Page 38 of What It's Like in Words
Please stop it. Please!
But piece by piece he vanishes, and I’m left clutching the dark with cartoon hands.
IWOKE TO FINDthe bed cold and damp with sweat. I reached for my phone, hoping for anI miss youorThe bed seems empty without youorI don’t want to go to Norwich in the morning.But there was nothing. I went to my suitcase and inhaled the smell of the beach on my clothes. It was a familiar feeling, an emptiness, like thirst:homesickness. And now he was a part of that. Now when I pictured the places of my childhood, he was there too, like he had been all along. I stood in my bedroom not knowing what to do or where to go, but then my eyes rested on my laptop.
I sat at my desk and opened the latest version of my novel. I looked at the careful words. The adjectives and nouns in perfect small font. Writing never used to be meticulous. When we moved back to England, and the therapist told me to write, I would sit up every night,surrounded by the safari wallpaper my grandparents chose to help me “feel at home,” and scribble frantically until my wrist ached and the pad of my thumb was black. And then it hit me: writing was never about control, it was aboutlosingit. That was why I hadn’t been able to finish anything. I had been terrified of feeling as powerless as I felt back then. So I arranged sentences and placed words and changed fonts the way that I layered my makeup and color-coded my books. Because I wanted to make it flawless and perfect and correct. But to write, you couldn’t curate pieces of yourself—you had to bleed, you had to show the ugly parts, the parts scarred and darkened by the sun. Editing might be order, but writing had to be chaos.
Jump out that plane, Laa.
I started a new document. That beautiful blank page. But this time I wanted to fill it; I had to fill it. I hadn’t felt this in such a long time. Thismania. I started writing and I couldn’t stop. I typed how Ruth ate a meal, as if she were scared the food would leave her plate, and memories of camping trips flowed like tears: lions roaring in the night; a pink sea of flamingos on a white shore; a mother cheetah nursing under a bush; wildebeest with avalanche chests, chewing grass like cowboys chewing tobacco, ready to spit it with a ping into a dirty bar glass. It was fiction, but it came from a real place, a place that I thought was destroyed when Mum destroyed the photographs.Honestbut nottruthful.
The sun rose and I stopped to look at my dust-covered bedroom and the truck that had crashed through the wall. My eyes were stinging; I had written all night.
CHAPTER 10
I check my phone. There are no new messages, but a piece of glass splinters from the screen like a crystal of sugar. It’s nearly six o’clock. Time to get dressed. I lift myMario KartT-shirt and, glimpsing myself in the wardrobe mirror, recall once overhearing a man on a bus describe a woman as “one of those fat skinny girls.”
When I was fifteen and had just gone on the pill, my grandma told me that I was chubby, but that same week Catherine told me that I needed feeding. I’ve always been neither one thing nor the other. My hair is neither blond nor brown, my height neither tall nor short, my appearance neither attractive nor unattractive. And my writing? I couldn’t write before him, I couldn’t write with him, and yet somewhere in between those states, like Schrödinger’s cat, in the liminal, I started to write. Perhaps I’ve always existed in the space between spaces, the crack down the side of a radiator.
I open the wardrobe and avoid myself.
Jesus. How many clothes do you need, honey?
But my wardrobe is a diary; the clothes are words. On those dungarees is paint from when Ruth and I decorated my flat. In that sliver of sage is the feel of swimming pool tiles on my knees. By my feet, like a cairn, myTHIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKET-shirt smells like his aftershave.
I put on a white tank top, blue jeans, and a checked shirt, no bra or socks, nothing restrictive—Dad used to say that the sole purpose of a sock was to go in a shoe—then I lie back on the bed and continue ourstory like it’s a restored black-and-white film. It’s one that I’ve seen before, but because the Technicolor is new, I’m hoping that it will end differently.
AMY CLEARED HER THROAT. All right, loves, because this is my last session, I wanted to let you know how much your feedback has meant. You will all be cited in the acknowledgments. And I’m sorry to have to bow out for a bit, but with all the publicity for book one and now edits for book two… I know it’s cliché but debut year really is a whirlwind. Anyway—
She looked to me.
I raised my glass: To Amy!
All right, Mat said. Enola, you’re up.
The last time I’d brought my work to the group was nearly a year ago, and the reaction had been tepid. Amy said that she didn’t feel safe with my writing; she didn’t trust that I knew where the book was going. This story felt completely different to anything I had written before, but I was nervous. I remembered the expression on Chris’s face when his protagonist was called a cunt.
I swallowed, and Amy squeezed my knee. I’ve actually brought something new this week, I said. Chris muttered that at least I had broughtsomething.
I had this idea for a YA book and—
A children’s book? Hugo asked, judgmentally tightening his ponytail.
Young adult, Amy corrected.
Clever move. It’s a growing market, said Chris.
As I read my chapter, I knew there were words to change and sentences to rearrange, but when I finished there was a hush. If Hugo liked something he hummed. If Chris was jealous he went quiet. Mat was always kind, but if Amy didn’t like it she spoke in a way that made you feel as bad as it did good:I just didn’t think it was worthy of you, hon.
Hugo hummed, and I exhaled.
At the bar, Amy told me that she loved my chapter. I waited for the sting, but there wasn’t one. Honestly, sweetheart, I just really loved it. It was so different from your usual stuff—
Sting.
My friend Diana, who is my agent’s assistant, is building her own list and I’ll mention you when I next email.
Gosh, Amy, that’s so nice, but you don’t need to do that!
