Raw January
A month as a series of days. A girl in three cities. Prolonged, pretentious, pseudo-analytic. Everything you will read below is a complete fabrication. This is what makes it true.
My front left incisor is chipped. I don’t know how long it’s been like that because when my mother points it out it’s as much a surprise to me as it is to her. I haven’t been drunk enough to chip a tooth in a long time, and I don’t remember a pain in my mouth. Not since my orthodontist told me to stop wearing my retainer have my teeth lost their bone-straight symmetry. I’ve been perfect since I was fourteen. I don’t know whether I’m going to get it fixed or not - I haven’t decided yet.
If - ‘[Leo] Tolstoy uses toothache mimetically to convey the searing dental pain that thematically reminds characters and readers alike of bodily decay, human limitation, mortality, and loss. [If] Tolstoy, like St Augustine and Dostoevskii before him, uses dental pain to explore emotional pain and moral choice,’ - then what does it mean that my tooth is chipped? What is the symbolism of it happening now, without me realising?
I don’t have dreams but when I do, I have dreams that my teeth are rotting. That they are loose in my mouth and fall out. That I have none, or I have too many - layers and layers of teeth stacked up like a shark. When things are bad brushing them is very hard. I never had a cavity in all of my childhood, and I live in constant fear that if I go back to the dentist, she’ll tell me that they are all filled with tiny little holes - calcium popcorned hollow, barely holding themselves together.
I keep asking everyone what their ins and outs are for this year - force of habit, I suppose. Just trying to get them to ask me so I can bring the conversation back round to myself again. A professional clown buys me a beer because an old man at the bar wants to debate free speech and I tell him I can’t put myself out on the table for contestation. It’s been a long time since a guy has come at me like that, and I’m more thrown than I realise. He leaves in a huff after I almost cry in front of respected acquaintances, and the clown tells me about his best friend in the whole world who died last year. There’s a joke in there somewhere - the sad clown takes pity on the sadder, less clownlike clown. He tries to teach me to juggle with no balls. We both take this ridiculous exercise ridiculously seriously.
I’ve been going around with a small hole in my heart, making a tiny pinhole pierced straight through my chest to my back for a year now. A year, actually, to the day. I’ve been learning how to balance carrying the hole around, but January is wintry and each time I try to sit up I feel a sharp wind whistling straight through me and it’s hard to walk without it doubling me over.
I am so tired and my body aches. I am the oldest 20-year-old to have ever walked the planet. I have been this way for years. I will never be the same again. I am giving up the ghost.
It’s so cold in Berlin that when I take off my clothes at the end of the day it feels like my skin comes with them. It’s cold in Edinburgh, and it’s cold in London because I refuse to dress for the weather. Wearing tights under anything makes me feel physically sick, so I tuck my head down against the wind in a scarf and walk like I’m running.
I make a friend who lives down the road from me in London, but he’s from Taiwan and we meet in Berlin. We spend eleven hours a day together for five days straight. And then fourteen hours together again on the sixth. Our flight is delayed, then cancelled, and we sleep for two hours out of four in a bed next to one another and in a really weird way I almost wish we were having sex because it would make it less awkward. But I do actually really like him, and he really likes me, and I’m trying to let myself be soft in front of strangers, so instead we just laugh and laugh and laugh together. I wonder if I will ever see him again.
A man at the airport asks for a filter and tells us he’s going to Sweden to meet his childhood sweetheart. They’re both divorced, and reconnected at their high school reunion earlier last year. He’s visiting her for the first time. I turn to my friend after and say that I didn’t realise stuff like that happened outside of movies, which is, if you think about it, exactly the kind of thing someone would say in a movie. I say this is maybe the most romantic thing I have ever heard, but it’s not actually - it just feels good to say in the moment.
I’m booked in for a spiritual healing session and I’m only really going for my mother’s sake. I have the best intentions of writing a hilariously dry and intelligent little story about it, but I am so horrifically late that she has already left. I end up sobbing in her waiting room. Crying in public has always been my only real party trick. I’m not trying to go on a spiritual journey, I just want to feel some kind of recognition within my body. I’ve been trying to pretend I don’t have one my whole life. I need to stop going to yoga classes and imaging my pelvis being pressed in from both sides until it snaps into two pieces.
No one is drinking suddenly, which is interesting. I didn’t realise we were grown up enough to have to stave off for the New Year. I’ve gone maybe the longest since I was 14 without having thrown up. I don’t know if that’s really actually saying anything at all, but putting a bunch of random prose in a singular post almost makes it seem like I’ve purposefully included these scatterings for a secret, profound meaning no one else is intelligent enough to understand. It’s lazy writing but I’m so tired. I can’t sleep at night because my room is so full of dust and our landlords refuse to buy as a new hoover. My head is so blocked up with snot and spit that I can’t hear myself think. I used to be scared of blowing my nose. My mum would rub my back and hold me down with a tissue to my face and force it all out of me. Now I do it all the time but I still get teased. There’s little black spots that keep appearing in the slime and I’m not sure if they’re coming from the room or from inside of me. I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions but I’m going to call my brother more. I think we maybe might need each other.
I almost cry in the taxi going to the airport leaving home. It’s the first time anything like that’s ever happened to me, like ever. I think the main reason that I didn’t cry was because the intensity of the urge was so surprising I couldn’t focus on the work it would take. I got up and looked down at the little girl in the backseat. She was overwhelmed. She wouldn’t know how to say this but she had a conversation recently that made her therapist of seven years sit back in her chair speechless. Something like Ophelia cutting into her father like a knife and finding he doesn’t slice quite the way she expected. He’s calling her about the storm about to hit Scotland - he’s calling her just because, and she’s still terrified to pick up, she’s still crying silently on the line but this time for different reasons.
I’m worried this might have been the moment. I still don’t know how I feel about what I said. If it was too terrible, or not terrible enough. How many times have I been called across the room to hug you like a puppet with cut strings? How many times have I torn myself away from who I am to make you forgive me? How many times have I run to a cab, plane, bus, train, to get away from this feeling? I’ve been so sure what I was running from. I knew exactly who I was because I knew who you were and how you shaped me. Now we’re both blurry outliers, too far away to tell if your hand is holding mine.
If time is a circle there’s a nine-year-old somewhere riding her pink bike up the M1. She doesn’t have time to be scared, because if she thinks too hard about what she’s doing she’ll lose her nerve and fall off, or break too heavy and get hit. All she has to do is concentrate on not falling behind the bike in front of her. It’s just her and him on the motorway. The scene is playing somewhere in an alternate universe cinema, and critics are calling it a lazy Sisyphean metaphor. It used to be a nightmare I had, but I haven’t dreamt about anything but teeth since I left home two years ago and I’d kill to have it again. I wish my old helmet would fit me but my head has swelled to like three times the size since then.
I am actually pretty fine at the stone-setting. I’m very well-practised at Keeping It Together For The Sake Of The Family. I catch the eye of my older sister and we look at each other the way we’ve looked at each other since before we could speak. I know what she’s thinking because it’s exactly what I’m thinking. We’ll look at each other like this every time a little bit of our smaller selves is cut down. We’ll do this many more times throughout our lives as people who have loved us die. One day we’ll do this for our mother. One day I’ll look for her across the crowd and she won’t be there. Or maybe she’ll look for me. And one of us will be left alone with no one else on earth to understand what that look means, no one able to meet that gaze. I wish I could be noble but I know that I’m a coward and will ask her to let me die first. I crumple under the terrible weight of knowing this. My face scrunches in and I smash my face into her shoulder.
The first therapist I had properly had a mouldering green velvet basement office. It was dark and damp and emerald. If I’m ever kidnapped, I’ll probably be taken back to that room. I would go in before school, because I was only eleven or something, and she’d tell my parents I was behaving this way for attention. It made me angrier than I’d ever felt, because it wouldn’t matter how much I denied it, she was stoic in her diagnosis. It makes me even angrier now because so what if it was? If a child is acting that way for attention, then maybe, god forbid, you should just give it to them.
What if everything I’ve believed my whole life is wrong? said the girl in her 20s. Gasps of surprise from the audience living in her head. What if the swords that have stoppered my joints for all these years have kept me from standing properly? What if I’m not deserving of my pain and it really belongs to someone else? Good writing is supposed to be persuasive - you’re not supposed to use any surelys or question marks (or dashes) in your essays. What do you call a sentence that isn’t a question or an answer? Everything is grey but there is nothing concrete to stake my beliefs on. The rotting mast I have tied my principled grief to for years is sinking down into the sea. What do I look like if the words I write don’t come from hands that are bloody and bruised and nailed to the cross that I bear? Maybe all I have ever been is a Jew with delusions of grandeur. But then, if all I will ever amount to is Jew with delusions of grandeur, I think that would be quite funny, so I’m not necessarily opposed.
If there was an Olympic category for feeling sorry for yourself I would sweep the polls for the popular vote, but come second in the end so that I could feel even more sorry for myself.
It’s actually been a pretty good month overall. It’s Aquarius season, so I have three parties in a row this week for three friends I would kill for with little hesitation. That’s good. I get to write and sing and buy stupid little skirts and coffees. My new planner tells me when it’s the full moon, which I enjoy not for witchy purposes, but just because it’s nice to know what the moon is up to while I’m down here. I hope I will grow out of this belief that I’m much more interesting calculating all the ways my little tragedies might be imbuing my life with meaning.
I decided a while ago that life is really just about starting over again and again and again and again. It always hurts, but sometimes it hurts in a good way, like peeling the skin off your finger. My body knows what it’s going to go through for the next eleven weeks because my mind remembers. I have done it before. I will do it again. This time, I will do it with a hole in the middle of my chest. So be it. Raw January. There’s no way out but through.
What I really want to say is: leaving will always be the second-best thing you can do. The first is to kill me. You cannot take, sir, anything that I will more willingly part withal - except my life, except my life, except my life.
I don’t owe you the truth, I just owe you a good story.
I guess we will speak soon. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I love you. I always have, despite both of our best efforts. Take it with a pinch of salt and swallow it down like a bad joke.