I know perfectly well I’m not where I should be / I’ve been very aware you’ve been patient with me.
Love has found me and I embrace it, angel. Ear-to-heart, I hear the depths of its swelling timbre. I’ve fallen hard and fast, dear reader, into the delicious pits of boy. Within that love - grubby, muddy, salty-sweet - I feel, for the very first time, supported. Heard, understood and, above all, loved.
Kathryn Grayson in Ziegfeld Follies (1945) dir. Vincente Minnelli.
I reflect on the love I thought I’d once held and now know fretfully, fatefully, that it never was. No true, be-all-end-all love - hand wrapped romantically around wet intestines, reeling me into that thunderous rapture - but an affected mirror, an imitation of a feeling which that figure cannot experience. As I weep into that skin of his - warm, pure and powder-soft - a well of heavy-wet-tears pools in the apex of his chest. I try my utmost not to dissociate.
“What you’re doing, Leah, is you’re taking back that power you’d lost…” Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976) calls out from the dark, satin-wrapped body dripping with pig’s blood. I look beyond her scorched, traumatised expression and allow my eyes to wander toward the open door. I watch the warm breeze of nite lap the long, dust-covered drapes concealing the window, and breathe.
Six months on from the severed limb - reddened skin still sore to touch - I have the time, space and freedom now to do exactly as I wish, reader. I’d never imagined it to be this debilitating. When your world is enmeshed with that of another, it’s difficult to truly know when it’s your life that you’re living; whether what you choose to pursue is really your choice. In the abyss, he tells me to jump. I grin as I do so - a disgusting puppy.
I reflect upon the rare instances in which I’ve stood firm, held my ground and been true-and-tall in my position, babe, no matter how seemingly frivolous that might be. I remember being met with venom, aggravation, and the very clear notion that “No” was never the right answer. I recall hysterical laughter, as though I was speaking a language not my own.
Sissy Spacek as Carrie in Carrie (1976) dir. Brian de Palma.
There is still so much sediment beneath, reader, hideous and bulging. Mud-covered, sweat-sodden and desperate, I wade through the bog with rage. Each day, now, as I awake I ask myself the same, singular question: “Are you okay?” I am yet to find the answer.
I cannot, in all my might, baby-angel, articulate the tremendous gravity of these experiences to you. Nor, really, should I. I wallow in the soft fog of nite, trying to determine what is and isn’t to be shared; The right way to move on, to be a ‘victim’ or non-victim, to be believed wholly and fully, without judgement or reservation. Is anger a healthy emotion? How do you express it?
The more often the reality of this past life reveals itself to me, reader - unravelling that knotted ball of string with lilac fingernails - I imagine that figure, match-in-hand, convincing me that my palms are empty. I look down, and the string disappears.
I long, truly, to look ahead. To experience life in all its richness with joy, eagerness and attention. As I plot my plans for Tentative Press and begin to pick apart all these avenues of research, reader - ink making, paper making, book making and binding - I cannot help but feel overwhelmed by the idea of doing this alone. I ask myself if I’m okay, and today I am. Within that, I know that this process of unlearning - “rewiring [my] nervous system”, as Brian de Palma describes - will not be achieved in a clear, linear incline, but simply through ‘good days’ and ‘bad days’.
A good day was spent, not too long ago, babe, within my new studio. A space to decorate, to call mine own, to think, to make and be. I feel great disbelief about these circumstances, and wonder when everything will fall apart - if and when that figure will walk through the doorway of my studio, my workplace, my home, to call me a liar.
Joan Fontaine in Rebecca (1940) dir. Alfred Hitchcock.
I think of all the work I long to make in the coming months - something to pour that energy into, babe, tart and hot and bright - and feel hopeful. I’ve been thinking deeply about painting again. Painting as a self-sustaining, regenerative practice. An object birthed from the Earth, which will inevitably return to it. Raw cotton, pure silk, organic pigments. A work which undergoes putrefaction, as David Lynch describes.
I think, too, of Valentines cards. Long lost lovers calling out into the dark, long dead. Lonely hearts’ columns and tart cards. Mass-manufactured but beautiful teddy bears won at the fun fair, “Love” machine-embroidered across the chest. Five-hundred flowers to love-bomb me with.
“Are you okay?”