The wound is ripe, yet I am alive.
My memory is shot. A bullet to the back of the head, baby-angel - blood lovingly splayed against the yellow wallpaper, flesh all plump and buckled.
“I’m sorry, it’s not that I’m not listening to you, I just… can’t seem to remember anything lately,” I lament, frustrated. I hover in the hollow hovel of my bedroom, pyjamas stained and sweat-sodden, and stand outside of my body.
Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley in Alien (1979) dir. Ridley Scott.
I return to thee, mind fixated on a sight, a scent, a sound, thinking much about love and anger, about boundaries - what I will and won’t tolerate any longer, lover. I tread this precipice carefully, rugged rock tumbling beneath mine feet, scattering on the misted moors below.
When does the artistic become diaristic? When does a writing practice veer off into the irretrievable intimate?
As the moon doth wax and wane, reader, women I know, love and have never-once-met have come to me, tearfully, to express their shared experience. That deceptive progression, languorous and soul-sucking; ardent praise becoming venomous jealousy. Hours late, with not so much as a rose to show for it. I behold a boy in my arms, fingertips tracing his intestines, and wish to never hinder him with such pungent tragedy.
It’s the little things that are difficult, darling. The debilitating repercussions that worm their way through the woodwork of my mind - parasitic, poisoned. Stood staring at my wardrobe as a corpse from Dawn of the Dead, a moth-bitten mound of cloth weeps before me. Overcome by insecurity, I fear my sense of self is near-totally eroded, reader. I apologise for looking ugly.
“You’re not ugly,” he fusses.
I nod, a fine glimmer of a smile pinching at my lips, as I disallow those words to penetrate me.
Dawn of the Dead (1979) dir. George A. Romero.
“I’ve never had any complex about my physical appearance,” my voice inclines frenetically, fretfully - bitter ball forming at the back of my throat. Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976) observes, offering up to me that familiar look of knowing.
I find myself, angel, days and nights and five-months-later, in an immovable state of ‘freeze’. Surveying the room, tempering the mood, in preparation for a volatile eruption which, now, no longer comes. Awaiting a tensed jaw, a clenched fist, an inanimate object launched across the room, I’m baffled when the boy before me responds with reason.
When will that feeling dissipate?
I am falling in love. I wrap that babeling up in linen and hold him close to me. He is bright, untouched, warm, trusting, and above all, normal. A safe, patient kind of normal which keeps me at ease, reader. I tear through a paper heart, hair curled and coiffed to the gods. Gilded bow-and-arrow in hand, a blanket of pink petals settles beneath me, soft to the touch.
“Marriage!” I plead in abstract, heart bursting through my chest as a Merrie Melodies animation.
I’m thinking, too, of dolls. John Willie, Bild Lilli and Barbie by my side. The doll as a symbol of autonomy, descending from a shelf in the darkest of hours, or propped, posed and placed by the collector’s hand. Years ago, babe, I’d collected together a series of wigs which I wished to don in costume, emulating those girls of the Golden Age, now lost to time. Two blondes, two brunettes, two ravens, two redheads.
A Vegas showgirl, a Playboy bunny, a lounge singer laid bare. An escape from the petroleum skies, leather saddles and copper-scented palms of home.
My Father died, and my work turned to other matters.
Ellen Sandweiss in The Evil Dead (1981) dir. Sam Raimi.
It’s only now, in the lamp-lit dark of Friday night, that I sit and consider all the roles I’ve adopted in these here seven years, reader. Maid and Mother, assistant, fucker, lover, curator, invigilator. A dirt-smeared body, I hurdle through the pine and hazel in search of a true self.
I’ve received, it seems, a silver lining from God. I’d fretted back and forth on how to tell you, in fear of a fatal mistake - my application somehow slipping, in error, through a hairline crevice.
For many years, Emotional Outbursts has been a vehicle with which I share the development of my practice, research and lately, life, with you. With endless thank-yous to Arts Council England, I am finally in a position to re-enter the studio, on my own terms. It’s with disbelief I share with you that I have been awarded Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP). I’ll be using this funding to embolden my understanding, and experience, of self-publishing to develop Tentative Press, a small press I’d soft-launched early last year.
After all that’s happened, babe - the loss, the fog and mental illness - this is, in truth, everything to me. Time and space to think, to make, no longer with my back up against the wall. I look to painting, to gravestones, and how these strands of practice all interlink. I’m still unsure, babe, of what I’d like that final work to be. I recall Seed, an idea for a quarterly arts journal not too many moons ago.
I think about Outbursts. A monthly publication which has opened me up to endless possibility, opportunity, connection and kinship. I imagine honouring this body of work in physical form. A heart-shaped chocolate box filled to the brim with love letters. Velvet flock, hot foil, wax sealing.
I imagine, finally, a future unrestricted.
Brilliant words