Writing Game 3
Wired
I feel you in my veins in a bloody droplet of blood, all full of memories of the first baby scream after our wired connection. The eternal link - which I feel more than you right now. There’s no denying! I know, and it’s okay. It’s how it is; how it should be. But the claustrophobia of your foetal encasement followed us year for year and never slipped away. Even during those nights when you screamed out in terror as nightmares tore into your core and forced your heart into a frenzied gallop across muddy fields and into endless tunnels and you needed me and my bloodied function for protection. No, it never left us, and was bound up in the knowledge of your leaving. And here we are again, in another bloody battle we potentially could lose (I have no illusions, have always been the pragmatic), but we just can’t !
Decrypting everything is simply not possible, there is no reason, I try to explain in frantic simple terms, but you keep trying so damn hard. That is what really gets me; you try so damn hard to understand, to know, to tick all the right boxes, to be a good patient, to be a patient patient, to be a listening patient, to be an involved patient, to be a better patient…. to be better. “Describe it to me,” you say, “describe it!” “Is it my twin, my second wind, my illiterate self, or illegitimate child? Or, is it just the epidermis and its squamos cells on a joy ride punishing the weather, the wind and especially the sun that touched my skin?” You ask me, “What is it? Am I it? And why? Why? Why?” It didn’t help that the surgeon in his ‘sensitive’ surgical language – who the hell teaches these people to communicate? - told you just before you went under that they would take a “good chunk” away – just to be safe, leaving you to speculate on the leftovers, the dogs, the wolves and the tunnels and the mud. So he drew on your mother-of-pearl skin with a blue trespassing pen – a trace for the bloody scalpel. And then you went – and it all began again– those bloody veins pulsing the same blue traces as that pen. I’m here again! Observing from within; the vivid droplet of blood, that bloody droplet of blood falling from your skin, as they erase you with a syringe -incarcerating you back to nothing.
Deep, and emotional. I love the rhythmic repetition 'a good patient etc...' but I am not sure that I understood it: 'and then you went... I'm here again!' Demands a second reading.
ReplyDeleteThis is so beautiful in so many different ways. I like it very much. Thanks for a pleasant read :)
ReplyDeleteSo your phrase read forwards, as you wrote it in your word hoard, was: "blood of droplet bloody a in veins my in you"? Not really likely, is it..?
ReplyDeleteApart from that little quibble, I'd say that this curdles the blood quite satisfactorily, as I imagine it was meant to do...
You are right Ben, I misunderstood, thought we were just meant to read it backwards and from there pick a phrase.
ReplyDeleteNo worries - but the idea was to give you an interesting but awkward backwards phrase that required creative work to naturalize and integrate...
ReplyDelete"Curdling the blood as it was meant to..." Sounds like I didn't quite get the story across. The background story: A mother sitting with her adult daughter, who is just about to go under the knife in an attempt to cut out her squamos cell carcinoma... The mum is contemplating child labour, parenthood and the connectivity it brings to another human and how our children are always on their way away. She stays with her daughter until they sedate her ("erase"). Having sat once with my child - it truly feels like they snuff your kid out for good with that syringe. The daughter's question about the cancer, what it actually means, relates to that people often rethink their lives when a big event takes place ("second wind"), but also that a beneign form of cancer (teratoma) is your undeveloped unborn twin embedded in you ("my twin")(now that's scary!). Looking at it now, I probably stuffed too many ideas into this bit of writing.
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