THE BRAIN SCANS OF COCAINE ADDICTS & REJECTED LOVERS LOOK STARTLINGLY SIMILAR

Ruth Isabel Field

The brain scans of cocaine addicts and rejected lovers look startlingly similar Ruth Isabel Field 2012-13 contact me at: ruthifield@gmail.com

Contents
Star Deaths ......................................................................................................................................... 1 Girl ........................................................................................................................................................ 2 Protective ............................................................................................................................................ 3 I am going to sleep naked every single day of my life ................................................................... 4 About a Boy ........................................................................................................................................ 5 I will do something with my life, even if it kills me .......................................................................... 7 Punk Rock ........................................................................................................................................... 8 I had to run away from my psychology degree to keep my sanity ............................................... 9 Poetic Science .................................................................................................................................. 11 The smallest bones .......................................................................................................................... 12 Five retrospective indications that I would be rubbish at relationships ..................................... 13 I deserve better than you, but ..................................................................................................... 15 Hyperbole .......................................................................................................................................... 16 Carpe diem........................................................................................................................................ 17 Acta est fabula, plaudite! ................................................................................................................. 18 Hunger ............................................................................................................................................... 20 Target practice is not the same as the real thing ......................................................................... 21 I am going to start kissing people in libraries instead of nightclubs .......................................... 23 Hold Fast ........................................................................................................................................... 24 Outliers .............................................................................................................................................. 25

Star Deaths The sky got drunk and dropped all its stars shimmer sadly outside nightclubs bottle tops and cigarette butts (I left lipstick on his lust notes pinned them to my oesophagus so that all the kisses Ive had since still taste like him) beneath bare skies those shattered lights slur in stilettos drown themselves in shallow puddles (on my knees I gutter vomit irony bringing him back up every Saturday night when I am drinking to forget) scrape me off the sidewalk please I just dont want to remember supple bodies between sheets exploding sex sweaty, oxygenless atmospheres (some sort of supernovas becoming black holes when he made a boyish promise to love me but didnt.)

Girl Call me girl I cannot possibly be a woman with these brittle bones, with these eyes constantly searching for emergency exits. All my wisdom teeth were impacted, removed before my twenty-first birthday. Ive been wearing lipstick in Rosy Nude, making myself up several shades less exposed. I let him hold me between his teeth like a lip bitten in lust, ripped open hastily like condom wrappers, I can talk about fucking all I want but the thought of being comfortable enough with someone to let them love me is terrifying.

Protective I read somewhere that if a man sleeps on the side of the bed closest to the door, he is being protective of you. All the men Ive ever been with sleep wall-side, become frustrated when I steal the sheets and conceal myself in covers because I get cold feet easily. I sleep closest to the door because I am being protective of me, I need clear exits quick getaways escape routes. I need to be able to run when I start wanting to stay.

I am going to sleep naked every single day of my life The riskiest thing I do right now is sleep naked and hope that nothing dramatic happens in the middle of the night like my house catching fire and me having to run outside in my birthday suit because I didnt have time to put any clothes on I would stand on the footpath with the flashing red of the fire engine illuminating my bare flesh and all the neighbours would stare at me as my life went up in flames. If I was ever going to stand nude in front of a bunch of people I would want it to be relatively soon because my body is never going to look better than it does now and it is my eternal nightmare that one day I will go to bed naked and wake up old and when I am old I will have a house full of things I have collected and cant let go of for it is an inevitable nightmare that I will spend my existence accruing possessions I am convinced I need but actually do not need at all. I want to be the kind of risky that packs one small bag and runs away forever. I want to be the kind of risky that sleeps naked because I am in the heady throws of a reckless love and not because I am crawling into bed alone and cant be bothered finding my pyjamas amongst all the useless stuff cluttered on the floor, all the meaningless little anchors of a respectable life.

About a Boy What are you doing in Ireland? asked two attractive Brazilian boys on the bus to Belfast. I kind of just ran away, I murmured mysteriously (seductively?) and one of them smiled and queried, Was it a boy? I shook my head but he said, Its always about a boy. and I laughed because he was cute and probably right, and we were in Ireland and there was a mist whispering lovely lies to the landscape like soft kisses, like the threads of a dream I could almost remember, if I closed my eyes for a second and just concentrated on the shape of your face. I took to drinking rich and bitter Guinness trying not to fall in love with everything I could let myself be if I remembered to forget, if I remembered the way sharp edges of life smudge in dimly lit pubs, down cobblestoned backstreets in Dublin. Its true what they say, though, Guinness tastes better in Ireland. Bus journeys with Brazilian boys end and you never see new friends again, the barman issues last call, turns on the lights things harden, sharpen, harsh and bright mist evaporates, escapes the earths embrace

and I cant quite recall the arrangement of your face.

I will do something with my life, even if it kills me Life feels like a dark desperate night trading kisses in cemeteries swigging spirits from brown paper bags until we are dull and blunt and drunk enough to dance on the graves of past dreams Dont do it. Run. Run. Run. Dont let me become someone who sits sedately in her living room watching ambition die.

Punk Rock I spent six years folding my skin over the scars I got from spending too much time inside my head and not enough hours making myself beautiful like over-plucked eyebrows. I wish Id found punk rock back when peroxide blondes were beating me down and I was wasting lunchtimes in the B-Block bathroom holding pencil sharpener blades to my wrist or cutting sharp angles with compass points trying to calculate how long it would take for me to feel better. I think thats why I want to live in London. There are so many people in London that even the outcasts arent really outcasts, they can all get together in a sweaty room and scream out lyrics that peroxide blonde bullies will never understand, the bass in their bones like some kind of remedy. But here in my hometown there are no punk rock bands no sweaty rooms for drowning mistakes and venting hate and I am the only weird one around so it gets kind of lonely. And even though Ive unfolded my skin so all my scars can breathe and I am no longer ashamed to spend most of my time inside this beautifully insane mind and I am mostly happy I still calculate: Six months, three weeks and two days until I arrive in London.

I had to run away from my psychology degree to keep my sanity I have 1,897 unread emails in my inbox and a $694 fine on my university library card from when I ran away to England without returning copies of Clinical handbook of obsessive-compulsive disorder and related problems and Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process I feel like four years of university didnt teach me anything except how to sit amongst honours students and not scream at them when they discuss whether or not people who cut themselves do so because they get some sort of sexual pleasure from the sight of blood, then try to make everything significant at the .05 level and place all our unbalanced brains in neat little boxes. I find it poetically ironic that I had to run away from my psychology degree to keep my sanity. But when I stood on the West Coast of the Isle of Skye with whisky seeping through all the holes in my messed up mind suddenly I was burning to create something from my obsessive and disordered and unbalanced brain, and I had a better understanding of being human than I could ever hope to learn cooped up in a classroom writing lab reports. I just want to tell you that yes the world is confusing and yes there are some very sad people but there are also very happy people and people who are both sad and happy at the same time and people who are neither sad nor happy because they are too anxious to do anything except check that they didnt kill someone with the thoughts they were having just now and these things might correlate or they might not correlate and they might be significant at the level of .05 or maybe we are all just doing the best we can

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whatever way we know how, and thats okay. And its okay not to understand everything. And its even okay not to understand anything at all. My advice is to run away to the UK and forget about answering emails for a while.

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Poetic Science My body is made up of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms and 6,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 of them cant think about anything except the way you felt beneath me on those nights devoid of gravity. But hey, experts say the atoms that make up matter never actually touch each other. So when I thought we were skin to skin I was in fact only floating slightly above your body suspended by the repulsion between electrical charges. I guess this means that when we kissed our lips never completely connected and when we fucked we never entirely touched and you leaving indefinitely shouldnt really matter all that much. Isnt it comforting to find poetry in science? Every year my body rejuvenates 98% of its atoms. Tomorrow I swear to God only 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of me will still think about you.

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The smallest bones The biggest, longest, strongest bone in the human body is the femur. The biggest organ is the skin, a protective barrier shielding vulnerabilities. The biggest mistake I made this year was letting you leave teeth marks on the smooth inside of my thigh. The smallest bones in the human body are the three auditory ossicles. The human ear can register air vibration as soft as one tenth the diameter of an atom but I think your love vibrates on a frequency too low to pick up and its taken me the longest time to place all my upper-body weight (the heaviest of hearts) on the strongest part of my skeleton and walk away. (I broke each of my smallest bones straining to hear those three words you never said.)

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Five retrospective indications that I would be rubbish at relationships i. During my childhood I never had the patience nor the careful fingers needed to make daisy chains. Id only get about three or four flowers threaded before my clumsy hands broke the sequence. ii. Restaurants make me feel nervous and stupid. I never learnt French. I do not know what tenderloin of pork avec compte de pommes is if its pork and applesauce, just say pork and goddamn applesauce. To any boy who might one day want to take me on a date: lets walk to the beach and buy fish n chips, eat from the newspaper parcels on our laps as we watch the ocean roll in and out and in again, our romance soundtracked by the squawks of a hundred hungry seagulls and their melancholy calls well call it a metaphor for the human condition, for our all-consuming need to devour love. iii. My mother once compared my sex life to that of our mutt we were walking him down at the river and he was trying to hump every other dog that got within sniffing distance. The funniest thing about this is that the amount of people I have slept with remains in the single digits and I have never had a one night stand. (The funniest thing about this is nothing at all.)

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iiii. I am messed up. I feel sinful and small. I cannot sleep in the presence of other people. I have Goldilocks-like senses: his body is too warm, his bed is too cold this position is too entangled, the other is too detached and the streetlight outside the window is brighter than the fluorescent bulbs in a dentists surgery (if I close my eyes how do I trust him not to extract each of my teeth while I am floundering in the dark shadows of my dreams?) v. I read too many books. At first they gave me hope for princes and heroes, happy endings. Now I am versed in sobering sadness drunks and druggies crippling minds diseased by terrible ideas, boys who pose as poets and poets who write prose about fucking and sex that doesnt live up to the sonnets I am wary of everyone now I know how these things finish I am a cynic stuck in the clutches of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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I deserve better than you, but You use sex like apostrophes something to place where other parts are missing your diction dictates that our time together be put inside parentheses (a digression or an afterthought, material not essential to the sentence) and yet you keep slipping ellipses onto the end of all our interactions (a soft kiss, the use of darling or baby, a suggestion to see me again sometime) so I am left questioning, dangling from the dangerous hope that I might be more than a simple placeholder. I dont know how to read you. Fuck this. If you are going to fuck me you need to follow up with either a full stop or a full story.

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Hyperbole In Athens I was eating lunch alone so an old man came over and sat next to me which was nice and then he said I looked like a movie star which was probably meant to be nice but was actually a little creepy and very hyperbolic. I like to learn the root of words like hyperbole from the Greek huper, above + ballein, to throw. While I was in Athens there were riots and the people threw bottles at police and the police threw tear gas at people but the rioting only happened at night because it was too hot to fight during the day which sounded a lot like life to me. Sometimes when it is dark I make heroic plans to change the way things are but then I wake in the morning and do nothing. Before I caught the subway out of the city I bought a pendant with Athena on it because Athena is the virgin goddess of wisdom and warfare and she fights her own battles and she doesnt need a man. When you were above me you said you loved me a little bit which was a hyperbole and then you climbed down and threw me as far as you could out of your life.

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Carpe diem I keep words like carpe diem beneath my coat because sometimes I feel like skinny dipping. Take off all your clothes. You might think Latin is a dead language but I am sick of not feeling alive.

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Acta est fabula, plaudite! i. You are the only person I know who uses the term per se in the middle of an email exchange about the dirty things wed do to each other if we were in the same city right now. (I am the only person I know who gets turned on by Latin terminology.) ii. A list of places you have recently been: Wellington, Sydney, London, Berlin, Belfast, Boston, my bed, her bed, and her bed and her bed and her bed etc. (the direct translation of et cetera is and the others used to describe a list that could continue ad infinitum.) iii. You typed You, my dear, are a catch. And a great writer. I am easy prey. All I do is fall. My magnum opus will be a bitter story about boys who spin webs with their words then scuttle out the door. iiii. Ive been having an argument

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with myself about you. It has continued ad nauseam the same thoughts over and over and over almost to the point of sickness. v. I need one of two things: a deus ex machina (a plot device whereby a confusing, seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved) or, to become a tabula rasa (a clean slate, not affected by impressions or experiences.)

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Hunger The photo where another girl reaches to touch your thigh under the table captured before her hand makes contact but I know she did, she made contact with you in all the ways I am unable to like probably rubbing your dick through your jeans. Taken to skipping lunch - part intentional, part unintentional mostly because I forget to be hungry and then at around 3p.m.when I am suddenly very hungry I like to sit with it to feel my stomach angry and empty and trying to eat itself, a physical sensation for the want of missing you. I have lost some things since I last saw you not long ago: forty dollars sanity two hair ties sleep and sleep and sleep 1.3kgs This winter I am either getting wasted or wasting away I want to do lines of oblivion off the coffee table in some other boys apartment (cocaine is an appetite suppressant) instead I lie face down on my bed and suffocate feel my hipbones dig into the mattress strangle my confusion in the sheets Ill starve out these hungry thoughts about you Ill quit craving your kisses (the brain scans of cocaine addicts and rejected lovers look startlingly similar) get up and weigh myself - manual scale and then the digital one pray that another few grams of you have disappeared.

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Target practice is not the same as the real thing I am getting good at going out. Getting better at forgetting. Dancing on broken bottles, spilt beer sleazy old man stares. Red lipstick, sheer top. Last night I promised a boy in a club that I would marry him. The music was loud. He might have actually been asking if Id come back to the barracks with him, he was in the army. He had nice arms. Secure hold, safety catch. Its easier not to think about you when someone else is thinking about me. You are hard work. You are the staircase in my office-block brain that all my thoughts keep falling down, I hit my head on every goddamn step. Come back. We can elevator kiss. Press all the buttons at once and fuck things up, suspended between twenty-ninth floor and rooftop. Emergency stop sex. Cable snap, shaft plummet.

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Kiss me like you didnt yesterday. Its not too late. Id probably still break my neck back flipping for you.

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I am going to start kissing people in libraries instead of nightclubs The people I have been kissing taste like predictable plot lines rising action - climax - falling action love like inconsequential footnotes. But I keep one eye open when lips connect because Im still searching for you, the trembling anticipation before first contact you will read the inside of my mouth like I am the most important text you have held in your hands an encyclopaedia full of facts you are living to learn a poetry anthology containing the gritty secrets of existence a dictionary providing new words for you to dip your tongue into you will study me like I am a Bible and then put your faith in science because the chemistry between us hums like overheated bodies or blood-sucking mosquitos magnetised to soft skin on hot summer nights or radiators on those cold winter mornings when you pull me back to bed.

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Hold Fast I dont think Ive ever been in love. I have leapt into holes that looked like they had something shiny at the bottom but all they turned out to be were almost-dry wells with high walls nothing down there except muddy slush that sucked at my shoes until I was so set in one place that I just stood still. Ive only ever tripped a little and slipped into comfort slept in the same bed and pretended it wasnt weird when we didnt want to kiss each other for weeks. All my long term relationships have sailed like scenic cruises skimming the smooth surface of pretty harbours, sheltered and safe. I will ask my next boyfriend if he knows that sailors used to get Hold Fast tattooed across their knuckles, for good grip on the rigging of salt-washed ships in violent seas. I want someone with Hold Fast stamped on his desire so that hell still tear at my clothes and grasp at my heart even when romance is rough and weve realised that security isnt enough and were taking on water way out in deep sea with no sight of land, screaming curse words like the most salt-crusted of all sailors love and life and everything else on the very verge of capsizing.

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Outliers To the broken boys who prop themselves up with poetry anthologies and punk rock CDs bleeding ink tattoos under band t-shirts and dreams as torn as a pair of worn blue jeans: Kiss me with all your loneliness. We can be the outliers in this small towns boring cluster of average. Your argument is flawed. Let me fucking love you.