Category: Failure
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I rarely cry. I learned quickly as a child that crying resulted in one of two things: being yelled at for crying, or being bullied worse for crying.
I cried today for a good five minutes. Nobody came to see if I was okay. There it is. My pain is just background noise. Family is a mere concept to me, I have no experience with what it is supposed to be about. The connections everyone else has in life are absent from mine. I will never have them. Even friends are thin on the ground, and growing less and less every day.
Eventually my only friend will be, as the rock poet Jim Morrison sang, The End.
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I would be lying if I said my original decision to drop out of work was altruistic. It was for three reasons: my anxiety and depression went into overdrive, and I decided I was safer and happier in my flat doing drugs.
Unsurprisingly, I had to leave the flat due to none payment of rent (my parents bailed my out there), but I clung to those childish little hopes we all have: maybe tomorrow the antidepressants will work, maybe tomorrow I can find the money to buy my stuff and stave off withdrawal, maybe tomorrow I’ll win the goddamn lottery (or mum or my sister will).
Of course, none of these things happened because they are the childish daydreams of an adolescent stuck in an adult’s body. I’ve never found a way to change that mind set. Maybe it is just how I am, but it makes me chronically unsuitable for the modern world.
Reading Liz Truss’s comments about how the workers here should be more like the Chinese workforce (you know, the country that has to put nets around their buildings because of all the suicides from their cruelly overworked workforce), I realised something as dark and sad as I have ever known since the nightmare of secondary school: this world doesn’t give a shit. About any of us. We are here to feed capitalism, and then die.
“Well, what took you so long to realise that?” It’s a good question, and the answer is Elphis. The Goddess of hope. The thing I have clung to for so long, that brief feeling during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure that maybe things really were changing.
But the Capitalist machine saw off the threat. And now it’s gearing up to grind our bones to make their bread. Before they fuck off into space and leave us all to starve to death. Interstellar was way ahead of its time there.
Well, I’m no cog in a machine. If it comes to it, I’ll make damn sure I’m dead before that happens. I’ll do my drugs because they make life bearable. They will kill me. I’m okay with that. It is, in the end, my choice to do this, and not some asshole bathing in millions I can only dream of.
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I’ve been having a pretty rough tome in my offline life, so I haven’t been very productive.
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I don’t have a title for this, and I’m unsure whether it’s a poem or a stream of consciousness. But this is an ode to Queen. -
I washed my face and hair
for the first time in recent memory
time seemed to have become like a dream
and I was unsure how long was long
(hours, days? Weeks surely weren’t possible).
A woman looked back, and her face pinched
in a quizzical expression because that woman
was not me. Worn, dark circles and eye creases
like train tracks long abandoned and leading to a station long gone.
But of course that was me,
that was who I let myself become.
I was the abandoned station. Forgotten except by the younger me
who broke the windows and scribbled obscene graffiti onto it
my mirror to the world. I hated her because she
let herself become derelict, and that’s what people saw me as
and I was furious that I could fail myself so badly.
I cleaned the stranger’s face with care,
it was time to start make repairs.
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When I woke up this morning – or, should I say, came out of my doze – I saw a beautiful white light painting the wall. I thought maybe – at last! – heaven had taken me home. Taken me to a kind, welcoming place where finally things are good, no more crying every day.
It was the dawn light. Because, as Hugh Jackman said in the The Prestige, the world is solid all the way through. Sometimes though, for just a minute, you can believe…
My life here is real, solid all the way through. My misery here is real. And I don’t know if it’ll ever change for the better.
If you can possibly spare anything at all, my Cashapp is £SaferThanHeaven84, my ko-fi is:
https://ko-fi.com/emmaslens and my paypal is emmaconner84@gmail.com.
Bloody Roses 