Real love will last forever
Real love will last forever
I’ve lived a life, deep inside, of a certain kind of woman, babe. I dread to dredge the truth to you.
Margit Carstensen as Martha in Martha (1974) dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
January has been a month of near-incessant realisation, reader, stewed in curdled blood and guts. I’m trying to listen to it more, that gut of mine, in all its burgeoning churning, hollow pain and hunger pangs; intuition is a new feeling for me, for I now know I’ve spent seven years ignoring it entirely.
“It doesn’t matter, I take it back, forget I said anything,” she pleads, forefinger lingering by the door handle.
A hammer, a drill, a plant pot, a tripod, a mobile phone.
A hole in the wall, the windscreen, my heart.
I want a love to pour my all into, pure and white-hot-to-the-touch. I want to scold my skin on that acrid organ of his, and feel it pulsate in my palm. I want a Build-a-Bear in a big, ribboned box, plush and bulbous. I want heart-shaped chocolates to muddy my paws. I want a bed spread of red rose petals, with a wilting trail toward the door. Is that asking too much, do you think?
Häxan (1922) dir. Benjamin Christensen.
Coercion is complex, ugly, insidious. It rears its head ever-so-slowly over time, crawling forth from the brink, the bog, the fog, with a foul and feverish grin. It leaves you, brows-pinned-tight-together-in-anguish, unable to discern fiction from reality.
Am I lying? Did I just make that up?
This reality has hit-the-heart-hard, for I’ve had to make some drastic changes, babe. A different self, a different life. There is the girl before, and the girl after, and we are not the same. I feel a lot of fear and sorrow, wondering how I could have ever placed myself within that situation, how I could have ever allowed that to happen to me. I think of the women within my life whom I love and hold dear, and imagine them in my circumstances. Salted tears tap the keyboard.
Crumpled underwear, untouched foil.
Moving on is never easy, as I find myself faced, now, with the untimely task of overwhelming choice. Who to see, where to go, how to spend my time. A hard ball bearing forms once more against the back of my throat. It aches, throbs, swells.
Marisa Berenson as Lady Lyndon in Barry Lyndon (1975) dir. Stanley Kubrick.
“I just can’t believe that people actually want to spend time with me,” I lament, wide-eyed, staring out into the ocean.
With every conversation I’ve had, every hand I’ve held, all company I’ve kept within this past month, angel, I’ve been met with a look of horror, true and just, and wonder whether that lover feels sorry for me. I’m past the pity. “What you’ll find, Leah,” the beautiful woman tells me, “…is that you’ll soon approach a new emotion, disgust.” I struggle to digest her words.
I question the trajectory of my work now, no longer having a body to defer to for certainty. I think about those girl groups of the Sixties again, hair-piled-high: pencil-thin figures hidden behind black lashes, lamenting on men. I think of Amy in an interview, telling the lens: “I don’t care if you don’t love me, I will lie down in the road, pull my heart out and show it to you.”
I love love, and always have done, so much so that I’ve never been alone, babe.
I look, now, to the rows of velvet-flocked mannequin heads lining the shelving of my bedroom. Two blondes, two brunettes, two redheads, two ravens. I think about how I can finally make use of them, become that girl I’ve always wanted to be – for myself. A tarot deck, a tart card, a centrefold. Destiny, fate.
Real love will last forever
Real love will last forever