Cursed Bread

by Sophie Mackintosh

It’s hard to tell what an image will come to mean, what a person will mean, when you are still seeing it for the first time, and some things you always see as if for the first time.

We don’t want to seem ugly to ourselves and even less so to those we care for, but I do believe there is an involuntary intimacy in doing the worst possible thing to somebody you love, the exquisite, weightless feeling of pulling out one of the little pins in my stomach and sliding it carefully back in.

If what never happened and exactly what happened can knock up against each other in this room, if we can’t agree on the sequence of events, if we can see things that aren’t there and remember things that never happened to us, what’s the difference, really? It didn’t happen to me. I make it happen to me. What’s the difference, I tell myself again and again. It exists as much as it ever did. Like a memory or a rumour is something that lives of its own volition, passed from ear to ear. Waiting to be tried on, altered, archived.

you can’t keep heaping shame upon yourself and expect to get out intact.

Shame was another dress you tried on, discarded, lavish in your waste, a curiosity to be played at. It meant nothing to you.

destruction which can feel a lot like peace when it comes, was in me all along.

I am learning that the unexplainable moments can be the most beautiful ones of all. These things seen and not-seen, things heard and misheard, the flimsiness we build entire lives around.

The ordinary and the sordid nestling together.

I think about how desire grows in the spaces around the known, where things are at their most and least real, where the terror of all the possibilities fracturing out through our lives is suspended, momentarily, so we can look them in the eye for once, and isn’t that what we are searching for when we debase ourselves for love, one moment of certainty in this strange and beautiful world.

There will always be someone to make an account of your tragedy, even if it is just yourself in the end, recording, noting, the crimes against your person, the various ways you have been done or undone.