Message from Kate

just read your last two blogs. i dont know if its cause i know you, i dont know if im making connections in my mind that arnt there... i read them and they felt so intimate, kinda like i shouldnt be reading them and i wondered how you showed yourself like that, is it real.. or is it fiction? but i know its not fiction, but, but, perhaps its an incredible compliment to your writing, it just felt very raw and i reacted to it - and is there a line you draw somewhere between you and blogger you? its none of my business and im really asking for myself and my own desire/fear of exposing myself (probably what i need to do most), and now that i think about it - christ, youve got a whole book coming out about you!! - Kate Lee

So we make choices. Some people chose to hide behind privacy. I hide out in the open. Honesty becomes my smoke screen. Here I am, naked I become invisible. You see me and you take the things that resonate with your life and I become you. I am you. I am your insecurities and your joys and your passion. I am the secret of your lovemaking. I am your furtive masturbation. I am the moments when you fall publicly and must pick yourself up and dust yourself off and you walk away with your pride hurt but it is my fall, my pride, and so you remain safe behind the public striptease that I am performing day after day.

Some times I become tired.

Some times I am dry and slow to orgasm. Some days I cannot hold the mirror up to myself. Today is a hard day. Today I do not impress myself. Today I would shake my head and drop my props and sit down on the stage exhausted. Today I would walk away from my life if I were able. Yes Kate. I am honest and it is horribly revealing and some people look away, and some keep staring as if my life were a traffic accident in slow motion. But if you asked me to find myself in 380 days of blogging, I might glean a moment or two. There, I might say, there I am as I catch a glimpse of that person who shrugs back at me in the mirror. The rest of it is all about you. I am you. There is nothing of me left to see at all.

Laura

I had the opportunity to write something sensual about her. It was a time when I was tired, fed up, wrung out till there was no moisture in me. Sometimes now I touch myself and I am slippery wet. So odd to feel this after years without. It has something to do with new beginnings I suppose, an odd kind of excitement, the potential for joy. She kisses me on the cheek and it is caring, care-full. It is a show of affection and I could feel myself slip down beside her. Slippery girls the two of us both.

We would have fun, we two. We would enjoy the play. We would do voices and throw our clothes around the room and laugh. I would lie and watch her, endlessly fascinated, I would hold her and listen. All this in another life, another time. These lives I long for when my own feels arthritic, paining me at the joints. I think of Laura because it would be easy, joyous, lovely. Lovely. She is lovely. Tomorrow, as always, she will kiss me and I will smile and there will be a small moist place in me perfect for growing the kernel of our affection.

fiction

In fiction I can reveal myself. I long for the freedom that lying offers. The place to take risks, to open myself and stand naked in public hidden behind the conceit of make believe. The raw truths glittering like the flash of sunlight caught in a rock.

I write my fiction for a collector just as Anais Nin once did. The truths I scatter out in the sunlight to turn leathery. The fiction is posted and hidden away and will be unearthed one day and gathered and even though it is fiction, it will seem more real than the shiny veneer of real life.

Voice in my head

I am not embarrassed for people to know about the illness. I have bi-polar. It is often far from pretty. It is a difficult thing for me to live with at times. At other times it is nothing, just the background noise of daily life. We all have our problems. Mine could be treatable. These are choices to make.

So I begin to emerge, tentatively. I do not want false hope. I distrust the idea of a dawn, free of nightmare. But here I am and I look back over the apocalyptic landscape of the last few days and I look for wounded. There is an odd silence in the aftermath. It is the voice in my head turned down, not completely silenced, but reduced to a vague crackle like a radio playing in another room. The soft toxic dust is settling and I wonder about your lungs, you who have stood too close and breathed my poison. I think about metastasis and long term damage. I remember that story by Tove Jansson. Moominland. The Groke, exiled to the ice. Everything he touched froze solid. And it comes back to me, this figure that most closely resembles myself.

I am not so brave. The lonely Groke wanders in self-imposed exile. I hold onto you like a buoy and if I drown there is a risk that you might come with me. It is unfair. It is selfish of me.

Still the clamour of voices raise themselves to an ugly shriek. They misinterpret the world and I am confused by the ferocity of lies. I listen and the world becomes an unrecognisable confusion of self-doubt. I reach for a hand and I cling to it. There is a desperation to the gesture. I am aware of it and this awareness joins in with the cacophony.

This sudden silence. A world returned to it's waking and sleeping. I stand in it and survey the damage. There will be damage. I am incendiary.

Then your voice. The voice in my head. My imaginary friend. Who has not been imaginary for quite a while now. And you say 'Hi'.

This blog post is not about sex.

This blog post is about love.

You say 'hi' and it is like a wound beginning to scab over. It is like a fur of grass growing in a dug out vacant lot. It is the 'post' to the word 'apocalypse'. One word, a voice in my head but a good one. A solid one. I turn the radio of self-doubt down to a mere whimper. There is another voice here. Yours. A good person, my poor shell-shocked friend. I am glad of you, and I am sorry for the damage.

past stories

Past stories can't hurt you. Stories set in the here and now are more problematic. I cruise through the I did this and I did that with a passing glance. Plenty of space between me and that. No bumping up against, or maybe once but I bumped and pushed away and righted myself.

Now we are here.

I kid myself into thinking that if I punch through the veneer then I will be down to the same stuff that everyone can relate to, all the messy guts of life, foul smelling, rank. My thesis is that I will bring you with me, because surely it is the same for all, this aching mix of fear and anger, this pit of emotional turmoil. Cess pit.

But the difference between us is that I am all demons. No angels. The shame of it. I imagine we are similar, but we are not. There is something amis with me. I am the spiked coil of armour that I have inherited. It is genetic, some tragedy of biology which quarantines me. Which is fair. I know it. I may be mad but I am not yet delusional.

being beautiful

On the Weightwatches website there are before and after photographs. Slimmer of the year. We look at the after shot and we see women who are beautiful. We view 'before' and we are meant to recoil. I find myself teary. This beautiful woman who would have been overlooked in a crowded room. This woman who now, after dieting will be glanced at and longed for and desired.

I wanted to be desired. A touch without the benefit of desire saddened me.

I also wanted to be published.

But ultimately, really at the end of it all the real point of it is the writing and the real point of my body is that it gives me pleasure. I have neglected myself of late. I have not touched myself or desired myself for a week and my body has begun to shed it's unsightly kilos in this mourning period. I will be desired, eventually at the end of it all, and then, as with the publication I will finally realise that this is not the point at all. My body should be like the writing, something done in private, something tended to in the dark with my little desk lamp. Something that comes from me and that is for me. Your critique is unwanted and unnecessary. One day when I am desired I will probably not value your review anyway.

crimes of passion

I think about passion and I think about anger, hate, the tearing of flesh. Romeo and Juliet, a slap in the face elegantly subtitled but so eloquent in the original French. I think, in exactly which of the seven stages of grieving do you pick up a semi-automatic weapon and shoot all the people in Garden City.

Christopher tells me that isn't in the seven stages at all, you have to endure all seven and then some. He tells me that is in the 20th stage. The French filmic slap is still coy enough to be textbook grief. Romeo was perhaps somewhere off the scale.

Christopher is the voice of reason. I squint towards him at the bar and try to imagine him trudging past the first stage of grief but can't. Just enough passion to get some traction on the new book but little more. He brings me a vodka and soda and I want to become him. I want to trudge casually past my erratic behaviour. I want to anchor myself somewhere in Mckissocks polite little stages. Somewhere within the realms of sanity. But perhaps I will just go on the meds again instead.