Tuesday 26 June 2007

Hope is the thing with feathers ...


I need to pause, reflect, and collect myself. The writing pace has been frenzied, as emotions, memories, and ideas surface at rapid-fire speed. As suddenly as the floodgates opened, I find they close—a seeming period of insanity ends, if only momentarily. This is a process of translation, of dictation, and of speculation. What do these strange passages mean, what do they reveal?

"Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977

You think you know us from these words? Are you attempting to decipher who we are, from what we write? What if we are weaving a great deception, what if I have been stealing stories from others and presenting them as my own? Truth has been distorted, and it is fair to say: I do not really know what I have written, I only think I know. It is you, the reader, in the position of power to determine what it all means.

FIONA

Friday 22 June 2007

Dear Albert


This love is not wrong.

I am far too young for you I know, but you are my first love, eternal. You are in fact dead, of course, before I have even been born. I fall in love with the ghostly remnants of text you have left behind, and the photographs of you, grainy, faded. Handsome. I think. Barely sixteen years of age, and I am seduced by your text, my heart captured. You are there in my blood, pulsating. Wrapping these texts around myself like a warm blanket on a cold day and this day, Albert, and the next day and many days that follow are cold, practically arctic. I am never quite where I am Albert. This confuses me. I look around me at the sea of faces in the corridor at school, and wonder if any of them actually see me. This is common teenage angst but … I fill this emptiness in my heart with your texts – sentences, ideas, dusty, well-fingered pages, the smell of aged paper, this is the texture of Love, the sexual of the textual. I am Fallen. Not yet Woman, but no longer Girl.

The darkness gathers. Blood leaks. Things swell. My body changes, betraying me and I am transformed by the gaze of others who devour me, strip me, and begin fucking me, all in the blink of an eye as I pass by.

I slip inside the space between the lines and take comfort there while the wolves begin circling.

Oh god yes, this is Love with a capital L.

I am as alone as I will ever be, with only your ghost whispering sweet nothings in my mind. Erotic. This imagined hot breath on my skin, words falling across my bare flesh, each one a tender caress that carries me beyond the pain of growing up.

The Sweet Nothing where I tread lightly, hoping to go unnoticed until such time as I find my place in this world, in this body.

I want to meet you in Paris, sit at a café with you, wearing a dress, which is too revealing in the way that certain dresses are on teenage girls. I want to enjoy being too young to know, awkward, and shy as I sit there drinking in every masculine detail of your body, your face, and your hands, which weave the spell of seduction. I want to suck on your cigarette, drink from your coffee cup, curl up in your lap and waste hours upon hours listening to the sound of you breathing. If only. If only you could be my first Lover, but alas we have this entire dimension of Reality between us. I am here, and you are not. Time has not been kind to us Albert, but it doesn’t matter.

At sixteen I understand that I will always, and ever, be in love with words, ideas, and the people who peddle them.

I say again: This love is not wrong.

Where the Lover is absent, words still bring a song of Joy into my heart. This love is enduring. Timeless.

FIONA

Thursday 21 June 2007

Seabirds

I called out to the seabirds ‘take me now, I’m no longer afraid to die’.
(David McComb/The Triffids – “The Seabirds” - Born Sandy Devotional)

I look up at the sun. His breathing is audible, kind of amplified with the sound of the water. This is the truth. He was there, once, and smiling, and unafraid. This may not have taken place in the way I might describe, but it was perfect, wherever it was. And wherever it was, he used my name and he spoke to me in whispers. I asked him to lie down there, next to me, at this place, a beach, a lake, a river, and just stay around for a while. I didn’t expect promises. I didn’t expect anything. I just wanted to feel somebody, specifically him, next to me. So, in this story, it will be a warm day and it will take place near a body of water. A river on the edge of town, let’s say. I prefer this to a crowded beach. Yes, somewhere quiet, with a hint of melancholy. He and I decide to bring songs we’ve written and to play them to each other, one at a time, what we have made. He brings his guitar like he always does. All my songs are about him. He knows that. His songs are almost about me but are ambiguous enough for me to imagine that they could all have been written with me in mind. He tells me (in song form) that he thought of me all the time when he was with that girl. He tells me I am ‘three’, as in the third person, always there, even when he’s with someone else. Usually a girl. I am, therefore, a boyfriend of sorts. A boyfriend on the edge. Border boyfriend, that’s me. And to me he is here, and that’s what counts. He brings food and we eat like a couple who’ve taken a picnic lunch, as if this might happen every week, when the sun is out. Let’s go for a picnic, honey, I might say. Good idea, sweetheart, I’ll bring my guitar, he might reply. He doesn’t drink alcohol so I will be spared my own drunken decline in the afternoon heat. We will take photographs of the swans on the water. He will take one of me standing near some reeds. I even think he’d like it if I took off my clothes, or perhaps that’s what I’d like to do. Show him everything. There’s no-one else around, not that I can see. The odd jogger, maybe someone behind the bushes, but I don’t care. I could die happy today, he’s here and I’m feeling good. I could easily be attacked by the crazy person behind the bushes and feel ok, feel content that my work here is done. Because I’m with him and he’s not leaving. At least not for a while. This is a happy moment, man behind the bushes! Don’t spoil it now. But I think my potential attacker can see this too and, well, it’s probably too strong a scene to penetrate, too strong so as to make any intruder turn their gaze elsewhere, somewhere else, to someone else, perhaps even to that young woman across the river who looks lost. Today I am a glad I am not her. I am glad that’s not me, looking all alone on a Sunday afternoon, unsure of where I am meant to be, wandering through the backstreets, ending up there, on the trail by the river, in a city so quiet, under the watchful eye of a lunatic behind the bushes. No. That’s not me. I’m not her. I’m with him, my guitar playing man and he’s looking at me, today, like he wants to kiss me or at the very least hold me and not let me go. He might not say it, but he’s in love. I can hear the birds, they are screeching a little too strongly for my taste. I prefer the wind through the grass. The shadows that play on the trunks of trees. That kind of thing. How the light changes and it gets a bit colder. It has been hours. We’ve not moved from this spot and, yes, I’m still alive and I still feel like this is happening, for real. I observe: he has not left. It is a protective situation, maybe, but I’ve always looked for a daddy. I’m much older but always become infantile by desire. I like to be taken, to not be top, to be led. Where did the day go? Who cares. We decide to walk, he and I - and I notice there are no more joggers and certainly no sign of that lost girl across the river. Someone must have found her and picked her up. I hope she makes it home tonight. As for me, I’m following his lead and he’s taking me to a garden. I just smile and follow. It’s easier that way. Often, I would lean a little closer to him and brush my arm against his. And of course, I want to kiss him still but he once told me that to kiss me would be like kissing his father. So, not being comfortable with the daddy role, I decline and am satisfied with my role as son, as student, as follower. No-one said to achieve this kind of contentment was unhealthy. There is nothing that states happiness must appear normal. And so I grab him from behind and give him a great big bear hug and tackle him to the ground. He throws me off and I fall backwards and I hit my head on the ground but that’s kind of sexy cos it hurts. It’s dark under these trees, I might say, looking up from the ground, a little stunned. Stay down there, he might reply. He’s here to save me, I think to myself. He has this spiritual side and he tells me to close my eyes. I do it immediately. I can feel his hands, not touching my skin, just above it, the heat of his hands near my forehead, that’s there, it’s close enough. Moving across my body. Held there at points. Again, his breathing, but no water now, just the slight movement of leaves and branches. He calls this reiki. I call it sexual by default. I can hear cars from some road nearby. There is a bird making sounds above me in the dark of the tree, a dull and muffled sound. Are you trying to tell me something, small mumbling bird? What kind of message is that you send? Speak up! Sounds like your mouth is full of feathers, little bird. Spit it out! Has someone sent you here, with a message wrapped around your leg? Have you flown across oceans and fields to deliver this now? To send me a sign? A tiny ring of paper that contains the answer that I need? I tell you, bird, it’s not such a good time. But still you make that sound above me, like a cry or a moan. Do not be appalled, small bird, as you witness this grown man, eyes closed, being seduced by this reiki, under this tall tree, flat and dumb on the grass, hypnotised by this man who claims to hold you dear to his heart. Do not tell me that what you see before you is a pathetic scene of a cruel master luring his dog into a trap. It is not true! You’ve got it all wrong. Come down here, birdy! Flap your wings and fly down here, now, close to my face and see for yourself that I am, at this very moment, in a silent and blissful state and then tell me – in your beautiful bird-like way - that this love is not wrong.

JASON

Wednesday 13 June 2007

Boyfriend (02)


Hey ---

You teased me about ass-fucking. So I let you. Laugh at me, go on. It's just a thing ok. I let you. You were my teacher. This is what I remember. I let you do it without a condom. That was fucking stupid. So we stopped. At least for that moment. You suggested cutting. Here's a razor. Oh that old story. Scars all over your arms to prove it. You hated yourself. You were on crystal meth. You were a raver. Still so much younger. Hated your parents. Said you'd kill yourself back in Edmonton, Canada, if life didn't sort itself out. "You won't hear from me again." Are these some kind of last words? You wanted to play rough. You've got the cuts to prove it. Couldn't keep a hard-on without a cock-ring. Something in your blood. Stops the circulation. Our brief moments of immense danger. I let you beat me up. Who is the weak one? I ask for it. The hits and blows. I asked for it. I ironed your shirts to keep you on the waiting staff but I kept you up all night and that got you the sack. You brought me jugs of coke and stuff. You flirted with me on the job. Fuck that turned me on. You said we'd be singing that Rufus Wainwright song on a bridge together in 20 years. Apparently we were destined to meet again. You phoned me in Los Angeles crying. I couldn't save you. You sounded so distant. Waiting for life to sort itself out. We were going our separate ways. I couldn't track you down. Somehow, I lost you.

Still, some love.

JASON

Boyfriend (01)


Dear ---

I had an epileptic fit outside a nightclub. I thought you were my boyfriend. You had pushed me around before. You had your life centred around your nightlife friends. We went out together. I was left in the dark. I had an epileptic fit outside a nightclub and you were embarrassed. You had no training in emotional rescue. I was foaming at the mouth and that just wasn't cool. You were attracted to the big lights bright city. Interior boy, you fell inside yourself. I fell onto the sidewalk. I broke my jaw. You put me on drugs when I was nineteen. You put me in pornographic flicks. You sold my body to pay for your habit. You see, he had a habit. Of leaving me on sidewalks. Of pushing me around. Of going off with friends when I didn't know how to act around you or them. You left me to foam. Disappeared inside the club. The bouncers looked down on me shaking. Should they call a doctor? They thought I might be dead. Do we drag him into the alley? Your boyfriend, which I thought I was, was dying out here. Alone with you disappeared and indifferent. My body was a disappointment to you. You fell in love with a dead boy. We had no life together. We struggled to speak about anything. I was never cute, just convenient. I sang a sweet tune but that was never enough. I blame myself. I had an epileptic fit outside a nightclub and you had no training in emotional rescue. You left me for dead. Maybe I could just be dusted like a vampire. But no, I wasn't the bloodsucker. You sucked. Drained and white as a ghost was I. Often around you. Look at these puppy eyes. They adore you. You, such a cruel fucking master. I fell onto the sidewalk and nearly broke my jaw. Split lip and blood. Messed around, shaky, unstable. You were never one for holding on. Or I guess just holding. Just hold me. That is not a question.

Yours ---

JASON

Tuesday 12 June 2007

The Disappeared: Part One


I tripped over an old man today and twisted my ankle. With all the grace and dignity of a drunk being thrown out of a bar I disgorged a string of obscenities. Disappointing, I thought, to have become this lame gargoyle frightening old men on the street corner. Slumped on the steps of a bar (as it happens) I contemplated the fact that I had so much anger inside me, enough to transform me into A Very Unpleasant Woman. The pain became a kind of comfort, the inability to walk reduced me to stillness as I assessed my options, all the while going into mild shock. Is anything ever by chance? I tried to recall my thoughts at the moment in time I tripped. "Suffering" was the general theme, of course, as it seems to have been of late. Self indulgent crap, and I know it. There is muck inside me, black and bloodied muck. A junk yard heap of unanswered questions, each of them beginning with: Why did you disappear? A taxi took me home, I hobbled upstairs to my current dwelling and settled in for the day, and night. Wrapped my ankle in a scarf that was a gift from a man I no longer love. Fitting, somehow, but not sure why.

I am stuck in this silent room, and being pulled deeper into myself, with pain as my only distraction, my only point of focus. And the memory of the look on the old man's face when I exploded in hysteric, obsence, and angry psychosis. "What's happened to the ladies of today?" He might well ask. I did. "What's happened to Grace and Dignity?" In myself. Was there ever? I could write a list of qualities I would like to embody, as an alternative to the monstrousness of my current state. Swing an axe to cut off dead wood and you're going to make a mess. No getting around that. Ghosts haunt me. In the light of my father's passing, I mean this literally now. There's a small child inside of me bleeding everywhere, and time is running out. Will I let her die, or apply salve to her wounds? She's a ghost too. I used to know her well, but she died one day. Well, actually it was more like a slow death. I stood back and watched it happen, growing apart from her as I continued living. She couldn't grow up because she bled out. Her heart it was. Ripped open. I had to leave her behind, I mean, when there is that much pain, that much blood ... death is preferable, surely?

Every now and then she visits me, and I don't like it. She is disruptive. Like a rebellious twin. Like me, but not me. Of me, but beyond me. I want to send her to Heaven, because I think that is where she really wants to be, with her list of unanswered questions. I mean, people have their reasons don't they? Tramping about the room in my scarf-wrapped ankle, I know what it means to disappear, leaving unanswered questions behind. So this is karmic payback maybe? I'm still not sorry I walked out on Scarf Man. The answers to the question of "why?" are so ... complicated. My answers don't matter anyhow, I mean don't we all draw our own conclusions? I am my Father's daughter. How amusing, how very fucking amusing. Well, there is no walking away from anything today.

It is all crashing in on me, like a dark and bloody waterfall of memories and stifled emotions. As the room floods with unshed tears I reach out to that dead girl and hold her under, hoping that this time, death will finally take hold and she will be free to go. Leaving me to Move On. This malingering lingering of hers has got to stop, because I don't like the woman I was today, screaming at old men in the street who might or might not bear a resemblance to my Father.

FIONA

Wednesday 6 June 2007

Film

Here is a film. And in this film you can watch me very closely. See, there I am, that’s me, crawling around, awkwardly, on the ground like a dog. It’s what I deserve. And I’m lost. You will recognise a forest and it will be dark. Things might be a little difficult to make out. It’s all blurry and night-shot. But I’ve been thrown here. Dumped by a car in the middle of the night by a stranger. There was an agreement. I asked for it. I thought I knew what I was doing. I wanted to know something about pain. About complete abandonment. About fending for yourself. About losing it. About being lost. It’s a survival tactic. With no prizes at the end. And in this film, I’m looking straight at the camera and the guy behind the lense keeps telling me to crawl, keep crawling, on my hands and knees, and tells me to start barking too. I don’t know why but I do. (Barks). I just do what he says. How did I get here? How did I manage to make myself into this slave boy without considering the consequences. So let me tell you a story: it’s about love. It’s about not having it. It’s about wanting to have a sensation that equates with love. Pure love. Have you felt that? Have any of you felt that? Speak now if you can tell me one time in your life that you had that kind of real, untainted, pure love. For something. Anything. This story is about the search for love. To crawl through the dirt like a dog to find some small answer or sign or person, for that matter. And this guy with the camera, well, he’ll do for now. Because he’s documenting something real. He’s capturing an extreme moment of an exchange between two human beings. And I’m happy to take the lowest position in all of this. I want to submit and I’m not saying this story is about submission either. What I’m looking for is not a consensual role-playing scenario – that’s just foreplay. I’m not looking for a story that ends with sleep or post-sex cigarettes. In this story no-one sleeps. No-one eats. No-one indulges in romantic fantasies of the perfect family. Pure love, by nature, is a fucked up place most of us here in this room tonight would only dare to enter. I’m telling you this because I’m not to be taken home. I’m not the kind of man you would introduce to your mother or father. Just like you, I have the face of a killer. Just like you, I’ll probably die some horrible death or be left behind in some hostel with a doctor who might as well just give up. Just like you, I’m on a downward spiral. Like you, I’m on a losing streak. Let’s not pretend. Try, if you can, to just be here for one fucking moment. No winners here tonight. So, I’m not prepared to wait. This story is not about love as you might know it. Pure love is pain. Pure love hurts like fuck. Pure love hates you all so much it wants to wipe every single god-damn one of you out with a shot gun. Sitting in your seats, like that, waiting for me to tell you how it feels to want to do what you might call “bad things”, unacceptable things, unreasonable behaviour. I’m not the kind of person who keeps a home. I’m interested in entering your house, in paying you a visit, sitting you down and showing you this film, of me, crawling through the dirt like a dog.

JASON

How Was It for You the First Time?


There is some confusion about my virginity, and specifically, how I “lost” it. Perhaps right now you think you know where this story is going; it’s one of those “I was so drunk I don’t remember” type recollections, right? Or perhaps you are thinking there was more than one fumbling young adolescent boy involved, which might lead to the very brief, but whispered word “slut” passing through your mind. But really, I am talking here about definitions.

How do you define virginity, and what qualifies as the loss of it?

When I was an adolescent, girls around me were sucking a lot of cock, giving a lot of hand jobs, and dry humping—anything but losing their virginity because you know; there was a certain currency in being a virgin. Most girls around me dreamt of meeting The One and getting married, and in those days, it was a given that men only married the virgin, not the whore. It seemed to be generally agreed that “virginity” was directly linked to penetration of the vagina.

But I was coming of age at a time where the concept of penetration of the vagina was complicated by the miracle of modern science, in the invention of the tampon.

Like all Modern Girls I invested in my first box of tampons, assured of the promise of a better lifestyle courtesy of soaking up all that blood, and keeping the process of menstruation hidden from view.

Which brings me to the hymen.

So, once upon a time, the hymen broke upon the initial penetration of the vagina by the hard cock. Ideally, for the purposes of authenticity, there would be blood on the sheets to prove a woman really was, “innocent” and/or “pure”. As a Modern Girl, I didn’t really give much thought to the hymen, because by that time, there was always the chance a hymen could be broken by such activities as horse riding or bike riding, or by the modern miracle of inserting the tampon. The hymen had no currency anymore, as proof of virginity.

Which brings me to the emergency room.

Something went terribly wrong with my first attempt at using a tampon. You know, I followed the diagram, I had the mirror aimed at my crotch, I even had a torch on hand—I mean, it’s a navigation exercise right? And I was so proud, I tell you, for the first three hours of that tampon being inserted.

So in the emergency room, there are a handful of us gathered. One of the few is a Young Man, with his Little Sister. Being a Young Woman I am hyper-aware of young men in general, but certainly of this young man in the waiting room. I focus on being invisible, assuming that my “problem” will remain hidden from view.

Which brings me to my Mother.

She drove me there. And being the mild hypochondriac I am, and she having grown up in the Dark Ages of menstruation both of us felt it best to bring my problem to an emergency room. They interview you, at the front desk, to establish the magnitude of your “emergency”. Bless her; my Mother had been attempting to be discreet on my behalf but-

“I’m sorry, could you speak up please, what is the problem with your daughter?”
“Oh she has a tampon stuck in her vagina.”

No longer invisible. It begins with the Little Sister of the Young Man:

“That lady has something in her gina!” (Giggles)
“Shut up, it might happen to you one day.”

Yes, well, now it’s awkward, what with my Mother and I sitting in the waiting room, my vagina suddenly front and centre in the collective imagination of the handful of people waiting to see a doctor.

Which brings us to Catholicism.

In the examination cubicle the Lady Doctor asks me a few perfunctory questions. Name, age, and ailment—all seem quite ordinary. Then I am laying spreadeagled on the examination table, with Lady Doctor shining her own torch into my crotch.

“Oh, it’s your hymen. The tampon is caught on your hymen.”

The hymen, my hymen is sort-of-broken. As though the last vestiges of my virginity are hanging on despite the disruption of the tampon. She removes the offending modern miracle from my vaginal vault, and then asks:

“Are you a virgin?”

Yes, I tell her, figuring that the lines of definition are still pretty clear.

“Oh.”

Oh? I’m not sure why she seems disappointed.

“Are you Catholic?”

No, I tell her, wondering when I can put my underpants back on.

“Oh, well I think it’s important that I perform an internal examination.”

At the age of seventeen, I had not been one of those Modern Girls sucking cock and giving hand jobs, in fact I had not even kissed a boy.

Which brings us to vaginal penetration by a medical professional of a minor, using a set of forceps, in the guise of performing a “necessary” pap smear.

Illegal, I am told later, what she is doing. At the time it’s just all one big blur of pain and confusion. However amidst this, I found myself thinking that at least I now knew what to expect “when I lose my virginity”. I lay on the examination table, my feet in those stirrups, and documented the pain; the feel of having my vagina expanded by the forceps, and thought “losing my virginity will be less painful because a penis isn’t this large.”

Which brings us back to my problem with definitions.

Looking back, I wonder if my fascination with Catholicism began in that examination room.

FIONA

Tuesday 5 June 2007

Wooden Desks


I want to talk about wooden desks for a moment. The kind you imagine yourself being fucked on. I don’t know whether it’s the books on the bookshelves by the desk, or the desk itself, or perhaps even the lover engaged in this fantasy scenario with me. Maybe it’s the intersection of intellectual and sexual attraction merging to such degrees that the space in which a simple, appropriate conversation on the psychology of intimacy is taking place suddenly turns into a heated erotic exchange. I’m not sure but I am certain that there are times to share these fantasies, and times to keep your mouth shut, or typing fingers still. It only takes a few words to slip and slide into the cyber-oblivion of lost connections, and failed intimacies. We exist only in so far as we construct ourselves via text. Words, sentences, textual utterances … we rely on linguistic accuracy to get our meaning across, and whilst as far as wooden desks go I suspect my meaning was very clear I feel the failure of text to represent my underlying meaning. I am now the recipient of Warm Regards. This is a difficult game, this Getting To Know You game. Fraught, this cyber-realm in which we attempt to be genuine despite the fact that we only have two tools to work with: memory (of what was, of each other), and text. Oh yes, and silence. In this silence, as opposed to other silences in my life, I am haunted by images of the wooden desk, the books, and now, of course in the sexual fantasy I am standing alone in the room, my skirt hitched up, waiting … but nobody is there. Which makes me question my own desires. Had I really wanted to be thrown over this wooden desk, like a pliable object of desire? An object. Am I? As in, am I casting myself in the role of “object”? In this empty room, draped across the highly polished wood of a man’s desk, the worth of his life’s work scattered about the room, on shelves, in folders, and loose papers I have to ask myself what I am doing there, sans underpants. I lie on the desk, feel that smooth, cold, hard wood underneath me and close my eyes to try and decipher this silence at a deeper level. Life is full of fateful choices. Each moment of a conversation is a fateful choice: what do I share, when is it right to share this detail or that detail? Somehow I have translated my admiration for what a man has achieved in life, his passion, the ways in which he is making choices that matter to him and to others … I have translated this into a desire to be fucked by him on this wooden desk. It’s a genuine physical desire, but it’s also a deflection of real emotion. Oh yes, that. I’m in trouble. I’m stuck on this desk. It’s all complicated. I’m scared of him finding me here, half naked, exposed like this. I’m getting cold, lying here. Am I allowed to even be here, in this room? It’s an impressive room of a very impressive man who I know has better things to do with his time. And what am I offering? Can there be any sort of deeper connection between us on this desk, his desk. I don’t know. I want to be real, but these emotions … are they real or not?
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I really, really don’t know.
Is sex the easy option for what can take place on this desk—the opening up of body, but not of heart and mind? Obviously it’s time for me to get off the desk. I think we’re starting from scratch. We are post-sex, and perhaps pre-intimacy?
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I really, really don’t know.
FIONA

Monday 4 June 2007

Stuck


I’m stuck. It’s like this temporary affliction but it’s a feeling I can’t shake. And I find myself here, often. Not sure how to describe it really but here’s my attempt: it’s that kind of moment where your feet feel bound in concrete or ice or maybe even quicksand, cos there’s a certain amount of sinking going on here too. You try and twist and turn but no matter the amount of energy expended you are still there, unmoving. Like in a dream where you are running, running, but getting nowhere fast, just dragging your heels on some road or crawling toward your next destination knowing you are a) going to be very late and in trouble with your mother or b) going to die. And there’s no real relationship to anything in particular so it’s a sort of universal stasis. A place you find yourself in despite wanting, with everything you’ve got, to move, and to get the hell out of wherever it is you are, which is somewhere you certainly don’t want to be. And a doctor might enter into this scene and will possibly make suggestions of ways to alleviate this problem, to get this sorted out or to put your body in motion, despite these measures being only temporary or superficial. You might swallow something that your digestive system can only barely tolerate but will soon become addicted to and then inevitably crave to the point that you won’t be able to live without it. In fact, you will die if you don’t swallow. That is what will be prescribed. Swallow or die. It’s a choice you will have to make. Because you want to start getting up or right out of the bed, from under the covers, or out of the gutter, the sewers and start to absorb some serious sunlight. And, my dear friends, it’s been dark in here. The lid has been screwed on tight and you have no option but to wait for some knight in shining amour to unscrew you, undo you, screw you. He’s up there, somewhere. And he is good with his hands and often carries a corkscrew and usually a swiss blade knife, just in case. He’s good at rescue attempts. Don’t ask him, however, for talk or to engage in conversation or provide profound counsel in your time of need. Forget about that. Forget that he might have some answers for you. Forget that he might actually listen and perhaps even learn a thing or two. Forget about him staying longer than he believes is needed. Because he will always talk over you, talk louder and with blind authority. And certainly watch out for the ritual act, his act of digging you out of some place for a brief moment in time only to drop you right back in a deeper hole in a not too distant other place in the not too distant future. He’ll be good for one thing but good for nothing. But at least, for a second or two, he’ll pull you up and pull you off and push you around for a bit, so at least it will be physical and real, a bit like turbulence on a plane: you will feel something and it will most likely be ok, if not good. A way, then, to be unstuck. You won’t have to tell him about the things you swallow to make you appear like a normal person in public. He will introduce you to others as an eccentric or some other endearing tag he’ll apply to a person who is actually just barely coping with the noise people make. He won’t understand why you react so strongly to the sound of screaming babies and their arrogant mothers. He won’t grasp your inability to deal with smokers in confined places. He will certainly not accept your intolerance to small groups of pissed young men walking with murder in their eyes in the quiet back streets. He will say that you are old before your time. That you are incapable of decent social interaction. That you are weird around people, especially at parties. That your drinking habits are in fact comparable to those pissed young men who walk with murder in their eyes in those quiet back streets. But, you will say, it’s a recognition of mutual fear that brings it out in me. It’s a knowledge that those young men and myself are actually almost the same. We’re like animals ready to tear at flesh and suck on blood. We’re no better than each other, really. And we’re just as fucked up and stuck in a rut as each other. So it’s not that I’m just terrified that they’ll jump me and stick a knife into my stomach or that they’ll bash my skull against the brick wall in this lane-way and then beat me to the ground screaming faggot or cocksucker in my ear only to have one of them fuck me with a long-neck beer bottle. It’s the fact that, if they did, I might enjoy it. That these are the kind of men I really love because they are beasts ready to pounce. Urban werewolves that stalk city streets at night. And to feel alive, to walk alone, to be on these streets, as a kind of equal, or opposite, whatever works for them, I am their prey. I am happy to be eaten just to feel alive. They could parade me through the main streets as their prize and throw me into the river. And I could have said to each and everyone of you just this: see, there you are, I experienced something today.

JASON

Sunday 3 June 2007

The Movement of Ghosts


In an atmosphere of increasing disillusionment I entered the Internet Café, again. This was my third trip for the day, and despite evidence to the contrary I denied the possibility that I was becoming obsessed. Young men feel a threat, I think, when I enter the café because there is this great divide between us: they are having fun, the 17 young men surfing the internet and playing war games, whilst I am clutching a bundle of screwed up tissues, red eyed, and yes I admit it, I am unhappy. I am unhappy. My recent declaration of love to The Man Who Undoes Me had resulted in a vacuum of silence in which I was beginning to both find God and believe in violence as a force for the Highest Good. God, because who else could I pray to for a reply? Violence because sometimes, I feel, you need to use violence to make yourself heard. All around me the young men are tapping away, so young, and so innocent but in reality, upon those screens, they are playing out a fantasy role as masked gunmen who slaughter those with wholly different aspirations to theirs. What are my aspirations? Sitting in the café looking at my empty inbox, I am contemplating hiring one of the young men to go and physically kidnap The Man Who Undoes Me and bring him to me so I can request he answer in detail exactly why my declaration of love has been dismissed as irrelevant. And the fucking you know, the fucking was so fucking good it would make you cry and actually does make me cry, right there in the Internet Café where I am haunted by the movement of ghosts of lovers past. Where are they all now anyhow? Those lovers I gave up, those lovers who gave up on me? 17 young men sit around me, each of them rapidly becoming ghosts in the war they are fighting, dying over and over again in their virtual battlefields, and whilst it is uncomfortable to admit this, my fantasy turns to the idea that The Man Who Undoes Me might be dead. Why should it only be my blood spilled? I mean I could forgive him this silence if he had a valid reason, and in my current emotional state death, his death is the only valid reason I can accept. This is it, I think to myself, this is the fight I have long been dreading. I wonder momentarily if I could join this group of young men, impassioned young men with a cause worth fighting for instead of blowing my nose on my sleeve like the pathetic lovelorn woman I have allowed myself to become. Fucking email, who invented this shit?! I wasn’t into instant gratification before the Internet came into my life you know but well … it was all about the telephone not ringing back then I suppose. I wonder if I were still young whether I’d fall in love with any of the 17 young men playing war games in the room where I hold the torch for romantic love and all its glorious lies. I envy fanatics; I really do because it must be so nice for everything to be so damned clear-cut. To channel your heart into a group, a cause, or like these young men a war in which they’d willingly die happy knowing their love was justified. I’m ashamed now I think about it, that I was nearly ready to break open the razor blades over The Man Who Undoes Me. Just the other night—I’d made 5 trips to the Internet Café that day, and you know all other messages in my inbox became invisible for the simple fact that his reply was not there. I might have won the fucking lottery—who knows? I didn’t open any of the messages I did have. Fuck him. Fuck telecommunications. Fuck the twenty-first century. But I don’t leave. I refresh the screen in case a message has slipped into my inbox. Nothing. Fuck him.


17 young men who are capable of breaking 17 young hearts, and more of course because really, who ever stops at one? Once you get a taste for breaking hearts it’s hard to stop. But then, their hearts belong to a cause. That is the war they are rehearsing for—the one taking place on the squalid streets where they spend their time, instead of in school. Christ, now I’m moralising, and I’m in no position to be doing that, not while I plot the murder of The Man Who Undoes Me who is resisting commitment as opposed to being committed to resistance. Perhaps, I think, looking around me at the 17 young men, The Man Who Undoes Me was never really my lover? Looking over at each one of the 17 young men, it strikes me that if I stare really hard I can almost see through them. They are distracted to the degree that they really are fading away from this reality. Their hearts taken hostage by the dangerous heroes of this virtual world, this violent underground in which they are no longer the hopeless, marginalized young people we believe them to be. In this Internet Café, they matter, they fight hard and they win. They score points and this is currency, this is their currency. What is mine? Tears? I’ve shed more than enough for one day. Love? What does that even mean anymore—I love you? Logging off, I realise that my love is not justified. The Man Who Undoes Me is just another ghost, a remnant of a memory of a lover I once had. He will fade from my sight, just as each of these 17 young men will fade from our memory when in a week’s time, a story breaks out in the news of a bombing that destroyed this Internet Café where I lost my heart, and 17 young men lost their lives.


FIONA
(Written for Barbara Campbell, 1001 Nights Cast project May 31)

Psychotic


I am psychotic. It’s a thing. A condition beset only upon me. And this is how it looks. For example. I am very drunk and outside a pub. I hear my name being called. It’s someone I recognise but don’t recall his name. Of course, he knows mine, he knows me seemingly very well. But who is he? Who the fuck is he? How do I know him? I can tell you that once I found him attractive and probably had a crush on him or something. I mean, in this situation his name could be Will or Jake or Hugh or mix of all of the above. But he asks me how I am. And I hug him and kiss him on the lips because it seems appropriate but judging by his reaction to my assumed intimacy it is kind of awkward. And then I say: ok, I’m ok, how are you? Good good, he’ll say and then proceed to give me the details. He’s moved here for work or study or something I can’t remember. He’s telling me all this like it relates somehow to my life or some experience we’d shared. I have no idea. But I say: oh and how is it all going, how are you finding it being here? As if I might relate this statement to some previous knowledge of his life as I pretend to know it. And in my psychotic state I am telling him that I am living nowhere in particular these days and that I have been drinking a lot tonight which he doesn’t seem to find that profound or interesting but I insist that this is important information and somehow will lead us to a point of recognition on my behalf and I feel like I am in a strange dream where a handsome man is interested in me but really he’s someone I’ve never seen before. But I have, in reality, seen this man before but I have no idea where from. What I really want to ask him is a logical question such as: so, god, when was it we last saw each other and he’ll reply with an answer that will ease my psychosis temporarily and we’ll both get on fine from there. But I continue this insane charade with inane questions that lead me no closer to understanding how he and I are connected. I had an affect on him, that much is clear. A small part of my brain is missing that disallows certain people to be lodged, psycho-photographically, for future reference. Names, it’s not just that I am bad with them, it’s not just that, it’s also that I insist on digging myself deeper into a hole that leaves me more and more in the dark as to their identity. But I am happy to leave him as the mystery man. In my madness, it’s a much better place. From this point on, he, like many of them before, moments of passing this body in the street will occur and I will never be satisfied with a name.

JASON

Ask


Ask me about the blood. Ask me how it got there. Ask me how long it took to accumulate so much of it all over the carpet, all over the house, the walls, the ceiling. Ask me where he is, why he’s not returned anyone’s call. Ask me to confess. Ask me to speak, very clearly, very slowly, with as much detail as possible, as to my whereabouts on the night before last. Ask me again. Ask me different questions in various ways. Ask me to shut up. Ask me to shut the fuck up and be silent. Ask me about the kind of relationship he and I had. Ask me about our political inclinations and our tendency to read the independent media. Ask me if he really did say “I would die for this cause” or to be more precise “I would die for you”. Ask me if he really said that or if, in fact, I have a habit of making things up. Ask me for my name, in full, and to inform you of my previous three residential addresses. Ask me for phone numbers, bank account details, contacts for doctors, copies of bills, correspondance with any government organisation. Ask me to show you the originals. Ask me why, on one occasion, I had to disguise my identity and sexual preference in order to gain employment. Ask me why they didn’t give me the job. And then, ask me again about the blood. Ask me who it belongs to. Ask me why I didn’t call the police earlier. Ask me about this video and dvd collection sitting on my shelves and why so much of it is so transgressive. Ask me about that painting on the wall, the one with the asexual looking guy with that sinister look on his face. Ask me what that’s all about. Ask me how long he and I had been seeing each other and if we were actually living together in the same house or was it more of a casual situation, for example, and did I have any other lovers. Ask me how much money I earn. Ask me about my aversion to small children and babies. Ask me why I have no time for families especially those with new-borns. Ask me what it is, exactly, I have against life, against reproduction, against nature, as you might call it. Ask me why I am so angry or at least appear to be, to you, the one who is asking me so many fucking questions. Ask me why I just don’t give up, give it all up and be done with it. Ask me: have I thought about suicide and then immediately after this ask me why I have thought about it so many times and then continue to interrogate me on why I have attempted it and the methods I chose, seemingly with a successive amount of failure. Ask me again about the blood. Ask me the obvious question. Ask me to identify the body and would I mind stepping into the small room for a moment while you make your enquires. Ask me if I am making it all up, pretending to have invented some story about a man who loved so much that he had to kill the very thing he wanted to possess. Ask me how that could happen. Ask me if that is what could happen. Ask me if something like love could drive you to the point of murder.

JASON

Terrible


If I asked him now, if only a moment, to think of me not as a friend but as a potential lover, would he still be sitting here, watching my face, watching my body, to see how it moves oh so slightly at the simplest of things he does: the way he takes his hand to the glass lifting it to his lips, drinking that wine we are sharing in order to get ourselves drunk enough to fuck. He’s seemingly not too scared to flirt a little with danger here. He’s not scared to blur the signals, to make his intentions unclear. Is this love or is this seduction? I talk to him about pain. The real genuine physical kind. He’s not convinced. So I begin to speak to him as if he and I were about to enact a particularly imprecise ritual. Something I might make up to make things a little more interesting. To see where this night might go. For example, I would place his body, not so gently, against the floor, arching his head back at an uncomfortable angle. Do I want to hurt him? Am I preparing myself to be hurt? Would I like to gaurantee that, this time, I will be the one inflicting the blows? What will either of us make of a scene that involves me pouring an entire bottle of red wine over his face, so as to make the liquid trickle into his nostrils, to the point of choking, to the point of suffocation or drowning. And, of course, for dramatic effect, I would smash the bottle near his head, just to make him understand that this is no game. The rules have been set. And remember, I will be the one setting them. Because, here, tonight, he and I have already drunk so much that I will want to hear some answers. I will want to hear the terrible truth. I will want to know that I am never going to get the chance to inflict any kind of pain on this man because he knows, when he looks into my eyes, that to invite someone like me in (like welcoming in the vampire into his home) is to risk the chance of losing his way a little in the darkness. Cos right now, he and I have some pretty serious ambiguity going here. He’s letting me stay around but I am unsure as for how long. But he’s not telling me to leave either. Listen man, you might as well give me the spare key. You might as well let me hang out during the day and trawl through your porn collection. You might as well add my name to the message on your answering machine. Cos I’ve moved in. And I’m not going anywhere. Believe me, I’m not playing.

JASON

Friday 1 June 2007

Game for Love


We're going to play a game. You and I. We're going to pretend we are In Love. You know, I'm talking about the real deal here, not some passing infatuation. Maybe we have already fucked, maybe not it doesn't matter, this isn't about sex, it's about love of the capital L variety. Imagine I am the one person you would die for, the one person you would live for. What does that mean to you? Who does that make me, in your eyes, mind, heart, and soul? You know, soulmates. You and I. Oh baby. Oh honey. Oh sugar. Oh dear. Already the Language of Love has been deconstructed into short, sharp, sickly terms of endearment for each other. I miss what we had already. It used to be so honest between us. Even with the lies. Bare-faced lying is a kind of honesty isn't it? When lies are so transparent that everybody knows it's a lie? There's a truth in there somewhere. I bet you cried the last time someone broke your heart. Left you, gave up on loving you because in their mind you just weren't worth the effort. You had become a disappointment to them. So maybe you spent a week drinking hard liqour and contemplating suicide. Who would I need to be, for you to love me that deeply? Who do you need to be for me to want to cut off my right arm and give it to you, just for a glimpse of your bright smile on a rainy day? Come on, I've got the hacksaw out, my arm on the block--don't let me down here. You need to be More Than You Already Are. You are Never Good Enough. You are a Failure in the Game of Love. Or are you? Prove me wrong. I'm waiting. Make an offer. I've laid myself bare before you, I've made my declaration of Love to you. Have you really nothing to say to me?

FIONA