Memory Exercise 12/04/2016 - Peace with my Past [Part 3 of 3]

It was a Tuesday. My mum’s fingernails were bitten right down, some were bleeding but she carried on biting. Occasionally she would make herself jump as she broke a new piece of skin and yet she continued, I don’t think she realised I was watching her.

“Katie Harper?”

I looked up to the smile of a fat, Irish doctor. Warm and happy, but I couldn’t bring myself to smile back. Why had she been so happy? She was fat and ugly, surely she didn’t have a partner, what made her so happy that she felt the need to smile at me, a stranger?

The interrogation began, I let mum do the talking. When she cried, the doctor gave her a tissue, but I couldn’t help but stare at her the same way I did when she was biting her fingernails. Why was she crying?

I can’t even remember what was said. I watched the seconds go by on the clock until I was given a prescription for some tablets with a name that I’m not even sure the doctor understood.

One in the morning and one at night. Repeat. Meet with doctor. Repeat. For how long? The rest of my life? I couldn’t feel this sick for the rest of my life. The tablets had some grim side effects, they made you sick and dizzy which didn’t help my already unwelcome mood.

I felt like a fucking nut job.

Mum always lingered, handing me my pills one by one, making sure I didn’t hide them under my tongue. She wouldn’t let me out the house without her, it was like being on day release. We’d walk round the shops arm in arm as she desperately tried to make conversation with me.

She’d point at disgusting, frilly dresses, “oh Katie that would look lovely on you.”

She’d approach old friends, “Katie, how are you? How is that nice lad you were with? What’s his name, Joe?”

She’d sigh as I picked at my cake in the café overlooking the Pump Gardens, “Katie, I wish you would eat something. You’re just skin and bones.”

That’s exactly how I‘d felt. Skin and bones. No interior. A waste. Nothing gave me happiness. Not even my mum, regardless of how hard she tried. The only thing that had given me the slightest feeling that I might be alive was the crystal, and being imprisoned in my own house, I couldn’t even have that relief.

I was dying.

Every single day that went past I died a little bit more.

I want to say it was a blur. Truthfully, the idea had been skipping around in my head for a very long time, coming in and out of view and at times, consuming me.

I bided my time, money was getting slim and it took almost a year, but mum eventually returned to work. She’d had tears in her eyes as she’d said goodbye, hugging me. I’d squeezed her back, taking a breath in and smelling the sweetness of her perfume. I came away slowly, looking at the wrinkles on her face, every scar with all their stories. I thought about everything she’d done for me all my life, how much of an amazing woman, and mother she was. Strong and caring, the type of mother I’d hoped maybe one day I could’ve been. When she left, I’d sat on the floor for what seemed like hours.

Under my bed I’d kept the note. I’d been writing it for a long time, although I had actually considered not leaving one. I didn’t want to be melodramatic or have people to feel sorry for me, but it turned out that this was the very reason I left one. I owed my mum an explanation, I’d wanted her to know that it was a decision I had to make myself, that it wasn’t her fault. I wrote about my poor baby, about how nightmares and reality began bleeding into one another. I wrote about how I’d failed my mum as her only child, how I’d never be able to take care of her, the way she did me. I wrote about Joe and how I felt that I was less of a person because of what he’d done to me. I wrote about my dad and how what he did kept me up at night and made me hate Joe before I ever really hated him. I wrote about when I was fourteen and she’d found out I’d been cutting my upper thigh. I wrote about my fear of never being happy again.

Mum had given her keys to our next door neighbour Mary, and had told her to check on me. A few minutes more and I would have died.

“You’re lucky to be alive, petal.” Said Mary. I didn’t feel it. I drifted in and out of consciousness, every time my vision focussed, I looked over to Mum. She was reading my note.

I told them that I didn’t want to be alive. I was angry at Mary for calling the fucking ambulance. Why didn’t she let me die? I didn’t do it for a fucking joke. I didn’t want to be alive.

“You old cow. You horrible bitch. Why didn’t you let me die?” I burst into floods of tears, I wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital for six days. On the last day I was given the truth.

I’ve been here for a while now, it’s getting better. My mum visits every other day, and I meet with Jenny three times a week. She likes the Libertines, and puts up her hair with chopsticks. At first I thought she was just a snotty doctor so I wouldn’t tell her anything, but she’s sort of like a friend. I haven’t had one of those in a while.

One day in the social space they were playing a comedy that I remembered going to the cinema with Joe to see, and for the first time in a long time I laughed, I really laughed.

Within these walls I have explored my lows, and reminded myself of my highs. It’s not going to be an easy ride; in the time I have been here, I have been back to that dark place, but fortunately it’s no longer my life.

This morning the cleaner swept around my feet as I stood leaning against the wall, scribbling in my notepad and barely noticing her. She made me jump as she asked me the question that no one has dared to in a while.

“Are you ok, my love?”

“No,” I said. I began to smile, “but I will be.”

Memory Exercise 12/04/2016 - Peace with my Past [Part 2 of 3]

The nightmares were the worst part. I dreamt that I’d climbed to the top of Guy’s Cliffe house. My mum and dad used to take me there as a child, telling me that I was a princess and that one day I’d live there. In my dream I look at my innocent baby with no emotion and I drop it into a sea of hands that were never to catch her. Angry women run to the top of the crumbling building and they spit at me, pull my hair out. They scream at me, call me a murderer. One of them is holding my dead baby in her hands. “Look at her. Look at what you’ve done you sick fucking disgrace!” I woke up panting, coated with sweat. What have I done?

Another dream was of me sitting on the sofa in a house I had never seen before, eating banana bread while watching cartoons. Then in would crawl a little girl no older than two.

“Mama!”

“Yes pretty girly, that’s your mama! Are we going to give mama a kiss?” Joe follows her into the room on his hands and knees, smiling at me the way he used to. She reaches out her chubby arms, drooling onto her t-shirt and I smile back as I’d give her a cuddle. In the dream, I love her. The Joe and Katie story, complete with our baby girl. A story from an alternate universe where I had done everything right, where Joe hadn’t left me and I‘d not killed my baby. I wished to stay there; the pain of waking up and remembering was far too much. They don’t bother me much anymore, the nightmares. As time passes they grow less frequent, one day maybe they’ll go away. It’s reality that becomes the difficult thing to endure.

At the time I was plagued with guilt. Every baby I saw left me disgusted at myself. I despised pregnant women, despised the fact that their babies were alive and I'd killed mine.

I’d needed to get out of the city fast. When it'd gotten too much to handle on my own I left. My mum was pleased to hear from me, it'd been a while since I'd last called.

“You’ve lost weight, Katie.” She pulled at the arm on my jumper which was now baggy. Shit. I had. “How’s Joe?” she asks.

“Fine,” Why am I lying to her? Because if I'd told her about him I was scared she'd have made me tell her about everything, and she will see me for what I am; an adult woman with no meaningful relationships and her grandchild's killer.

She's always been incredible though, my mum. You can tell her anything and she'll help no matter what. So I swallowed my fears and told her.

She sat and listened to me cry, my wounds open, the secret finally out. I told her about Joe, how I was confused at how easily I’d discarded my beliefs, my guilt about my abortion and the nightmares. She didn’t shout at me, just told me that she loved me and that I shouldn’t have kept it a secret.

“Katie, I love you so much. But right now, I want you to come and live at home. Not in the same house if you don’t want, but I want you to be close.” I stayed that night, couldn’t bear to be alone any longer.

So I moved back home, but my mind was somewhere else. My mum wasn’t angry at me, but I didn’t feel any better.

I still remember my first time with the crystal. Remember the way my pupils dilated, everything I saw intensified. The trees danced and the sky and the land became one as the horizon disappeared. 

Cars zoomed past as a flash of colour. The world had appeared crystal clear. The crystals themselves flowed through my veins and in that moment I noticed how important my blood was, how I was entirely impotent, that my existence depended on it and how it felt like liquid gold as I’d came up. Every breath had felt heavy. In that moment, I hadn’t just been living, I’d been alive.

In the years since this, the crystals continued to make me feel that way, enlightening and disillusioning me. When I was in oblivion, and my body was numb, my mind was filled with music, neon colours and paradise.

It’s never stopped the nightmares though.

It’d felt as though I couldn’t sleep - but being awake was even more difficult. The days and nights blurred into one another. With no job and no real friends, there’d been no purpose being here.

Memory Exercise 12/04/2016 - Peace with my Past [Part 1 of 3]

In some Indian cultures, the feeling of a sinking heart is a recognised illness. It’s that feeling where you’re walking upstairs in the dark and you think that there is one more step than there is and so you fall into the black obscurity, your hair standing on end and your heart racing. It’s the feeling where the person who you changed yourself for tells you that the exterior you crafted is not enough to cling onto their love, no matter how much you plead.

I still remember the first time. A pain I‘d never felt before, first physical, then emotional. Then, at back of my mind, a question - is this really what it means to be a woman? Because I was terrifyingly happy. I felt the butterflies pirouette in my stomach as I realised that I was no longer my own, knowing that the crimson stains on my bedsheet were a weakening of not only my body, but all my beliefs. The beliefs became white noise, and words from the literature, squiggles that were to be lost alongside the person who I used to call myself. For this I hated him. He tore away what fundamentally made me, me.

No matter how happy my hormones had told me I felt, I hadn't been sure if I could really have loved him, been committed to him, a cannibal of the soul, someone I knew could kill me one day if he woke up and saw fit. I'd always known this, deep down where I kept my doubts, yet the day he woke up and did so, I'd been no more prepared for it. I changed into a person I never thought I’d become, someone incapable of making their own decisions, someone who had no respect for them self, someone who allowed the illusion of love to consume them, and bind themselves to the harbinger of their torment. 

We all question what love is. Regardless of how educated we believe we are, no one ever truly knows the answer to a query so subjective. Some say that love makes them weak at the knees. Well, love weakened me in every way a person can be weakened – if this is true for love then obviously, I’ve been in drowned in it. Kicking and unable to breathe, this suffocating feeling is colossal compared to a physical pain, although I can still remember the pain she felt when he broke her nose and cracked her ribs. This dominance I once thought I could’ve fought, can in fact drown me.

I clenched my teeth as I walked past the leering builders.

“Alright love, where’re you off to, a modelling shoot?” Being 5ft 4”, and a size 12 on a good day – I was clearly not on my way to a modelling shoot.

I held my tongue, I couldn’t be arsed with the confrontation, not on a day where I was running late for work.

“Get that face off o’yer!” And with this remark he slapped me on the backside. I jumped and without even thinking I returned the slap, right across his face.

“Fucking hell lads! The fat ones are always feisty aren’t they?” scoffed the slapped builder. The ‘lads’ descended into fits of laughter as if what the tosser said was remotely funny. They continued to discuss how ‘feisty’ I would be in the bedroom. I walked away wishing I’d hit the bastard harder.

I once was confident in my beliefs that women should not be subordinate to men and shouldn’t live to please them. Yet despite this, when he leaves the room and there’s a sharp sting between my legs, I smile, knowing that I have done everything I needed to, to please a man. There’s no denying that I loved the feeling of being useful to him.

Jump to my twentieth birthday. Two blue lines on the stick before me blurred as I looked up to the mirror. I examined the mousey brown roots in my bleached blonde hair, my fat spilling out of the top of my jeans, my mouth and its opinions silent for once. There was a baby inside of me.

Are women put on this Earth to birth children? Whether you’re religious or scientific – that is what people are made to believe. As a woman, I was going to fulfil my ‘purpose’.

Those two blue lines disgusted me. Have I not gone through enough?

“I’m pregnant.” Silence.

“What you going to do with it?”

I paused. This isn’t what I’d expected, though what was I expecting? Anger? Love? “I can’t… I can’t have the baby. I’m not ready.”

“Well what the fuck do you want me to do here, Katie? We’re not together anymore. Your body isn’t any concern of mine.”

“But Joe – I didn’t make this baby alone. We’re in this together.”

“No. We’re not anymore.”

I fought back tears as I asked the question. “What do I do?”

“It’s not my problem Katie.”

He’d reduced our baby to an inconvenient ‘problem’. A problem so immediate and complex that I couldn’t put it to one side, to resume it when my mind was in the right state. It was one that I needed to solve now. But he didn’t help. I remained silent and the result was evident. That I was on my own.

I didn’t know what I wanted. For someone who in the past had felt so empowered when alone, I had never felt so powerless. I hadn’t the courage to make my own decision. I just wanted him to tell me exactly what he thought, then, when the decision was made, I would know that the fault didn’t lie in my hands.

I'd pictured him letting me fall into his arms, then kissing my sore eyes. I wished that he’d cried tears of joy, told me that he wanted our baby more than anything in the world. I would want it too and wouldn’t feel the need to end my pregnancy. With his divine consent, I would be happy. My stability rested entirely on his permission, a cage I promised myself I’d never be trapped in.

I was willing to take his share of the ‘problem,’ his exact half of the baby, a whole life, into my own hands, but I was too young to have a baby, too unstable. The maternal instinct that seemingly comes as part of the package of being a woman had never arrived for me. Almost everything in me was telling me to make the appointment, and yet somewhere inside, a small part was drowning out the rest, branding me a killer and haunting me.

No, it’s not fair, but how can we blame individuals? When Mr. Punch kills Judy and her baby, the children laugh. The puppeteer laughs too, an innocent, stifled giggle as he presents the show to us children, and we’re taught that the death of this lady and her baby is ok at the will of Mr. Punch. Not only ok, but comical. So later in life when a man kills a woman in whichever way he chooses, the spectators smile and the woman remains silent. Which is exactly what I did.

The words continued to pierce through every fibre in my body, resonating to a terrifyingly familiar level of sadness, piercing deeper each time they repeated in my head.

“It’s not my problem, Katie.” It wasn’t his problem of course, not if he didn’t want it. And so, at my own will, I made the agonising decision to terminate my pregnancy.

Elizabeth

Source: http://brianabbott.net/photos/2012/11/11/macro-weekend

Not even the sun assists the sunflower when she seeks sanctuary in a world that will only continue to fail her. Innocence shines out of her smile – unsuitable positivity for a person whose life is far from perfect. And behind the smile? I didn’t concern myself with the answer to this question for she was below my eye line, or so I thought.

Where is she now? I don’t know. I didn’t care until I was reminded of her existence, eight years after forgetting. Looking back, reminiscent of the journey from which I came, I remember her. Few people do until they delve deep into the ignorance of their self-absorbed minds and when they do find her, they find her sitting in a dark corner wrapped in cobwebs, behind uneasy experiences and rainy afternoons, behind memories you have to remind yourself to forget and behind ones that you don’t.

And when you finally displace everything in the way so that you get a glimpse of her you are filled with guilt and worry, because who knows what happened to her while you were gone? I should have been there, I should have protected her. If there was a demise at all, I contributed to it. Anxiety closes in, my head filled with questions that I can’t ask and so will never be answered. It’s terrifying how my complete ignorance has been so indefinitely invaded by all-pervading feelings of guilt, consuming and ruining what I now see was an oblivious paradise. The guilt I feel because I laughed at the sunflower’s unkempt hair, I laughed at her dishevelled clothes and I laughed when they called her names and plucked off her petals and it was ok because she laughed too.

She laughed so it’s ok. Repeat. Repeat. But I can’t repeat for much longer as with each child that plucks a delicate petal from her sore head, I envisage her suffering until there are no petals left and when they are gone, what happens then? Perhaps she wilts and dies, she rots away being eaten by mice and birds until there is nothing left. No sunflower, no memory, no pain. No one cares that this sunflower died, no one ever has, worst of all the sun.

But the way in which I contributed was not direct. I did not pick her petals off of her, I did not stamp on her in my Mary Janes in an act of malevolence, and I did not ridicule her for not being like the others. I painted a picture and she wasn’t in it. I painted the grass and the sun, I painted the children sat around her and yet I did not paint her despite the fact that I knew she was there.

She was an unusual flower, dirty with black stains and when I approached her to introduce her to my other senses, I held my breath to stop the unfamiliar stench of cigarettes from filling my lungs. Not only was she an ugly, unloved flower, her sweet smell had gone – I didn’t want to look after her or restore her back to full health, it was best to ignore her.

My questions could start here. Did the gardener who planted her ever come back to see if she was well? Did the children pluck off her petals until there were none left? Did they choose to leave her to decease and decay? Is she still alive – ugly with a foul smell? Or perhaps she bloomed, the sun shining on her to restore her petals, a kind hand watering her to relieve her from the agonising heat she had grown to uneasily tolerate.

Because while the oxygen in my lungs has never failed and with an undeniable flame in my heart, I have prospered from the goodness of the earth and the kindness of the water fed to me since birth. I am not lucky, this is merely what I need to live. Those four same friends who should also have been hers excluded and damaged her, leaving her without the essential elements she needed to survive.

Unlike me, they laughed when they knew her laugh was false. They purposefully spat on her and crushed her under their feet when they should have been fundamental to protect her. The Earth and the people on it refused to take care of her as soon as her seed was planted and I don’t know if anyone ever did. For the years that I knew her, all I have is her first name, the realisation that she was neglected and I did nothing to relieve her. 

An Ode to Jessica Clayton

For a few years now I've wanted to venture to Eastern Europe and this year I was going to do it, regardless of what happened. It got to the point where I was so determined to go that I was going to go alone, something I was originally completely opposed to. Then came the legend that is J Clay.

Cliche, but when you leave school, you really do realise who your real friends are; you no longer are forced to spend 6 hours a day with people. Regardless of how hard you try not to, you inevitably part ways when you go to university or take jobs that make you old and boring and stop you being able to spend time with your friends. On paper, myself and Jess probably shouldn't still be friends; her job requires her to travel away to events and uni for me means that I'm constantly drunk, so I break my phone a lot and therefore have no point of contact.

We also have other friends that are undoubtedly our bests that we throw into the mix, some common and some not. Megham Clements, the beautiful giraffe-like creature who we love dearly, Curly and Tammy and of course the rest of my LUWRU girls. But we know that our friends that we don't have in common would love each other and we're happy to introduce them as and when and we know they'll all get on - this is when you know that the people who you surround yourselves with are awesome.

But yes, Clay and I are best friends. We go through periods of talking everyday which is wondrous, but sometimes life gets in the way and we will only manage to speak properly once a month if we can. The incredible thing about this is that despite how much time we've had away from each other, each time we talk, it's as if we'd never left each other and this was proven by spending twenty days away together this summer. Spending twenty days with only one person is pretty intense, you'll be exposed to the person's strengths, their weaknesses and most importantly of all - how much of a nutter they are.

Jess and I discovered on this trip that we balance each other out VERY very well. There were times on the holiday where one of us (usually me) messed up and the other was there to provide solitude. E.g. When my bag got "robbed" and therefore the bank of Jess was there to help me out for the remainder of the trip when I had to cancel my card (my bag definitely did not turn up somewhere that I might have put it when I was drunk). And at times when Jess was being over-pragmatic and stressing that we wouldn't get things done in time or that things "weren't going to be ok," I was there to provide the hippie, (apparently radical) left wing, chill out vibes.

Some memories will live with me for a very long time, despite being drunk for the duration of the trip. The Drunken Monkey bar crawl in Prague where we first had a true taste of each others' limits, the Sparty in Budapest, lovingly referred to by Jess' soulmate Larry as the "Reservoir of Sin" and Benicassim festival which was honestly the best time of my life.

We met some interesting people from all over the world throughout our trip and were reconciled with our lovely friends Megan and Georgie in Spain for the festival. A festival which by the way, I cannot recommend highly enough. From the guaranteed weather to the brilliant acts the festival was always going to be insane, it was only the company that could have made it any better, which of course it did by miles.

We had some funny times, some scary times (Munich) and some crazy times and I wouldn't change a single part of it.

We absolutely had the trip of a lifetime and I can safely say that along the way, we've made friends for life. The important thing to remember is that your friends are important, you need to make time for them, you sometimes need to spend a shit tonne of money to go on holiday with them when you're close to not being able to afford it. This holiday (if you can even call it that) was phenomenal and despite ruining my body in every way it could be ruined, it has consolidated and reminded me why this utter knob head/absolute legend is my best friend and I love her.

This blog post however, does not weaken me. I still don't have feelings, this wasn't me, it was Bev.
CYA.