Kitabı oku: «Validate Me», sayfa 2

#candid

You only take photos when you think something might die

You only post photos hoping that it’ll survive.

#fitspo

Smelling of fags and biscuits

Embers the colour of the bits that I missed.

The Party

The door opens quickly just as my earring falls out and breaks. Steph catches it and puts it in her pocket, seamlessly, and stares confidently at the man leaning and swaying on the frame. ‘We’re here for the party. Right house?’ She says this with a vague tone of annoyance because it’s bastard-freezing outside. Neither of us have tights on and he’s just stood there gawping, assessing, working out if he’ll get off with one of us by the dregs of the evening. Music crawls in muted tendrils down the tall staircase behind him. No bass.

‘Well, hello girls. Who are you then?’ An over-exaggerated mockney accent dribbles down his polo; when had people started to think that being mindful of your privilege meant performing a class act?

‘This isn’t Mahiki, mate. Let us in, would you?’ It wasn’t, thank God. It was a flat in Denmark Hill, with a door off to the back of a newsagents. Our legs are bare, shaking, and my mind clamours for space as it beats itself into a pulp wondering how I could’ve crammed another cigarette in-between the Uber and this unnecessary faux formality. ‘Robbie invited us,’ I say, meek in Steph’s confidence, staring. I feel shiny. My face feels filled with obvious pores. I feel an intense fraudulence, which I’m sure is about to be exposed. I do not look like my photos. I am catfishing myself, at best. ‘’Course he did,’ he stares at my boobs and Steph’s legs. It feels almost like a compliment that neither of us would ever admit felt like one, we’ve spent enough time slagging off how Robbie always must be seen with the next hot girl and how he always has a line of them waiting, and how horribly disgusting and misogynistic that holds. But to be assumed to be one of them? An ego boost. ‘So can we come in or what? Bloody hell.’ This is boring.

‘Yeah. Yeah, come up.’ He steadies himself on the bannister and the noise of the party engulfs us as he swings open the kitchen door. Everyone stops for a moment.

‘LADS! FOUND THESE TWO LOOKING FOR ROBBIE ON THE DOORSTEP,’ he shouts with smackable smugness. Some roll their eyes whilst others cheer, others pay no attention at all and the girls move in closer to the men they’re sat in front of.

‘Drink?’ Steph glares.

‘Bathroom first. I’ll sort out my face. Pour us one in there. Then let’s give this a go.’

I hadn’t been to a house party in years, the coy butterfly-sizzle of excitement about the hours of pre-game are lost and forgotten. Nothing about being stood in somebody else’s bathroom with a cheap bottle of vodka between our legs felt naughty, it felt a bit grim and regressive. The fists banging on the door outside were not of rowdy teenagers who’d overdone it, not of new-found couples burrowing away for the night for a private snog, but of four thirty-year-olds after the cold, flat porcelain of the toilet to rack up lines of cocaine, which they’d later learn was actually ketamine. We let them bang.

‘Remind me why we’re here again?’ Steph screws back on the cap of the vodka, wrestling with the cheap teeth on the cap that won’t quite align. Impatient.

I ignore her, transfixed in my own reflection. I do not look like my photos and although I have spent countless lost, and wasted, hours studying the planes of my face to an almost scientific degree on my phone, it feels like the first time I’d really seen myself in months. Vulgar. Vile. I do not look like my photos. Of all the places to be incarcerated as a fraud, tonight’s setting couldn’t have been more perfect. As we’d walked flat-palmed, pushing doors in the dark to find the toilet, I had spotted five men I’d at some point matched with on Hinge or Bumble that had later gone on to ignore my witty, well-thought and, through a series of screenshots to friends, well-vetted opening lines. I had arrived at a place of uncloaking.

The banging becomes more incessant and grows to a kick that shoots the brass lock up and off its holder, the four men fall in crying with laughter, pulling each other down to pull themselves up in a twisted rugby scrum. I may not have looked like my pictures but they certainly didn’t look like men. Little boys, still.

In the kitchen, it is much of the same tired scene we had left in the past of our pre-youth, where we were too young to be doing any of this at all but still stabbing at the perceived rituals of fun that we’d learned from films. Scattered plastic shells of shots and stepped-on crisps nestle deeper into the thin cracks of the wooden floor. No one here was having fun. Everyone is desperately ferrying around in a painted distraction, feigning merriment, if only to not feel cheated of the future they thought they’d be living for an hour or so. Thinking they’d have kids by now. A house. A holiday or two a year. A career. But here we were, acting fifteen, feeling forty-five, grappling for an artsy shot by the plugged-in disco lamp, rehashing unread articles that made one of us sound cultured and the other aggressive.

Empty.

Your Boyfriend in LA Loves Me from Across the Ocean

When was ‘psycho’ so sexy

Yet still castigated?

Everyone here is married

But they’re all fucking, faking

When was dumbing it down

Cashing in as enough?

Who sold you the fear

That you need to be seen as in love?

They grin doe-eyed and warm

In every photo you post

Happy Valentine’s, Babe

I Love You The Most

It all screens so perfect

But I scream DENIAL

Am I bitter and twisted?

Just crave a number to dial?

Scroll

Where are you finding these partners?

Will you teach me your rules?

What do you serve them for starters?

Are you drugging these fools?

How are they harnessed

So tight to your hip?

Bzzzzzzzzzzzz

Oh

A DM!

‘I miss you gorgeous’

… sorry love, it’s him.

Mercury in Retrograde

We are ruled by

A fool’s literature

Our settled Sunday readings

Map out an astrology-pulled apology

For the curves and quirks in our hapless week’s psychology

Clutching a passionate grasp around instruction

That limits our habits to the moon’s and sun’s seduction

We are led by the hand, willing participants in our own abduction

Lured by the romance of another world’s aura – chunked construction

Running blind from our own control

Two thirsty dogs lapping from a cosmic bowl

Two sapient dogs lassoing a leash to their own soul

Dutifully bowing to boldly meditate

Around Leo’s planetary heavyweights

Obediently howling at a weekly Mailchimp email to celebrate

A half-hashed understanding of Mercury retrograde

Cocking a leg to salute a sold faith

Doesn’t the whole infinite eclectic point sort of dissipate

When we hand a stranger a title that lets them control our own fate?

‘I Know I Can’t Talk but …’

Darling

You and I are important

And what I thought to be suffering

Was an inkling and a drain

But what the world around you is doing

Is seldom progressive

Just shouting SAME

SHAME

SHAME

Never looking back at the woman

Who was privileged enough to realise

Those sentiments were a gain.

#whatafeministlookslike

Dyed of its natural conditions

Died of its misconvictions.

Aesthetic

The glamour is better

When you’re less put together

It’s real it is felt

It’s authentic

All that you are and all you exude

Weighs out its aesthetic.

Self Care

There is only a trace of anaesthetic

In the aesthetics

There is no truth, no freedom

No Holy Spirit’s leading

In the clang of rose-gold copper self care

There is only growth in muddled despair

There is help in the hurting

In the muddied soul searching

In pulling it all out of mind for your eyes to see

It’s mad – a cruel charade

For anyone to sell back your sanity

In bubble baths

Face masks

And breakfast in a bowl from Anthropologie.

The Walk-In Centre

Looking around, brush strokes of broad bored glances, everyone looks perfectly healthy. A little ruddy-cheeked from the December air and a faint suggestion of office-party regret, but no one looks like they are dying. Not that I know what the early stages of dying look like, but there is a disappointing lack of green gills, limbs hanging off, and intestines snaking the floor like stomped-on internal telephone wires. I suppose they think the same of me. Able-bodied, aggressively highlighted cheeks, bags of late Christmas shopping (the Urban Outfitters sale starts on the 20th so why bother buying all your crap prior?) and a fake limp so bad that I catch eyes with one man who gifts me a gentle ticklish cough, pulling it from his throat in solidarity, and we both do an awkward inward laugh. Ah, communion.

There is a lump on the back of my knee, which WebMD suggests is likely to be stage IV cancer or a golfing injury. I don’t play golf. I am clearly dying. I wonder if everyone else here has convinced themselves that they are dying too? WebMD has become a form of idle procrastination for me, sometimes even when I am perfectly fine I’ll click the parts of the digitised body and input symptoms just to see what they amount to. If they have any correlation. I am certain now that any time when I feel an organ fizz, I’ve got a spot on my right cheek or my ankles click, I can do some sort of WebMD-informed maths to convince myself I have a terminal illness. There is something about finding logical, even though it’s not, impermanence to life that soothes my anxiety. There is something about finding pattern and reasoning in my body’s shortcomings, and potential failings, that makes the notion of a suicidal thought seem quite quaint when I can convince myself my body is ready to give up before I give it permission to.

Not that long ago mental illness, albeit taboo and often dismissed even when as real and as profound as someone with suicidal ideation – there was a certain sympathetic coup for it. An arm rub. A waft of misunderstanding that means it is serious. Yes, it was saved for nutters and mad women, but it was also serious. There were institutes. Slurs. But now it just feels assumed. I don’t feel any new communion with the movement of celebrities ‘admitting’ their anxiety and depression, I feel annoyed. I feel ‘fuck’. There’s already next-to-no resource, what happens now more people use it? It also feels a bit self-aggrandising. This idea of admitting.

The hero worship that would come off the back of it. I hate it. In a world so saturated for content, this feels like the new obvious like-worthy filler. Draw it out on an Obama-style YES WE CAN poster and it could be 2008 again. My illness isn’t Kony. So fuck off. Depression and anxiety feels cancerous to me, but it no longer sounds like a killer. We’ve all got it. We’re all being sold it in a breath of good deed and a lack of education. In fact, it’s not different to how it once was. We still know nothing, the pharmaceutical companies are rubbing their hands, and we’re all still mad and not being taken seriously. Only now everyone’s being mis-sold their mental health, the thing we’ve all got and all must look after, as though it’s an illness. As though we’re all broken. As though any quirk or human emotion is a defect. So sometimes I like to convince myself there’s something more physical, more appalling sounding, more known, so I can get a week off. Or a life off. So I can explain my struggles to an apparently new woke world in a way that gets some proper sympathy instead of a #MeToo. It sounds awful I know, but sat in this surgery, staring down faces who also don’t look like death, I apply the 1-in-5 statistic and realise at least ten of us are here because of our brains. Ten. And I’m here saying it’s cancer because my real killer doesn’t feel real and I wonder who else is doing the same. I daren’t say it to anyone ever because I sound worse than a climate change denier. I sound ungrateful. But in a realm of fake news and sold thought, that feels about as radical and free as I can think. How sad.

I shuffle about once my name’s been called, ferrying heavy bags and a comedy limp to greet the doctor.

‘I know! I know! I’m coming in with a leg problem and here I am with all these heavy bags like I can handle it!’ I’m lying, apologetic, and unable to hear the echoing irony that will ring once she’s read my medical records and knows how to properly understand them, if she can.

‘Take a seat, love. I’ll ask you a few questions and then I’ll have a feel to see what’s the matter.’

A feel to see what’s the matter. Brilliant. Unzip me from the ears and watch like ticker tape as it falls, celebratory around my knee lump. Therein lies the problem!

She transforms from doctor to mouse, sheepishly suggesting that I have a womb.

‘I have to ask this to all females, sorry – is there any possibility of you being pregnant?’

I love that she must disclose this as a run-of-the-mill question, as though once a woman walked in and complained to someone that they thought she was an easy whore who had unprotected sex, and was deduced as such from sitting in front of her GP.

‘I bloody hope not.’