I gently pluck the xerophytes out of my hair. I think I am ready to write, ready to grieve what is not mine. Ready to scrape the edges of my tongue and regurgitate words someone finds worth remembering. But my teeth won't comply. They are retreating into my gums, refusing to vacate my partially fermented solace. I look out of my window, onto the seductive green of the sea, and I wonder how long. How long will these waves bow and quiver before devouring us all.
I have read enough poetry about marmoris (latin: marble-like rippling surface of the sea) to be able to visualize staircases to the other world when I see it. Visualize gossamer maps of sea kingdoms, phantasms of liquid, faeries reveling on the surface when the light gently nips the ocean’s lips and draws blood. I try to flesh out some words of my own to describe its beauty; but all that my mind conjures belongs to the darkness within.
I have words careening out of me. They braid around my ribs and placate the hollow of my chest. I have always thought of stories as a form of escapism. Escaping into the fuchsia-hued mythologies, fading into the haze of a well-spun romance, words that seep into our sinew, that breed on osteocytes, ritualistically awaiting decalcification. But when I look back at my writing, all I see are the same phrases woven together on top of each other, shattering in a million different grandiloquent ways and meaning nothing. I do not mean to say that I don't know what I am writing. There is a thought behind most of it, I am sure but it's latent. I want to write about a lot of things I haven’t even experienced yet. But I can't because that would mean asking my skin to stretch, to strain, to accommodate more than it was made to.
If you are an experienced and coveted writer, I think you would agree that true poetic beauty lies in banality. In the almost mechanical chores that seemingly unravel some undeniable truth, we were all missing out on. But like me, my words don't linger long enough to trace the pulse in my wrist. If the story thrums, I dance right back.
My editor often tells me how my writing has an almost symbiotic relationship with you. I aestheticize the pain, wrap it in lace, and adorn it with bronze anklets, antlers, wreaths and other things that constitute my idea of motherhood. I drown my thoughts in formless dances, dressed in aureate metaphors and silk masks—elegant but nebulous. How much I wish to tell her that nuance doesn't need grammar or definite structure or a final climax that ties all the suffering in one climactic simile. because blood, behind all its picturistic gore, is a fluid. It will always bleed.
More than the decay, the art that comes out of it becomes cardinal. all tears are beautiful as long as they can be alchemised—mutilated into words and acrylic. Writing feels like occupying a space that never existed. A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity, Kafka said. When you write, you'll realize how frail the architecture of sanity is. Insanity is not a disease or physical ailment. It is fluid; it will seep in no matter how much you drain it. It is an erythrocyte, the one that refuses to die in 120 days, the one that lingers and breeds on your oxygen. By breathing, you have established an amensalistic relationship with necrosis. As long as you breathe, the darkness keeps being fed.
I can see matter annihilate each other. Protons and positrons, anguished, prophesying collision. I can hear my mom on my tongue. When I burn under the flame of a thousand suns, to straighten my back, to embalm my skin, to smile because I am ugly enough. I can hear her when I am drowning, telling me to breathe evenly, to inhale only as much as I can survive, and to rest my fate in the cobalt-dipped hands of the sea. When my friends left me alone in the alleyway / at the cul de sac / near the trash bin / locked inside my pelvic girdle, I could smell her—the scent of chocolate truffles and coriander oil, wafting in the air, choking me.
When I cut, her voice pounds, like an inebriated heart trying to burst out of its pericardium. The heat licks across my navel and I am in hell and it's coloured pink.
Every day, so many turn to cocaine in hopes of transcendence. A piteous attempt at elusion, I believe. But have you ever tried wearing your mother's teeth across your wrists? Tugging your flesh every time you dare to evanesce too far.
When I tried to engrave a heart across my hips, my sharpie glistening carmine with erythrocytes and denudating flesh, you grieved. You cried and begged me to never make a heart that crooked again.
It looks like a cannibal’s bite, my friend pointed out, a few years later. A half-formed beast, riddled with a sickness it cannot name, trying to outgrow the animal within it, trying to hide the crusts of blood caking its chin. That day, I developed a newfound sense of appreciation for omnivores. The courage to return to god's altar, after gnawing flesh, the courage to come back and masticate on different shades of green, only to fantasize about lovers and gray matter. A type of courage I cannot fathom having.
I used to run a literary magazine last year. Our staff—we used to cross-edit and review each other’s work. I often received critiques that included words like breathtaking, disgusting in a satisfying way, trying too hard to be intellectual and by far my favourite- strangling. But one of those critiques really stuck with me. I was about a body-horror poem I wrote, my best at the time. She said that she could envision the denudation I talked about, how the narrator cartographed her body, how desperately she tried to keep the leached soil from dehydrating the already dead flowers. She could tell I was trying hard not to glorify body dysmorphia but unravel it. She never accused it of being autobiographical (though we all know that there is some semblance of truth in all that a writer writes), but could tell that I chose ugliness by choice. That I didn't mind being broken, eddied by the corrosive nature of my thoughts, that I didn't really care about drowning as long as the salt left behind made me luminous.
