There is no way to know how long I have been lying, here, minutes, maybe hours. I wake to the sound of cars, less of them now, the rush hour long gone. How long? There is pain. It is the kind of pain that is a physical shearing away of my skin. I feel it in my scalp, waves of it, washing over me. I am in an ocean of the stuff and it is difficult to breath but I do, small shuddering breaths. So, I have fallen. I may have broken something, my foot, or my leg or my back. There is the possibility that I have snapped my spine. I certainly feel as if it will be impossible to move. With difficulty I reach down towards my body. I am in my pyjamas and it feels as if I have wet myself. I touch the damp fabric and the pain is something new and all consuming. My hand is wet but not with urine. There is blood, so much of it. I peel down my pyjama pants and there is blood on my thighs. My first thought is of sex. I have destroyed the possibility of pleasure. Somehow I had slipped and caught the edge of the speaker box in my crotch and now there will be no orgasms. Even now, in the pain, I think about life without the relief of an orgasm. If this is the case then I would rather be dead. I wonder if I could somehow develop the ability to have non-clitoral orgasms, the fabled vaginal ones that I have read about. I wonder about reconstructions, plastic surgery, a stitching up of ruined flesh and the softer skin taken from the back of my neck or my elbow. I lie awake in the pain for what seems like a mess of days. Somehow, eventually I will have to move. My elbows act like knees. I drag myself along the ground like someone participating in army manoeuvres. I kamakaze crawl. I but up against the door and here it is like a mountain, something to be conquered. Somehow I manage to drag myself to my knees without fainting. I stretch for the door handle and somehow, miraculously, it is in my hand. The door is open. I am sprawled in the corridor and there is no one about and there is the lift at the other end and I must crawl to it. I think of ants dragging twigs that are hundreds of times larger than themselves. I think of maggots, hatched and wriggling, seemingly on the spot, babies burning their skin on carpet, grunting their frustration, edging towards tears.
She screams when she sees me. The lift doors open and she screams. It must seem that I have been attacked, stabbed. She sees the blood and she shrieks. I relax into her panicked care. She pulls me into the lift and we are somehow in the lobby. I am kneeled beside, I am tended to. I sink into the hurt and the embarrassment of it all. They ask me what happened and I am not sure how to say that I was sleeping in the top of a cupboard without sounding like a freak. I am a freak. The ambulence drivers glance at each other and I know that it must be bad. I am thinking – I will never have sex ever again. I will never have an orgasm. I will die now. Must die. They give me pain killers and I become drowsy and it still hurts, but I am distanced from it.
In the hospital the doctors come in packs, a (collective noun) of doctors who look but don’t touch. There is a swelling that has grown to the size of a cricket ball and it is a purple black canker.
The same question. “How did this happen?”
I invent a complex story about spring cleaning, the same fall described in detail but with a different prologue. I know that they can feel the lie. I do not lie. This is a new thing for me, this invention, this half truth. They know that there is something amiss and so they hold me, feeding me pain killers, trooping through the ward and lifting the pristine pastel blue of the hospital dress, telling me to spread my legs as if I could have clamped them together in my present state. It occurs to me that they imagine I have been abused. One nurse asks me about my living situation, my boyfriend.
“I fell out of a cupboard” I tell them again and again and it must sound like ‘I ran into the door’ or ‘I slipped down the stairs’. It is a lie in it’s unlikeliness.
I ask them if I can leave. It has been three days and I am missing university. They keep me under observation but they do very little. When a week is up the release me into the world. I have enough money for a cab fare but I will have no money for phone calls home or bus fares or food when I am there.
I hobble to university on crutches. I sleep in the bottom of the cupboard with the speaker box murmuring a classical lullaby. Bach. I have a sudden longing for my grandfather and his piano and I take the tape out of the machine and replace it with a mix tape of songs of sadness and longing. Love is A Stranger of A Different Kind, Ground Control To Major Tom. It calms me to know that I am not alone in my disconnectedness.
Time passes. The bruising fades, the swelling eases back to a kind of normalcy. I masturbate carefully in my cupboard nest. No response at first, but slowly my body responds to my touch. A gentle orgasm. A slow return to form. The orgasms ease the loneliness a little. I abandon the crutches. I find myself restless in the evenings and I leave the confines of my student prison and wander the streets of Spring Hill. The houses are beautiful. The beautiful people in them have city lives full of excitement and families and friends. Everyone is busy doing something of importance it seems. I glimpse them through half drawn curtains. I pass them spilling out from the doorways of pubs. I get to know the street walkers by sight. I venture to the edges of parks. I stand under the glow of street lights and am bathed in otherworldiness. There are mad people pacing and talking to themselves and wandering in endless circles down streets, up streets, around streets. I pass the same man several times and suddenly realise that from his perspective it may be me who is mad and aimless. I sit in my lonely grey room with the flowers sagging under the weight of days, petals dropping in time to the rythmless strains of early Pink Floyd. I become restless too quickly and I am back to walking. Time passes and passes and passes some more.
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