I was sitting in the library in the first hours of morning, utterly sick of working on a writing assignment. On the shelf to my right the fall 2017 issue of The Paris Review sat, beckoning me, teasing me with the promise of words and ideas much greater than the shit ones with which I was using up my word count. I shut the whirring laptop and picked up the issue, flipping immediately to a piece called 'Diaries' by Duncan Hannah. I was unfamiliar with Hannah. I read; I went back to my computer and devoured his paintings and found interviews and videos and blogs. I opened up my green 'thoughts' notebook and scrawled out the line from his 'Diaries' that I had been repeating in my head in a Zooey Glass fashion in the minutes since first seeing it on the page. Dear thing, I ouch for you. Ouch had never been a verb in my dialect. It’s now my favourite one. What follows (a poem, a short story, a song) is what I conjured from that beautiful little phrase. Dear Thing
I Ouch
She wasn’t running from him. She needed to get home but not in a hurry. It just kicked in, animal instinct. RUN! Run from the comfort and spindly arms and sweet sounds and sour smells. RUN! Leave it behind, it doesn’t suit you, doesn’t look good on you, that smile, that warmth, that confidence. RUN for the hills, for the mountains, for your life, for his. RUN away from that thing that feels like contentment. You can feel it like you’ve always had it, like you’ll never go without it again. Don’t be foolish, girl. This thing, it’s not meant for you. Don’t give into its seduction, don’t bare all to it. He says he’ll never hurt you but he’s not the one to fear. He’s just human. It’s beyond him and you and the physical world you think you have some sort of control over. You think you’ve felt pain before; this will do you in. I fear my warning has come too late. Poor thing, I see it; it’s in your eyes already, in their blink and their glaze and their dilation. Sweet thing, you’ll know soon enough. Dear thing, I ouch for you. For You
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You can change your clothes Change your hairstyle, your friends, cities, continents But sooner or later your own self will always catch up Always it waits in the wings ’Be Safe’ - The Cribs with Lee Ronaldo I changed my clothes.When I packed for England I had a chance to reinvent my image. Pack the tweed my internal sartorialist told me. An English countryside town called for an English countryside look. A look for a girl who was going to read poetry written by dead white men and listen to music dug out of crates in musty shops and drink tea instead of diet coke and write a book. I changed my hairstyle. I changed my hairstyle.I’d landed in London and headed to Shoreditch. This girl needs fringe. I’d found the salon a year earlier when I’d woken up in London on a weekend trip and decided it was time for a change. I went back, this time with a photo of Marianne Faithfull, and I changed my hairstyle. I changed my friends.It is hard to maintain friendships from across the sea. I needed some new ones which was going to be hard because talking to new people is on my list of things I’d love to never have to do again. I started with the man in the shop. He sold records and had salt-n-pepper Hugh Grant hair and dressed like a professor in corduroy and khaki and drove around in one of those big Land Rovers people always drive in movies that take place in small English towns. He’s the kind of person you should have as a friend. I visited once a week and we talked about music and New York and my writing and the town.
My own self caught up with me.I changed my clothes.Tweed is sort of itchy. And when you put on a wool sweater, it will always scratch some part of your body and then all day that little patch will itch but when you scratch the spot it will grow and it will itch more and you’ll start to wonder why you bought the fucking thing in the first place and you’ll start watching the clock for when class is over so you can go home and put on a tshirt but you did tell someone you’d grab a pint after class so that will add another two hours and god, what if it still itches when you take it off, a lingering itch, the worst kind. I changed my hairstyle.Fringe grows really fast. And it takes so long to lay right, and then some days you’ll have a really nice straight line and then you’ll go wait for the bus and by the time the bus comes it will seem like each individual strand of hair is going in a complete separate direction and that split where you part your hair will have crept forward and so then you have to do a weird side-part bang but FUCK you don’t have any bobby pins in your bag so you can’t pin the other side over so it just flops around on the side of your forehead, and not the good side of your forehead, and it would be so much easier if you just grew them out but that will take ages so for the foreseeable future you’re just going to have to find a way to put up with it and remember to always have bobby pins. I changed my friendsI never built up the courage to ask the vinyl shop man to be my friend. And when I had the first day of my masters program I sat in front of the two people I knew were the cool ones, because don’t you always just kind of know who the cools ones are just by the way they sit and dress and how they know each other already, and they were the kind of cool ones that had always been in my classes and I’d always wanted to talk to but knew I wasn’t their kind, the cool kind, the kind that could sit like that and dress like that, the kind that would have sat with them and said hello instead of sitting in the front with the sweet looking girls with the sweet sounding names like all the sweet girls I hung out with in New York.
My own self was waiting in the wings.I changed my clothes.I bought a red leather skirt. I wear the Fred Perry clothes I bought to look like my Britpop idols but that I never thought I was cool enough to wear. I bought a yellow rain mac. Sometimes I wear vintage things I bought in vintage shops in vintage cities. I changed my hairstyle.I’m growing out my bangs. Somedays I don’t brush my hair at all. I stopped trying to grow out my undercut. I shaved it closer. I changed my friends.On the second day I said hi to one of the cool kids and he said hi back and now I can go back to not talking to new people because I’ve found people of my own. He’s going to edit this later for me and he’ll have rolled his eyes when he read the part about me thinking they were too cool and he’ll probably roll his eyes at this part, too.
I don't know who that is waiting in the wings anymore.An obscene number of Americans asked me before I left for Falmouth what I was going to do about food in England, as if the whole country was starving itself, as if there wasn’t a crumb from the Queen’s scone to spare. My canned response was to rattle off a list of the restaurants I’d loved in London as a student there. The Americans don’t know that Cornwall isn’t London, anyway.
In Cornwall, I starve. I did not make a friend in Falmouth for nine days. For the first nine days I ate on my own or I didn’t eat at all. There is something less depressing about falling asleep to the sound of your stomach groaning than to sit at table across from an empty chair while chewing on some bread. Maybe it’s because when I sit across from empty chairs I hear Eddie Redmayne singing ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’ in my head and the thought of all of my friends being dead is enough to put me off food. In Falmouth at first I didn’t have friends to imagine dead, but I still didn’t eat often. I grew up outside of Chicago and then lived in New York for five years, so pizza is my lifeblood. Not many weeks of my life have passed where a hot slice hasn’t been munched on, hasn’t warmed my stomach and cured all my problems. In Brooklyn, one of the checkout girls at Duane Reade became so used to seeing my crying face in line with a Jack’s frozen pizza under my arm that she didn’t even give me the ‘you-okay-girl?’ face after the third or fourth time. Pizza was my sadness antidote. When I got to England, it became my sadness. One of those first nine days a roommate showed up and we ate at Pizza Express. I wanted a pepperoni pizza; to order one I’d have to say I wanted ‘the American’ which was almost enough to make me order a salad instead. But I really wanted pizza. It was awful; I ate the whole thing out of pity for the poor restaurant with the word ‘pizza’ in its name that wasn’t serving anything close to pizza. At home I started plotting the next pizza I’d eat, how there was no way it could be worse. I bought a frozen one from Asda; it was somehow worse. I bought a frozen pizza from practically every grocery store in the Penryn - Falmouth - Truro tri-town area. Not one of them was something I’d ever eat again. After three weeks I’d made a couple of friends. One night I sat and watched them eat Dominos out of cardboard boxes. A pizza each. I couldn’t bare the thought of taking even a single a bite. The smell reminded me of the time I threw up for fifteen hours before a school dance after eating Dominos. It hadn’t been Dominos fault. I had an allergic reaction to the fish smell at school when the science teachers did their annual fish fry. But the Dominos exited my body with such force that the smell of the garlicy dough gives me PTSD. Never again. Especially not when trying to make new friends in Falmouth. I daydream a lot about the best pizzas I’ve ever eaten. Those cheesy $2.50 slices from Brickhouse on Bedford Avenue that got me and my bank account through senior year at NYU. The salt of the tomatoes on a Lou Malnati’s butter crust deep dish. The simplicity of a frozen Red Baron supreme and how Dad used to keep them in the oven too long so the crust crunched on every bite. How could there not be edible pizza available here? How did I get to a point in my life where pizza defined home for me? How thin was I going to get without the grease of a dollar slice coating my stomach? I complained to essentially every person I met. No one convinced me I’d find what I was looking for so I gave up all hope. No one’s eyes lit up with the excitement of a child seeing Disney-on-Ice when I asked for recommendations. I looked at my calendar and put a little star on December 18th when I’d fly home for Christmas and make sure my mom had a hot Lou’s cheese waiting for me in the car. I’d resigned myself to a pizza-less life. ‘I’ll make you a pizza,’ is probably the one thing that could be said to me that would identify a friend-for-life. Even if it was going to be shit pizza, the effort is enough to raise someone to best friend status. I made one of those friends a month after arriving in the UK. The pizza dry spell had been consuming me. Desperation was on my face like a dribble of red sauce in the corner of your mouth left behind after a slice of Hawaiian from California Pizza Kitchen. I needed a real fucking pizza. I kept expectations low for this homemade one; I couldn’t let a friendship dissolve because of soggy crust. We bought our ingredients at Marks and Spencer - pizza bases, tomato paste, pasta sauce because we couldn’t find any pizza sauce, pepperoni, olives, mozzarella and shredded cheddar. I sat in front of the oven and watched the cheese melt over the side. It was pornographic. We cut into it and I let my slice cool; burnt taste buds would not aid the situation. After feigning patience for thirty seconds, I blew on it and took a bite. It was a damn good pizza. It wasn’t a New York uber cheesy, thin-crust slice and it wasn’t a Chicago mammoth pie, but it tasted enough like pizza that I felt a little better. I knew if I got sad and needed a hot slice to solve all my problems I could make it again and it would do the job just fine. |
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