Eulogy

I.

Me: You’d have relationships since?
Him: Well, yeah, I have a child.
But you've gone out with -
Yeah.
So how’s that been?
Pretty disastrous.
Why?
Not disastrous. Just that I get tired of people very very quickly.
Have you loved anyone?
Honestly I don’t know. I've found that quite a while after I would compare things to how they were with you. Not physically — kind of, more in terms of — oh I don’t know — how intense it was and how real I thought it was. Well that pretty much made it impossible.
Do you think that intensity was a good thing?
Yes.

We meet in an arts centre in the city because I can’t find anywhere in my home town that feels private without feeling like we’re hiding. All the fields and the quiet places in town feel like they’re covered in eyes. I turned hiding into an art that year, that year we were together. We exchanged books I never read with notes in them. I was a kid who’d been reading dirty poetry written by old American men and I was being what I called the other woman. I wasn’t a woman at all, not even a little bit.

I would listen to Emmy the Great’s album ‘First Love’ for years afterwards and cry to the lyrics “I was only a baby, now I am what you made me”. I buy you a coffee. I try not to shake. I’m a woman now, I’m a writer, Serious Young Woman, don’t need to hide. I try not to scan the faces for people I know.

I should explain why I’m doing this. I spent so long forgetting, moved town, changed my name, changed everything. But I am what you made me, or what we made me, whatever. I could never forget that summer. “Why can’t I forget you?” I ask. I try to say it with a smirk, not too tender. He says it’s because we still have feelings for each other. I think that this is a very male thing to say.

My memory skips over the last four years: bulimia, self-harm, a suicide attempt for every year. I think, I think this might be the reason I can’t forget.

“I’m not trying to punish you,” I say as I list all the ways you ruined my life. I’m really not; I want something else from you. I want you to blame me. I want to feel the force of your condemnation on top of me. But you keep saying “I don’t blame you,” like some adult. Us in our adult suits pretending to be people when we’re not. I can’t tell if you can see through me but I feel as obvious as these glass walls. We get out of there and sit by a river and we’re children and you haven’t eaten, bad, maladjusted child, and you tell me the truth. You haven’t loved anyone since me. My emotional response to this is to want to fuck you.

II.

Why can’t I forget you?
I’ve been asking myself that exact same question for quite a while.
You always pop up in conversation. Maybe it’s just because you were the first person I had sex with.
But it’s not just the sex.
Losing your virginity is a big deal, like.
It is a big deal.

That night:

I’m running a bath/there’s a thunderstorm
Outside and bright yellow flowers
Poking from dark green.
I burn in the water,
I fold my body in half,
Feeling the excess.

You told me earlier today: “I still love you”
But I already washed you out of this bath,
Out of this skin.

I told you: “I don’t love you.”
This isn’t a love poem.
This is a poem about turning myself into a demolition zone.
This is a poem about taking a knife to the parts of me
You touched
And not understanding why.
This is a poem about shame.

A man once told me: “There is nothing more terrifying than a sixteen year old girl who’s just realised the power she has.”
I wanted to tell him that he, a teacher,
Talking about his pupils like temptations he could barely resist,
Was scarier.
But I kept my mouth shut.

III.

Maybe, I think if we hadn’t have rushed into sex…
We were together a month, it wasn’t that bad.
But you cleared me out, I’m still catching up.
[laughs]
You did. that’s part of why I always felt jealous of you because I went down completely and you just went on.
I didn’t go on.
You did so much, you’re doing so much.
But I was fucked up for a long time.
Yeah, but, you’ve done something with that. You haven’t just… You went to London. I completely idealise London. I’d write love poems to the city…
What? Come on.
Well, they were never to the city. They were to you.
Do you think you idealised me after I left?
Oh, obviously.

The Sixteen Year Old Girl’s power is not her own. It is power because of the effect it has on men. It relies on a sudden shift in interpersonal dynamics. As girl turns to woman, man appears — not boy to man, for that comes later, but father to man; teacher to man; stranger on the street. The Sixteen Year Old Girl does not know what to do with this power. She does not know if she wants it.

Some girls, like me, were tempted: we liked the terror. The breaking of social codes, the confusion on faces (they don’t know what to do with this mess girl/woman tacked together any more than we do). But because you learn it first through their eyes, you learn to channel it in the directions they want. You see Lolita’s warped sexuality as power. You don’t see the abuse, the trauma, the young woman she becomes, trying-to-get-by. You watch Ginger & Rosa and Thirteen and Juno and American Beauty and An Education and you see the adulthood in sex and sex as a burning house, as a school shooting, as a group of broken bodies. They tell you: break it all. You do.

IV.

Do you think we would still feel like this without the sex, how important was that?Yes.
Why? Because it was the breakup that hurt you, wasn’t it?
Yes it was. I felt kind of betrayed. Which I’ve never really been able to justify. Which is why it pisses me off so much. Because I know it shouldn’t piss me off, which pisses me off even more.
It was sudden. And I had no explanation.

The girl can’t see the strings. She reads the lines she’s been given.
She talks in tongues. How could anyone resist?

(Maybe if I’d had a father, a solid role model;
Maybe if I hadn’t been such a lonely literary girl;
Maybe if I’d dated someone normal.)

But:
I wanted a pyromaniac.
I opened up my chest, turned my insides into iron,
Spread my blood-trail through the empty house,
Came out screaming, your heart in my hand.
And when that was done, the fire kept burning.
the red shoes kept dancing,
faster and faster.

“Until after a while you wouldn’t feel anything.. and then your body would just burst into fire. And the angels wouldn’t help you, ‘cause they’ve all gone away.”

Laura Palmer is a girl-monster of the highest order. Black lips, yellow teeth, terrified of the thing inside her and the thing that comes in through her window and wants to be her. But Twin Peaks got so popular because it was unravelling the greatest mystery of them all: what do teenage girls write in their diaries?

In Fire Walk With Me, there’s a scene where Laura’s smoking and putting on a pair of stockings and making plans with someone on the phone and it’s all so teenage, so pink and heart-shaped and homecoming queen. Next scene: she’s screaming, kissing, falling on the road and disappearing into the woods. It’s an act of transformation. She’s only half a person (half living in dreams and doors that lead to nowhere and dream-worlds and dead bodies in her bed). But that’s what every teenage girl writes in her diary. Every teenage girl feels like she’s living a disappearing act.

How many teenage girls have written the phrase “dead girl walking”?

V.

I remember pacing up and down past you. I knew you were self-harming at this point. But I couldn’t because I was still hurt and terrified.
I hated you, after.
I hated you, too.

I don’t know what to do with my hands or legs. I’m suddenly terrified of steps and platforms. I want to scream or dig my fingernails into these stone walls and see which one of us cracks first.

There are no stars. There’s burning wood. There’s the smell of a heart attack.

VI.

Are you still attracted to me?
In what way? I don’t know what’s changed, what about you is different or the same. Yes.
Do you still want to have sex with me?
[laughs] Yes

Look at yourself in that broken mirror, cracked in straight lines splitting up your face into equal-sized fragments. If you move your head back and forth your eye disappears and gets bigger, splits in two, disappears again. You have a memory of an arm: tense, curling in on itself, unwinding with a hard china ornament in its palm. Glass and china shatter in different ways but they both cut your soles just the same in the morning. You have a memory of an arm being attached to a body that looks like yours but you’re not sure. You don’t have a memory of breaking the mirror. You don’t know how it broke. You, you, you.

VII.

Do you blame me at all for having a baby?
It’s not so much your fault as… it wouldn’t have happened if this hadn’t have happened. I don’t blame you. I’m kind of ok with it.
You’re ok with it?
Not really.
Do you see her?
Sometimes, but she doesn’t know who I am.

But here’s the thing I’ve been writing over. Here’s the blood beneath this poetry, this prose, this second skin. I remember that summer as hiding because he wasn’t single at the start of it. And after, when they picked back up after the mess I’d made, she got pregnant on purpose. And I got sick, and he did. Writing those words without the cover of poetry is embarrassing. It’s all so embarrassing underneath. Whatever vision of yourself as young-woman you’ve created, you’re still just a little girl staring at a pile of bodies.

After this interview, after the next round of this game, he got sick again. Turns out that spilling blood to make art still leaves you with a lot of spilled blood. Turns out that bodies are hard and real and can’t be made to disappear by closing your eyes and pretending.