November has been walking
This year has been a brave face. My freckles are fading, and the first rains have fallen: summer has ended at last. Things are darker and there’s this big fog, or maybe it’s a mist. It doesn’t matter, I don’t think. It’s here and it’s heavy and a misnomer won’t change that.
I’m currently being followed around my local Tesco’s by a man in a security uniform. Wherever I am, there he is. My hood is up, and I am wearing sunglasses, and it is not raining, and there is no sun: I am looking particularly ratty right now: I suppose it’s fair enough.
After I pay at the checkout, I put my wallet in my bag first thing and spend the whole walk home wondering if I really did that or if I left it at the till:
I buy a vegetable soup and spend the whole walk home wondering if I actually did that, or if I picked up the meat option instead, even though I know I checked the label.
I know I checked the label and spend the walk home wondering if I checked the label.
I hear a song and remember I was trying to remember this song a few days ago but can’t think when exactly or why I needed to remember this song.
I pick up loose strands of thought like picking old hairs out of the threads of my jumper that have hibernated there since last winter, back when my hair was longer.
I need a piece of string, and I need a hand to tie the string to. I make do with long strands of year-old hair and loop them around the tips of my fingers until they turn purple.
It is the primal things that I struggle with: that which is supposed to be instinctual, or at least in others appears to be so
I know it is supposed to be instinctual.
I know it because I am guessing.
I am guessing because I have forgotten, and there’s this big fog or maybe mist, and it doesn’t really matter; I can’t think.
Summer has ended, and summer has ended. It gets so dark so early, now.
I walk, and I walk, and I walk.
I register the footsteps pounding the pavement behind me a moment before they are upon me.
At just past 6, it is dark, but not that dark- not dark enough to really worry.
In an alley, when you are a woman walking alone, it is always dark, and you should always worry.
I have sinned, cardinally: I have broken the golden rule of owning this body; have one eye over your shoulder, always. It will be my fault, should something happen. It’s always “her fault”.
It’s so sudden that I flinch when I turn around and see someone running at me, despite expecting to see someone running at me.
I’ve done it wrong anyway. Should anything happen, this would be my mistake. You’re supposed to turn slowly, look slyly- no sudden movements: do not prod the bear. Do not come with aggression and provoke aggression, for he will meet you with aggression.
I shrink and feel my eyes go wide. Freeze and fawn as he runs right at me and runs right on by.
I almost trip- the relief and the fear one in my throat.
He was wearing a white T-shirt, probably one that said something to represent the fact that he was a runner and had run before, runs regularly. Shorts, orange shoes- perhaps neon pink. Something flashy. Short back and sides. Blond and tall. Thirties, maybe pushing forty.
I register, as he goes past me, that he’s running without headphones in, and wonder if he heard me gasp when I turned, heard the scoff I made to myself when my brain caught up with the fact that I was not in danger. What kind of idiot was I to have fear? It’s dark, but not that dark. How egotistical of me.
No, reframe: What kind of man runs past a woman in an alley in the dark?
My hands are shaking, and my heart is in my stomach, and I’m flinching at people who walk too close, too quickly. I break into a cold sweat that comes and goes with the things that enter my mind and only flee when I scrunch my eyes and nose up tight.
I walk, and I walk, and I repeat a good story to myself.
I’m looking for a song to play. I’m on the free version of Spotify, so I’ve one chance of doing this right before an ad plays, or I run out of skips, before I’m doomed to listen to the entirety of a song that is far too long and not at all the right mood. I’m looking for something Radiohead, something that’ll hit you right in the gut.
It’s weird; I hear something like heavy breathing to my right just as I hit play on Angel by Massive Attack. I thought I heard the same noise earlier, when I first slowed down to choose a song, but this playlist has a lineup of songs where the artists like to put strange semi-ambient noises deep in the track that blend into your surroundings. And anyway, I’ve my hood up, and it’s dark, and I’m on a quiet street without many streetlights, so you’ll excuse me for my impaired vision, my lack of noticing the man across the street who is sitting on someone’s front wall, staring straight at me while he inhales a balloon. He might not be alone, but I can’t see because there’s a car in the way.
My bones just about leave my body when I lock eyes with him. He’s looking right at me. I don’t register anything but his shape in the dark, distorted by a shrinking balloon and a whistling noise as the chemical air leaves it.
How do I excuse my fear: how do I justify it and its source? How do I explain my fear of the dark and the men that come out of it?
I can’t, or maybe I don’t want to right now. You’ll just have to forgive me for the speed at which I move, and how fast my phone makes its way to my back pocket. I try to do it calmly, but I know that I’m jittery and my face has probably fallen, gone whiter than is possible for someone already pale and significantly, laughably, anaemic. I try to walk calmly too, but I find, what with my bones scattered at my feet, my stomach there on the floor, making the ivory bloody, my limbs don’t quite work. I’m walking like a wooden puppet with its strings tied: with each step my knee bends backwards, and I can feel the motion ripple down my body- hip, thigh, knee, foot. It lands awkwardly, and I know it, but my heart is racing, and I’ve already turned the corner, and I’m already almost home, and I hear the metal clink of the canister fall onto the pavement and wonder if they are coming after me, and my hands are shaking so much that the vibrations of my rattling body stop me from being able to hear the song. It hit me right in the gut that I left on the pavement a few streets back anyway: I turn up the volume and try not to think about England.
I walk, and I walk, and I repeat my good story. Everything is and always has been okay.
It is November.
This month I read a book about trauma. I went to therapy targeted at trauma. I worked with people who had experienced trauma. This month I have felt compelled to write about trauma.
Afraid to do so: afraid to expose shame or the inexplicable, twisty things inside of me that are wrong because of the trauma: the fear; the paranoia; the disgust; the numbness; the rage. Oh, the rage. They do not want me to call it wrong, of course. But they are wrong; it is wrong. The lot of it is wrong. The magnitude of all of the things: the way that we live and the things we feel compelled to unspeak and cloak for the benefit of others.
Each time I have tried to write about these things, I have either echoed that “good story”; that polished script that undermines that trauma for your benefit. Or I have swung the other way; gone beyond surrealism into the absurd, into anarchy; become too comfortable with lies that have overwritten the gaps in my memory; spoken too openly too frequently about these things in conversations where these things ought not be spoken.
I have wondered if this is some ploy- these (un)deliberate nontruths that I cast- some great design for attention. It did not really happen. It did not happen. You are still there: you are always there. But you’re not there, are you? You’re not there at all. You were not there.
But then each time I have tried to write about these things, I have landed on another thing that I belittled for a good story and come to the realisation, several strides into a sentence, that this good story is not a good story, and half a step later, recollected several things about the actual story that I had once forgotten for the sake of stripping down that good story into a respectable sentence or two.
Mum had an accident, I say. She ripped out her feeding tube, and I can smell/hear/feel the pull, and it was my job to make the adults laugh, and I grieved her, and I was told to grieve her and she lived, and she did not recognise me, and I did not recognise her, I do not say. I was not there, and yet I am there almost all of the time. Less so, now. More often, at the moment.
We were children, I was a child, I am still a child, I didn’t know, I didn’t mind, I say. I was not really there: I did not say anything. I didn’t say anything.
These are sentence openings which lead you down the path of ending that street with a harsh stop, cutting it into a cul-de-sac, turning back after realising that maybe this is something that you would rather remain buried and leave buried and leave it at that good story for both your benefit and your benefit. And thus we circle back to the shame and the rage and that ugly thing in your throat that feels an awful lot like choking.
I have been desperately mad in conversations that reveal that my good story fooled you into thinking it was the story. I have been desperately mad in conversations where you do not accept my good story and know that it is not the story. I have been driven deeply and desperately mad. I feel so alive that it feels like I am asleep all of the time.
Dad hides those hospital records at the back of the sock drawer on his side of the bed, like it is something that he is ashamed of: the same hiding spot as Mum, who, on the opposite side of the bed, keeps my baby teeth: buried at the back of her sock drawer, piled under layers of fabric. Something sharp soft and sleeping. Something with fangs wrapped up tight. Something we do not talk about but all know about anyway. I know they are there because I went looking. When I was younger, I always went looking. Sometimes it would be for spare pennies I could pinch. Usually, it was because I knew there was something that I was not supposed to know about, and therefore something I had the potential to find, and I did not like that feeling. I became very skilled at making my presence invisible: entering a place, tearing it to shreds, tearing myself to shreds, restoring it, and leaving. I touch something and leave it untouched. I hoover when you are out. I do the dishes. I do the dishes. I offered to do the fucking dishes. I press my fingers into my chest, and my fingers sink right through to sinew. (Please, let me do the dishes.)
There has always been this feeling that something is being kept from me: that there is me and then there is the rest of the world, and these things are polar and kept apart: I am not invited into the fold: I am buried beneath it. Everybody knows something. There is something on my face and something in my teeth. I am elsewhere and something wrong. I am doing things, and I am secondary to those things. A plot point or punctuation. I am not really here.
There are things at the bottom of cupboards and hidden in corners under piles of things: I am there, and I am not really here. I am there with them: hiding, being hidden, and having things hidden from me. This is where I get half of my shame, and this is where I keep it too.
None of this is true, obviously. Of course it’s not.
(Partially inspired by Dog Days by Emily LaBarge and the image is Paul Delaroche’s ‘The Execution of Lady Jane Grey’)