Category: Poetry
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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.
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I had my biweekly benefits interview today (apparently they tried to tell me to stay home and do it by phone. Oh well). These sessions are really more of a catch up and a subtle prodding at my mental state to make sure I’m not planning to take any baths with a toaster. Which several days ago was a not unattractive option for me. I was crying a lot.
(I know you are tired of hearing me talk about crying. Again, I’m sorry. I opened a mental Pamdora’s box and I can’t seem to find the lid).
Fortunately the mood passed. A good thing, I hope. The future can seem ominous, especially at year’s end. Suicide rates go up at Christmas for a reason
What I wanted to write about was a slight follow up from yesterday: little things. Little victories. I was seen by a work coach who doesn’t really know me, so we did the edited “this is what I want in life” chat. I don’t know what I want in life really, other than to create, so I usually stick to the one area of art I actually have some published work in: photography.
I had a photo used as part of an advertising campaign for the Sony RX100 MK2 model camera. It was a collaboration with hitrecord.org, a community I was a member of at the time (I still am, but take part in little of it anymore. My last check for my work from them was 27 cents. What can you say to that?)
Anyway, fifty of us were featured in their ad campaign. It was the most money I ever made from art: just over a thousand pounds. I bought a second hand Samsung laptop since my desktop was dying. It was the best computer I ever owned.
I gave the abridged story of this tiny triumph to my work coach. She did the politely impressed response. I shrugged, muttering I had done little since. I had a screenplay considered for broadcast here in the UK, and was featured in a few other hitrecord.org publications. It amounted to nothing in the end.
I know I sound ungrateful, and I don’t mean to seem so dismissive: I’m proud of my little achievements. That’s not the problem.
I’m ashamed thst I failed to turn them into anything but this utter mess, my failures. This life of emptiness and pennilessness. I failed. I am a failure, a loser, it’s that simple.
Little things can be good, but what we take (or don’t take) from them can be bad. Useless as I am in life, I took nothing but stupidity from mine.
So it goes.
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A sentence that means so many things to so many people. Sometimes it’s just pure physical exhaustion. A long day of work, frustrations, road blocks. For others, it means mental exhaustion. Minds are not light switches, they go at their own pace and so often are beyond our control.
I mean the latter. Mental exhaustion.
I’m tired of staring at an empty future. I’m tired of crying. I’m tired of hate surrounding me, surroundomg all of us in one form of another. I’m tired of hoping for a glimpse of humanity – just one, a tiny peek of actual people behind the bureaucracy we call the government – that maybe they would give us our disability benefit money a day or so early. A hope that ended in predictable disappointment. I have my two weekly appointment Tuesday, which means taking the train to get there because my town has no benefit office of its own anymore, and I have 30 pence in my bank account. It’s £6.50 to get to the town with the benefits office. I will be penalised if I don’t attend for a good reason.
I hope a family member can lend me the money but there’s no guarantees there.
I’m tired of letters asking for money that, thanks to the benefits cut, I simply can’t pay. I have been working with a company to consolidate my debt but the gentleman I was speaking with has gone quiet – Christmas holidays. The credit card companies, it seems, do not take such holidays.
I’m tired of the utter lack of desire to create. All I can wrote, it seems, is about misery. My misery. Unsurprisingly, that’s not a popular topic. Not that I had much audience to begin with.
I’m tired of having nothing to take my thoughts away. I don’t care of it’s an addiction, it’s my escape. I need the silence. A few nights ago I found an old Valium and cried with joy. I slept like a baby.
As Jimmy Darmody (via the immensely talented Michael Carmen Pitt) said: “I am what time and circumstance has made me.”
I’m tired. I’m sad. I feel little emotions other than quiet despair. The world remains apathetic. It always is. It always was. The world that cared, that one only ever existed in my imagination. And time kills all such fantasy.
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Written for a prompt on hitrecord.org.
I won’t tell you what my inner monologue has to say these days. That would seem to run contrary to the prompt, so I’ll clarify a bit: I’m not going into much detail on my current inner monologue because it is a dark place. Anyone who knows me will know what I mean.
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It wasn’t always that way. My inner monologue was full of movie ideas when I was six or seven – a child with a vocabulary of a teenager, an active imagination and few friends interested in hearing about any of it. That didn’t bother me back then. I rehearsed my lines in my head, rewrote my drafts, offered commentary on how I was doing. We had a lot to say to each other.
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I learnt quickly never to say it out loud though. I knew early on I was a bit different to the other kids, and certain behaviours wouldn’t fly with them, but it didn’t make me sad. Not yet.
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My monologue started to get angry when, once again, maths defeated my understanding. My flaws, my weaknesses, my deficiencies were starting to show and my monologue, like my teachers, hurled criticisms at me.
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Monologue, once my most jubilant cheerleader when teachers and other students loved my short stories, suddenly became a stranger.
Monologue, the one who had wondered if that man Stephen King (my dad was a huge fan, so he was the one “adult” writer I knew of) would like my stuff, called me stupid. A loser. A freak.
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Darkness crept in more and more as I got older and, it seemed, the world became ever more hostile toward me. Sometimes people would catch me muttering under my breath – monologue and I discussing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or dinosaurs or art or acting – whatever I had on my mind that day. What a weirdo.
Why are you always embarrassing yourself like this? Demanded monologue. I didn’t know.
You’re stupid, she said.
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As I sat on the classroom step alone during lunch break, a long time before things got bad, I asked a question monologue couldn’t answer at the time: why didn’t the other kids like me?
Later on, she had a whole list.
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Many years later, at 14, monologue asked me a question I couldn’t answer: why won’t you just kill yourself?
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She still asks. Sometimes I answer. But that’s between just me and her now.
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I live a stone’s throw from the cemetery where my mother’s relatives are buried (dad’s family favoured cremation). I see their headstones every time I walk down the lane leading into town. I give a glance of acknowledgement. For a long time that was my sole concession to their presence.
As years went on, the family plot grew: once it contained just Grandad (he died of bowel cancer when I was four. One of my earliest memories was seeing him, jaundice from liver failure, on his sick bed), then it housed Grandma (passed away 2002) and my still born cousin Thomas. More recently, my uncle died in a car accident, buried in a plot of his very own, always easily recognised by the Middlesbrough FC regalia adorning it.
In 2011, my mum very nearly joined them after doctors failed to spot a ruptured appendix. Death, once a subject that was usually in the back of my mind, was everywhere. A lurking threat to my family. A shadow clinging to our heels.
To me, death was a subject I mostly thought about in times of stress, when it seemed like a good escape route. I never thought to wonder whether I would be buried or cremated (I’d chose cremation simply because it’s cheaper and the cemetery is overcrowded). Unlike emergency exits in buildings, death isn’t easy to locate when you’ve decided life has screwed you over one last time. All I’ve got to show for my efforts is minor liver damage.
It is one thing when, as I do, have suicidal thoughts. That is under my control, and I can decide “not today, Satan” and carry on.
You can’t stop it taking away others. It seems unfair, almost taunting, to take the life of someone who had everything to live for and deny the suicidal person who actually wants to leave. A cruel joke.
Today, I did something I rarely do, and spoke to my grandparents. Or if you like, I spoke to a slightly tilting piece of granite like a mad woman. I apologised to my grandfather for a very private reason. I joked he’d picked the right grandchild to favour since my sister is the only one of us who actually has a stable life and he adored her. And I cried. I’ve cried so much recently, somehow a floodgate opened inside me and everything I have repressed over the years has come out in unpredictable bursts. I accepted my terrible failure of a life and confessed my deepest sin: I still don’t want to be here.
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I burned my hopes and dreams. Rest in peace, naive little me.
Bloody Roses 