havemehavana

When I am walking through town at gone eleven one night a man with a heavily-bleeding cut above his left eye stops in my path to grasp my hand and garble a story about the time he was serving in Iraq and clocked a fellow soldier on the back of the head with the butt of his gun to stop said fellow soldier raping a woman who the bleeding man describes to me now as “a Muslim woman”. Possibly there is truth to it. Possibly he tells me because blinking through the drink he sees my dark hair and paisley-swaddled torso. I give him a couple of minutes then make my escape. Later when I wave away a man asking “dywanennyeezorcharleelid” I see my hand the hand the soldier shook is streaked with dried blood.

I look at myself and I see your words I am covered in your words. I look at that woman that cafe that picture and I see your words the world is covered in your words. I want my words you scared away my words leave now so my words might come back to me so they might cover you so I might look at the world and see myself.

Love is a poison. Some cures for poisons: Steroids, fluids, sleeping and crying, vinegar and pennies, heat, heavy drinking, angelic teaching, ibuprofen and aspirin and paracetamol, counter irritants, bleach, gasoline, pepper mace, hot candle wax, hot water, cold water, salt water, swimming in chlorinated water, bathing in tea, soil, scratching, doctor, discipline, oxygen, prevention, time.

[Inspired by this website.]

I was having my usual anxiety dream - a million things to carry and not enough bags to put it all in, having to pack it all in public, getting in people’s way, being left behind by the group - and I was crouched over packing in clothes and food and things from my bedroom and then you were there. I asked you to help and you did. And I must have been close to waking up because I became lucid, realised I was in a dream, and just wanted to spend time with you. So for the first time in my memory of having the loads-of-stuff stress dream I stopped packing and stood up straight. I asked you to come over to me and you did. We stood together in a lot of light, maybe next to a high window. I said something else, something about this being a dream, something about missing you. You didn’t say anything but I felt your arms go around me and you held me until I woke up.

“It gets up into you,” my dad’s mum’s mum would say about cold under bare feet. You can also leak out of them, your feet. Leak bad things. A couple of Christmasses ago I couldn’t shake the feeling I left black tar footprints wherever I walked, sweating pain out my soles like it was poison. This went on for a few months until I was outside in the garden one afternoon and it started raining, massive marble water, heavier and heavier, until it was difficult to breathe and the air ran off me like a river. I leaked out of my soles and my palms and when the rain stopped and I walked away I knew my footprints were clear. It gets up in you through your soles, the cold, but it gets out that way as well.

The hoarder at the back of our house has a new children’s chair. It tips as if dropped from the fog, fire engine red and nursery yellow at three angles over his brown-grey-occasional-splintered-white-good. I wonder how the cats will like it.

I’m in the pub with the drinkers and the train drivers and the commuters waiting for the Virgin speed train to London Euston from Lime Street and all they’ve got on tap that doesn’t make me baulk is Peroni so I order a half and count out the change from what I can find in my pocket and in the zip of my wallet even though I’ve got only fifteen minutes to wait before I can buy an off peak ticket and order it before I realise I need the loo. The table I sit down at has an old Victorian radiator blooming with heat and I’m in my gloves and scarf and coat and at the table next to me three women use words like “shock” and “disorganised” in conversation about a boss of theirs but I can’t tell what it is they do. “What do you do?” not “How do you do?” not how are you as a fellow human person but what is it that you engage in to occupy your time, for time must be occupied if you’re to be worth the status and relative comfort that we as an unconsciously self-declared community can afford you. Is it worth my time? Are you? Are you worth any time at all? The man I love has left me for his home. He won’t be talked to or touched. I may sit here an extra hour thinking about him and how I could be to be the optimal human for enabling him to live his life as fully human and so abdicate responsibility or even desire for living my own life or being fully human myself. The lager is working on my digestive system and I still need to deficate, I can feel it in my lower bowel, and I think about my grandmother who was so kind and well read and gave up almost her whole life to an emotionally abusive man in order to raise five kind and well read children, one of whom was schizophrenic and committed suicide, before she died of bowel cancer. I drink more of the lager and press myself into the chair.

It’s always disconcerting when this happens. A shock, then a relief, then befuddling. Like you’re the dusty box room and someone comes along and throws the window open and the wind rushes in, and the dust is gone and the air is great but in the new light you can see there’s mess all over yourself and now there’s more mess because of the wind and it all needs tidying up but it’s pointless to do most of it until the air inside and out reaches some kind of equilibrium. The heavy things - big boxes of things from childhood, familiar hardback books, family pictures nailed to the wall - stay put, but reams of administrative papers, well-thought-out pamphlets, newly-developed photos… they’re flying all over you. You know most of it’s there, you can see it, but you can’t catch it. The rest of the house is there but it’s not an option. (It’s windy today. Expect another wind analogy.)

I genuinely don’t know what’s going on and I’m staying cautious. The tendency is to BUSYBUSYBUSY, quick do everything, before it goes away again, but that’s usually a very bad idea.

When I finally have that optional exploratory MRI scan in twenty years (on the re-socialised health service under full communism)*, they’ll probably find a little mouse in my head who periodically nibbles through the wires connecting my breathe-poop-sleep brain to my everything-else-like-general-cognition brain. And another little mouse who comes along with a tool kit and connects everything back up. But while she’s connecting it back up she has to have the power off, until she’s done, which means the effect is BAM! when the switch is flicked and I can think again.

Sometimes she gets it right first time. Often the new connections hold for a bit and then blow and she has to start again. Often there are sparks coming from somewhere and it’ll take a while to figure it out and allow full service. She never sees the other mouse, the one that nibbles through the wires. Sometimes she finds paw-prints on the inside of the skull, the husk of a sunflower seed caught in the ridge between hemispheres. Sometimes she thinks she’s imagining the other mouse, that she might be chewing the wires herself in her sleep.**

So today I can think and I’m going with it. I can make jokes, I can understand abstract concepts, I can make lunch. I can write a load of dodgy metaphors for mental un-health.

I said I’d give you another wind reference, so here it is:
Tropical cyclones have an eye of mostly calm weather at their centre. You’ll feel like you can step outside. But the cyclone is still moving. All the rest of it is still to come. You know what to expect, but you probably shouldn’t drive.

(Yes I know that’s cheesy, what do you want from me? My prose handbook’s stuck to my ceiling and the mouse can see sparks.)

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* I’m positive today so I envision happy future. I could have said “when we’re all forced to have full body scans to determine whether we’re worth the fuel needed for work in the labour camps or better harvested for parts”.

** I generally don’t like using mechanical analogies for brains. Not only is it not close to physiological truth but it’s unhelpful to perpetuate associated ideas re. design (because we’re not designed) or computers (because biology is not a system). But the mouse thing is completely accurate as to how it feels. That is just how it feels. So I used it. Plus I like mice.

A bathroom swoon of phlegms.
A chill of sheer blue polka dots.
An altitude of selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.
A Sindy Chupa Chup advert of burqas.
An isolation of incidents.
A plywood of chessboard cathedrals.
A potato of beards.
A wet paper bag of hearts. … *thinks* … “Something something the heart’s wet paper bag.”