synesthesia

I think I have an odd kind of synesthesia. I feel words. When I write it is like sculpting. It feels like motion. I feel like I am running my hands over a scultural form. I can tell when the piece is too flat. I can feel the rise and fall of it. I can feel it when I am reading too which is why I get so angry when the words I am reading clang flatly. It is a ride and if the ride is not fluid I am jerked out of the story.

I know this now because I went on anti-depressants last week. I took them for 5 days. They stopped me from sleeping. I broke out in pimples on my nose and forehead. I sweated terribly and smelled funny. But the worst of it was I wrote words without feeling them at all. They were all flat on the page. I had no way of telling if they were good words or bad words. I was removed from the dance of them. I couldn't feel them in three dimensions any more.

Last time I went on the drugs I didn't write for a year.  Now I think I know why. What is the point of writing flat words on a page. If the dance is gone or if you are removed from it, why bother to try to dance at all?

I have stopped taking the drugs. I know I have been close to the edge. I know I have been worrying my friends and bothering my acquaintances with my odd paranoia. I have been thinking about the long sure plummet of late and that is a concern. But what is the point of living if you are vaguely happy. What is the point of working if you cannot feel the words.

Maybe it is not synesthesia but if not it is something terribly similar. Whatever it is, it allows me to wrap my arms around the body of the work an bend it into the most pleasing shapes. It is like being with a responsive lover. It is like the best kind of kissing. I am not yet ready to abandon this for the safety of sanity. I have come off the drugs. Bear with me. We may be up for some hard times. yet.

flirt

You are playing with her. Playing as a child plays, full of joy and wonder. There is just the bubble of you and her, she giggles and moves her arm, you lean towards it, chasing. This is kiss chasey only on a micro scale, here in the bar surrounded by the rest of us. You are just flirting. Both of you partnered off to other people, but for this second there is only the pure childish joy of this moment.

You are fun to be around.

I hear you say it and it throws me. I am here with everyone else and I am alone. I do not flirt. I am not flirted with. I am not fun to be around at all. You lean in to chase her arm and I withdraw. I am close enough to touch and yet I am not touched. I could be chased but I remain heavy and static, a statue made of brass, untouchable.

Little stop

Little stop, my grandmother used to say. Now a little stop. I think of this when I place it on my tongue and swallow. I don't feel quite right, but then I wasn't quite right before. This unbalanced feeling is perhaps a leveling.

1.30am. A ridiculous time to be so awake, awake enough to work and yet with nothing to offer. The pounding in my skull is the sound of the world emptying out. My palms are sweaty. There is a faint odour.

I have been taking the drugs for three days. I can still see the slide of the knife into my eye. I can still imagine the cold O of the mouth of a gun. I can do myself harm, but what is the point when I have no passion for it. I no longer weep because I am all dried out and I am thirsty as a dog in summer.

I sit on the couch, sleepless, wide eyed. I sit and know the vast emptiness of eternity and my place within it. Only now eternity is shrinking, day by day, closing up on itself till, next week, or the one after, I will walk down a small street into a small city and it will feel like everything there is.

Genre Attack

It is strange when I suddenly realise that what I am writing fits within a genre I didn't expect. It happened with Steeplechase (Text Publishing due May 2013). I was writing this book and I thought it was just a straight literary fiction. It was only sometime in the second draft that I realised I was writing a ghost story of sorts, not actual ghosts but the ghosts of your past. I started to read gothic ghost stories and suddenly the whole book fell into place.

This next book, Abstinence had the same journey. I wrote the first draft referencing classic erotic texts and it was truly an erotic novel. That was it's genre. Facing the second draft I knew something was not quite right. It seems what I have written is a sexual superhero story. I blame my obsession with Wilhelm Reich, of course, but now that I come back to the book, the Orgone energy thread is the strongest trope in the book. My heroine is a sexual superhero. She is Barbarella, she is Batman with a cunt. I am learning to embrace this now. In my re-draft I am upping the superpowers. This is not a genre I am used to. The comics I enjoy are more Chris Ware than Marvel or DC. Perhaps I should introduce a costume for her at some point. Oh dear. What have I done?

Not the best

I hang on to the things that are worst. The criticisms, the negative comments the bad reviews. All the rest slides off me like water and only the gritty stuff is rescued like stones in a sieve. I delete the text, burn the letter, practice forgetting. Anything that will help me unwind this bitter ball of hate that I am gestating. Why is it that this self hate does not turn to cancer. It seems unfair that I go on when others fall. My grandmother who always told me that at second best I was not good enough, is still alive into her 90s. She is limping along on hate and anger I suspect. I lie in the bath and close my eyes and feel the same energetic throbbing behind my lids. I am held up by all the terrible things that have ever been aimed at me. I collect them like severed limbs kept in jars. I am nothing but a medical curiosity. Her words to me, his words to her, his words to me, my words to him, all of this niggling criticism fueling a life that has stomped off the rails and is rampaging out in a more self destructive direction.

remembering

I remember him eating pizza. The problem was the swallowing of it. By this time his muscles were not working in any kind of automatic way. He chewed, deliberately, but when it came to swallowing, the whole thing became a nightmare of muscles working against breath, breath working against saliva, Coordinating the march of food from lips to throat to stomach seemed to overwhelm him. He choked, coughed, the sound of vomiting but without vomit. Just chunks of pizza spilled in his lap and the look on his face, the shame, the sense of loss.

He apologised and I told him it was unnecessary. I looked at his lips all smeared with red sauce, those fat sensual lips that had been the first to touch my cunt. The twist of a tongue and what it felt to have that tongue inside me. He was the first and the last lover who actually enjoyed lapping at my clitoris. I wasn't to know this at the time. I thought that all men after him would go down joyfully without all the cajoling that one has to do. Now, here in the last years of his life, his chest heaves, his lips twitch.

'I am sorry' he says and he is almost crying. He is ashamed for me to see him because he still wants me to think of him there between my spread thighs. I am not embarrassed to see him like this because I have long since stopped thinking of him in this way. His eyes are welling with tears and for a moment I do remember. He was the first lover who liked giving head. I was not to know he would be the last.

Five years later he would be dead.

real things

that need to be dragged out from under the bed. Or from within it. Real things that frighten me. That won't be trapped on a page like the petals of a dead flower. That avoid words, hiding in dreams. All the play things on the page are too easy. Real things resist because I am frightened of them. But they are there. I hear them moving around down there like crabs. One day I will kneel down and lift the corner of the blanket.