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.