Fragments

I started writing a long fiction piece in 2021 and thought I had lost the entire thing but miraculously my laptop which is beyond fucked and missing 3/5 of its vowel keys has revived. Of the 25,000 words I have, I only like a few fragments, so here they are:

**

Burning is my superpower and my anti-power. Put me in a room full of people and I’ll rage like a fireplace to warm those around me but put me in a room by myself and I’ll combust until my skin blisters off in the heat of my own flame. Burning the candle at both ends is obviously something I’m very good at. I burn to uphold, and I burn to destroy, though these days I hardly think there’s a difference between the two. Burning, always burning, that’s just what I do and it’s all I am, a flicker of flame in the darkness yearning or maybe burning for peace, though perhaps by peace I mean numbness. I want to destroy myself properly you see, with some integrity, if that makes sense, though of course it doesn’t because destroying oneself never makes sense until you’ve done it. Have you tried being on fire? Don’t worry if you haven’t, it’s a very lonely thing and I wouldn’t recommend it much but I suppose it's better than drowning or maybe they’re both the same. It’s just when I think of fire I think of flare and heat and who wouldn’t want to kill themselves with a little flare and make it hot? Let’s face it, society loves a woman on fire, so I thought why not jump in line and give it a go. Maybe because I am a woman, ‘to burn or not to burn’ has never been a question I’ve asked myself because our only option is to burn. To be brilliant or to be brilliantly destroyed, that's the question, and there’s nothing more brilliant than fire.

I remember when the habit started, the burning; it was when I was twelve years old, and I first saw the picture of the monk who set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War. I had stared at it for twenty minutes during a history exam without writing a word because I had thought how strongly I wanted to set myself on fire in protest too. I wondered what happens to skin at that temperature, what does it feel like to become a vessel of smoke with heat coursing through glass veins? Of course at the time I naively thought I wanted to protest the exam itself because American history wasn't my forte and I couldn’t face the thought of failure. In reality though, I think I wanted to burn in protest of the education system itself or maybe just systems altogether, but we all know by now that overthrowing a system is near to impossible; I am a woman, so I know this well. They know me well too or at least they try to, the people in the system, but they stop being able to know me, hurt me, debase me, control me when I set myself on fire. So, there we have it: fire, a gift and a curse, a source of freedom and a trap. What a paradox, what a bind but that’s life really, a string of narrative pulled out and frayed into a threaded spasm of contradictions. So where better to start than at the root of the Gaudian knot where the scarred tissue of the past fuses with the flames which race towards the future.

**

We were there in the flare of the strobe lights, weightless. We were temptresses, empresses, pressing our bodies against the bodies of others for the sake of pressing as our feet stuck to the sugary snare of the garish floor. Faces blurred, whirred, and whirled as the world unfurled like a butterfly’s wing, expanding into a frenzy of colour. She was ethereal bathed in all that light. Her frantic movements dissolved her until she became nothing but a singular note, so clear, so small, so free as if she were at any moment ready to begin again on a spontaneous riff of her selfhood. Pulsing rhythm murdered me and I too was free-falling and calling out her name in the fractions of light that moved like the sun on the surface of water. All was quick: trickster moves, shapes thrown, hoppedy-boppedy, knees crunching, hips swaying, arms flailing, bad singing, wailing like wolves to an invisible moon and then suddenly it all became slow. Sound slinked away into the shadows of an almost silence and I was left with nothing but the vibrations of the music pulsing through me. Sound slowed down, time stopped, and I could hear myself breathing, the blood in my veins moving and I was reminded that I, myself, am a vibration of breath bolting with the energy of the sun. Then suddenly that energy became rhythm gathering inside me like a surge of honey and I was composing strings of language. Words pouring, flashing, crashing together in dissonance, and then coalescing into harmony. The whole club became paper, and it was me alone writing it into being. Yes it is true I think what they say - that language shapes reality and marks presence. Yes it lets us hold moments like these so they don't ebb and sink away.

***

Cheap wine out the bottle isn’t a holy ritual,

except when it is. Club lights are nothing like candlelight,

until you squint.

Satin skirts aren’t white wool robes, but spill some blood

and tell me the difference.

The Greeks didn’t have glitter or jägerbombs but there was light and noise,

frenzy and flame,

mystery and magic,

all the same.

Ecstasy comes from the Greek Ekstasis, loss of self, but I think this batch comes from a bathtub,

and we get it from whoever texts back.

You can see it in the midnight bodies:

all altered posture and frantic hands.

We make our fatal mistakes, and live anyway.

Girls just want to have rights, but the dancing will do tonight, this forever, angled against the light,

praying not to fall.

Can see the future coming so we shut our eyes and spin.

Amphora hearts sealed against time,

impervious to pain, and whatever happens next.

We make our exit; emerge into civilisation, like deer into headlights and know we can still die young.

**

Love fascinates me for many reasons, perhaps because I do love the world and some of the people in it and when I love, I love deeply and furiously. It also fascinates me because I care about language and yet the English language, for all its complexity, only has one tiny little word to describe such different kinds of feeling. How can that be? The Greeks had agape (love of everyone), eros (sexual passion), ludus (playful love), philia (deep friendship), pragma (longstanding love) philautia (self-love), so that I could say I have done well at ludus, eros, and philia but have failed spectacularly at philautia and agape. At least then I’d know what I needed to work on because often love does require work. It also seems strange to me that we think we cannot romantically be in love with our friends, why do we draw such a distinction? I was in love with Natalie, and I loved her, but how much of that was just being in love with her as a person and how much of that was wanting to have sex with her? Was this just a soup of philia and pragma or was there a little seasoning of eros, some croutons of unwanted desire thrown in unexpectedly for me to break my teeth on? I couldn’t tell. Then I wondered, what happens if the reason you want eros is because of pragma, ludus and philia; I for one find I probably want to have sex with anyone that I have loved deeply, playfully, and constantly – it’s the triple entente, who could resist? Sex and love are not the same, I know that well enough, so why the blurred line? You see, language can do so much but sometimes it isn’t enough and well, I could never find the words for her, nor could I ever find the words to express how much I loved her, how grateful I was for her, how much I was going to miss her. Why couldn’t I find the words? Words were meant to be the thing I was good at. If I could just tell her then it would be fine, but it was all so unspeakable, unmentionable, inexpressible so I wanted to hold her, shake her, kiss her. So, is it that we just wish to have sex with people when they start to elude language, is that it? Perhaps that’s why I am often astonished by those I want to have sex with precisely because I can’t find the language to contain them and so I start wanting to hold their bodies with my body, to kiss their lips with my lips, to move with them, to create a separate language of flesh and spit entirely unique and co-produced. This wasn’t language in its usual sense of course but it was an enactment of the unspeakable, the carnal beyond words. It was pre-linguistic and yet post-linguistic; it was the only time that words left my head, leaving a gasping, rasping well in my body that was thick with the plenitude of pleasure so that I felt perhaps as if I were a giant olive tree old as blood and made of shadow.

When I have enjoyed sex, it was because it provoked a feeling of jumping off a diving board into the abyss where I couldn’t categorise or think or say or know anything, where we were just two bodies breathing in a reciprocity of movement. Was it the fact that the good sex annihilated my capacity to think, was that it? This made sense to me for I had been chatted up by swathes of attractive men and women, but I could say very clearly how they made me feel and how I thought of them. Yet with Natalie and with Anthony, well, they eluded words. So then when I stopped wanting to have sex with Anthony was that just because I had found the words for him, that sex was no longer necessary?

I wonder then do we fall out of love when our lovers or the love we feel for them falls back into language, or has language nothing to do with it?

**

Genitals

are not everyone’s cup of tea. In fact, it is very un-British of me to conflate tea and genitals, or is it? I mean I suppose I quite like both really: tea, genitals, tea, genitals, just not at the same time, though tea-bagging does seem to blur the line somewhat. But no, seriously, genitals; I think we ought to talk about them more, not me and you, but generally, we as a society just should. Then again, they are our private parts and the private parts of ourselves are scarce these days, so I understand why we want to shelter them. I suppose when I say talk about them, I mean demythologise and destigmatise them, remove the shame and the objectification. I was once in a bar with my friend speaking about sex and she made the most remarkable comment; she said: ‘you are far too intelligent to care about genitals’. To this day I cannot work out what on earth she could have meant by that, and I honestly think about it at least twice a week. I have never been as obnoxious as to say I am a ‘sapiosexual’ though I do think I fall in love with people’s minds, but who doesn’t when a mind is what makes a person who they are, for better for worse, in sickness and in health? Was she merely implying I was bisexual? I mean she wasn’t wrong, but still, the comment wasn’t about which genitals I like but rather that I’m too intelligent for them altogether. Or was it a telling off? ‘Stop having copious amounts of sex and focus on being intelligent’ but that seemed ever so dull. Too. Intelligent. For. Genitals. But I like genitals and I like being occasionally intelligent, does that just make me intelligenital?

**

God

it’s tiring. God; it’s tiring. God is tiring. How can three similar formulations of the same three words mean three entirely different things? The first is something we all think because when isn’t life relentless? The second, well, I tried kneeling in prayer once. I was scared, desperate, Godless, and afraid so I prayed on my knees to a God I didn’t believe in and said ‘God; it’s tiring’ instead of ‘God it’s tiring’. Amazing that a semi-colon can bring God into being. But when that failed to make my life any better, I said, ‘God is tiring’ and walked faithless into the shadows wondering whether I’d be better off praying to the Devil instead.

**

Don’t

smoke, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, don’t say that, don’t overthink, don’t fall in love, don’t have sex with him, don’t have sex with her, don’t chase that, don’t stroke that, don’t eat that. But that’s the thing about all these don’ts, we all want to do them over and over again. Why? Because the stuff that’s bad for you always tends to be the most fun. He was bad for me, and I was bad for him so naturally we wanted to do each other, over and over again. So, we did each other and what did I say afterwards? Don’t do that again, so of course what did I do? I did it again. God, isn’t life absurd?

**

Holding

is tiring. He was holding me with his eyes closed like a blinded angel at rest. I was wide-eyed awake in the shadows holding my thoughts like weak arms hold anchors, barely. I was tired of holding myself up, holding it all together, all that mess and all that weight. I wanted someone to tell me how to dress, how to think, what to say. I wanted someone to attach strings to my limbs and move me because I was so heavy, so tired. Or did I just want to scream? Get out, get out, get out! I wanted to tear my mind out of my skull and let the anchor drop. I wanted to stop but I could never stop, that was the problem. In the shower I could not stop thinking. At night I could not stop thinking. When putting on a sock, making the tea, watching the sky, I just couldn’t stop thinking. Thinking, thinking, thinking endlessly, deeply, aggressively like my thoughts were pellets of hail, thundering, clattering, shattering the front of my windscreen head. I wanted to be blank for a second but his arms were beginning to feel like a cage and I couldn’t understand it for I wanted someone to hold me but when he did, I couldn’t breathe.

**

Oh, fuck off’ she retorted with her devious smirk but as she turned away from me to pour herself a drink, I saw the words of a novel forming on her bare back, as if her shoulder blades were the structure of a drum and her skin, the fabric of the plot stretched over the frame. I watched the body of the future book take the shape of her and I thought to myself, of course I’ll write about you, you are why I write, you are who I write for. The spine of her back was the spine of the book holding me and my messy pages of self together for she and the book were one: blood and ink, breath and language, spine and spine. What title I thought, what title, but before I could find one, she turned back around and threw an orange peel at my face with astounding aim proclaiming, ‘yeah well, I wouldn’t write about you either you boring cow’.

So little did she know, I had, in that moment’s turn, written her already.

‘Cheers to us both for being ever so dull’, I exclaimed as I toasted the air.

She raised her glass, we sipped our drinks and looked at each other over the rims knowing without saying of course, that we could never be boring together.