst possible outcome, my girl. You must battle to keep that part of yourself, even if it feels worthless or even contemptible in the roaring high seas of loss. You must still fight to keep it.’

That that’s the whole fucking point. And although you think this fog of sadness, or whatever it is you’re going through, is the worst thing in the world, perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps it’s a fucking brilliant thing that you loved him so much. Perhaps your capacity to love – how deeply you love, Mathilda – is a rare and wonderful thing.’

To love oneself is to seek out the worst and most terrible parts. A curse, lifted.