amaryllis

poetry & prose

by claire lontis
 amaryllis
by claire lontis
illustrated by tanya scott
cover art by leonie psillis
Please be aware that this anthology
contains content which may be
distressing.
 Botany

I dreamt of small spaces in forests

and of you, speaking in static,
with ammunition capping your teeth,
and I- I replied with a bitter
abstinence,
a betterment;
you, the haunted, heretic heroine,
paused
and my body
divided into spores
sewn into the itching opal-cubed earth
I gorged myself on botany
and you deepthroated bouquets
and we split ourselves open
down to the roots
I dreamt
of small spaces in the universe
and my veins
untangled from my wrists, stretched out
to the stars
quelling some
half-hearted agony
 Anemone

Marsha M Linehan,
Mother of Borderline,
Matriarch of a distinctly female
agony,
said that borderlines are like burn
victims;
That we have no outer layer of
emotional skin
and that we feel agony
at the slightest touch.
The monochromatic landscape of the
borderline
who waltzes to her own requiem,
cloying purple prose upheaved on
napkins in coffee houses,
spilling blood like verses.
It is so easy to romanticise
the maudlin of self-flagellation
Suffering in legato
Recovering in staccato
Mother,
I am sorry for the maelstrom of my
continuing adolescence
I am sorry for tearing through the
skin of your first born
I am sorry for voiding my vessels
onto mattresses
and for swallowing pills like
prayers
I am sorry for lacerations lain on
muslin
But I lack an outer skin
and this chaotic contamination
is a noose that I was born with;
an umbilical cord
and I haven’ t the strength
to untie it
 gilden

lithium limbs carry me

through these labyrinthine walls
through this pantheon of the
dej ected
a week ago
I choked capsules
down
into gold-crested innards
2 53
2 53
2 53
excavation of the self
lilac lungs and syrup lifeblood
slunk sunken onto my mother’ s couch

cataclysmic glimpses of
a makeshift
ascension
 Begotten
Group therapy and the inhabitants of
the room split themselves inside out.
And as the traumas were spoken aloud
the heavens opened. Mabel looked up to
see there was no roof; only bleeding
chrysalises falling from the skies,
leaking constellations of pupae strewn
amongst the similarly semi-formed
beings of the room. Sunk into the
battlefield of the room, wombs
independent of a female form. Traumas
actualised into pulsating cocoons
seeping blood like slivers of beating
hearts. She caught one in her hand and
pulled herself upright from the
bleeding soil of her past, blood swept
saccharine under her fingernails,
palpitating outward from this strange
form. She observed it and knew it
wasn’ t real. She could tell because of
the glimmering on the edge.
That’ s how she could always tell.
“Are you with us, Mabel?”
Her dreamscape shattered and she was
sitting in an armchair and the young
psychology maj or with that damn
sardonic tone was looking at her.
“Where did you go?”
Mabel tells the psychology maj or to fuck
off and leaves the room.
Two decades ago, when she was 30, she
had her first miscarriage. She’ d birthed
it, a floppy-limbed gesture of a human
and had held it to her chest for an hour
before the doctors took it from her. The
corporeal form of her dreams was
starting to decay. Four decades
beforehand her stepdad had slid under
her lavender bedsheets. And she confides
in those in the smoking area that maybe
it was for the best she’ d lost the baby.
How could she have protected a child
from this world and the monsters that
walk its surface?
A broken bone mends itself under
plaster, but the anatomical overlaps of
bone will show under an X-ray years
after. It’ s like golden j oinery on a
ceramic plate; shattered ceramics glued
with glimmering lacquer. People who were
broken, but are now whole. Only some can
see the glint of the adhesive used to
patch them back up.
The children born of the mistakes of
their forbearers. It’ s always people who
break people.
A generation or more of flain-fleshed
victims imbibed with the nectar of anti-
psychotics and still fallen; haunted
father, dysthymic daughter. Type-B herds
heralded by the foulness of half-
forgotten assaults; exuberant messes of
gloriously woeful women.
If a broken bone is still visible under
an X-ray, then psychological trauma
reveals itself under certain similar
conditions.
Mabel was 4 9. Stranded forms, fragments
of what once was and what she wants to
be. The psych maj or had followed her out
the room and her mouth was moving like
an open wound but the heavens were too
loud and Mabel couldn’ t hear her.
 Epoch
Foulweather friends, spitfire lovers
we sit haloed in cigarette stubs
and I look at her and know
that she is gestating sadness, that it
is an expanse within her;
as it is
within me.
She sits on the crest of the garden
and in my sun-bathed reverie I imagine
flowers spiraling up her spinal cord
and sprouting from her fingertips
her eyes a paradisiacal, lacquered blue
her heart-shaped mouth tastes like a
confection
and our flayed arms hold one another
and together
we are conquerors, together
we will no longer bleed
like hysterical Catholics claiming
stigmata, together
we will leave this bed of flowery
decomposition, together
we will transcend this void and find
the elysian, together
we will trade stitches for kisses, and,
together,
we will hold hands and recuperate-
-no, not j ust that-
Together, we will eclipse our former
selves and, together
step out of the skins of our agony
and into ecstasy.
 Inertia

veins drawn from the moon

her words acrid with the second-
hand salt of tear ducts;
coruscation of star-bound stares
sad again- that sadness which sits
spitfire-sweet in the lining of
your skin. It spreads at the rate
of your pulse and poisons you
from
the
inside
out
 Resurgence

I held the knife to my hand. Negotiated

the edge to an inward slope. I held my
hand down at a right angle to my arm,
flexed crippled fingers, thumb pressed
into the meat of my palm; like the hand
of someone experiencing a seizure.
Fittingly it trembled. I had not yet
overcome that.
I tried to breathe mindfully but I
caught my breath trying to run ahead,
slipping over itself, tripping. I
shuddered inward and started to cry
soundlessly. The kind of tears that
stream bright-hot, one after the other.

The knife was expensive. Lacquered

wooden handle with a paper-slight
blade. Etched with some German name.
I’ d told him it needed to be the same
knife, and if that wasn’ t possible, a
replica; same brand, same model if
possible. The results would be
optimised. It was a burgeoning science,
self-taught, but so far the method had
worked.
I took an almighty intake of air and
slipped the tip of the knife between my
right point and middle finger, into the
fleshy web of subcutaneous tissue.
Approximately 1. 2 cm deep. I wasn’ t the
best at approximating such details so I
followed the Sharpie markings on my
skin. A self-surgery. In, and out. Like
a vaccination. There was a lot of blood.
Hands are ridden with capillaries. And
the livewire sparks of nerve endings.
I fell back, my flayed hand flopped to
my side and I exhaled all I was worth.
‘ No fuckin way! ’
I glanced blearily at Terrance, who was
pulling the dressings from his hand. As
he held the bare flesh aloft we both
watched as it sewed itself back
together; globules of fat cells closing
in reverse, the outer dermis
reconnecting- and the outer layer of
skin closed over. The lines on his palm
re-aligned; the ones we’ d use to tell
our futures in primary school.
Terrance stared at this resurgence of
flesh and he shook his head.
‘ They told me you were good. This is
amazing- I don’ t even have a scar.
I’ m gonna be able to go back to work
tonight. I can’ t tell you how much this
means. ’
I drew my uninj ured hand over my face.
‘ Yep. That’ s two hundred. ’
‘ Sweet, easy. Dude- this is amazing. I
can’ t even tell you. I thought for sure
I wouldn’ t be cooking for like a
month. ’
I didn’ t know what it was with
customers sharing their life stories.
In my old work, men were the same.
Something about services of the flesh
drove them to overshare.
Terrance slapped four fifties on my
desk. He wiped the knife clean and
stuffed it into his backpack.
‘ Wait- so what happens to you now?’
I wrapped my hand in the pre-prepared
damp gauze. ‘ Now, I have the
inconvenience of an overcrowded waiting
room and stitches. And I’ ll have your
scar long after I spend that money of
yours. ’
‘ Damn, ’ Terrance hesitated, and then
placed another fifty on the desk.
‘ You’ re a real-world superhero.
Power of healing. They weren’ t
kidding. ’
I gestured to the door. Terrance
blathered on with increasingly lofty
accolades as he left and I nodded and
grimaced a smile, wounded hand held to
my chest. The wooden door thudded close
with him on the other side and I
slumped into my office chair. I threw
open the top drawer of my desk and
procured a package of Zofran. They were
wafers, like plaster in appearance, and
cleared up nausea in a way that felt
much more magical than any of my
abilities.
Once the Zofran kicked in I took out a
vial of lidocaine, a syringe, gauze and
suture kit. I wasn’ t in the mood to
deal with waiting at the emergency
department but I couldn’ t leave this
laceration unattended to- I’ d have a
great slash of scar tissue and a few
weeks of down-time if I let it be. I
had to have it sewn or sew it myself.
It was neurovascularly intact- I’ d
checked the original wound before
taking on the case. I wasn’ t gonna give
myself nerve damage for 2 00 bucks.
Although I’ d done worse things for
less.
I’ d rather slip a knife through my
flesh than suck cock.

_______________________________________

That night I dreamt again of men with

open hot mouths and grasping fingers
and woke up to hear myself screaming.
When does persistence cross the line of
consent?
When does a financial transaction
become a maj or crime?
And when the fuck does it stop aching?
I sat up in bed and closed my fist
around the wound I’ d inflicted the
night before so that it ached. I leant
into the pain.
It was 4 am. I walked drearily to the
edge of my one-room apartment and
picked up my work phone. It was the
same burn phone I’ d used when I was
Ophelia. Four messages from unsaved
numbers. All of them accidents from
drunken nights out with attached images
as per my MO. A split chin, a
dislocated elbow, a broken fibula and a
glassing to the cheek.
I accepted all but the broken fibula-
fuck that- and advised the dislocated
guy to smoke a j oint and get a buddy to
pull his arm til it popped.
Who would have thought that a high-
school dropout would be giving wholly
untrained medical advice to ex-Scotch
College fuckboys looking to pay their
way out of their inebriated mishaps?
I’ d charge a thousand for the glassing.
My face was already gridded with a
year’ s worth of glassings; herringboned
lines in shades of lilac.
Most scars take two years to fully heal,
to fade through the spectrum from mauve
to white. I’ d taught myself; perused
mid-century anatomy books from the
second-hand bookstore near the markets.
The plasticine white of the epidermis;
the subcutaneous adipose tissue threaded
with minor blood vessels and nerves; the
fascia, a hymen-like membrane before the
dark meat of muscle. I had taught myself
the location of maj or nerves and
arteries that transverse the underside
of our skin like a roadmap. There is a
solace in anatomy. It’ s static, factual.

In his youth, my grandfather had loved a

woman named Anneliese.
According to family lore they had an
impetuous romance which ended when he
fled Germany after the war. She married
another man but still longed for him.
Sixty years later, delirious on her
deathbed, it was not her lifelong
husband she called out for; it was my
grandfather.
Sixty years of heartache must hurt worse
than anything I’ d ever done to myself.
I placed a bowl of food down for Parsnip
who mewled in acceptance. I put the
percolator on the stovetop and sunk
cross-legged to the kitchen floor. I
could almost reach my bed from the
countertop if I stretched out.
Sticking myself like a voodoo doll
wasn’ t bringing in enough to get a
bigger apartment.
And hell, did this place feel small when
I hadn’ t left my house for any reason
other than to go to the hospital in
twelve months.
I sat on the fourth-floor balcony with
my legs dangling over Grote Street,
black coffee and clove cigarette at
hand. Watched the straggling revellers
staggering on the street below.
Inhaled and exhaled and watched the
moon, waxing gibbous, paling in the
upcoming dawn. I’ d agreed to let the
glassing victim come at his convenience
and so had wrapped myself in a satin
dressing gown. It was midsummer and the
heat from the day before rose still from
the road; the smell of bitumen and
melted tar.
These kinds of mornings always reminded
me of getting up for school right before
summer break; standing with limited
patience in the hallway, Mum slathering
me in sunscreen; pleated dresses and
sandals and legionnaire’ s caps.
Protecting me from the sun before
sending me into the world as though it
was the only thing that could hurt me.
The landlord had slipped my mail under
my door. He knew I wouldn’ t come down
for it, and it was a small kindness I
was thankful for. I threw aside the bank
statements and opened the one labelled
Guttmann & Son’ s Legal Services. Stared
at it. Threw it onto the bed.
The glassing guy came stumbling in at
around 6, a globule of congealed blood
on his left cheek, like some perverse
rouge.
He sat on the couch- faux leather; blood
stains had wrecked my goddamn Söderhamn.

The guy was sodden with sweat and beer,

his face and hair flaked with dried
blood. He didn’ t speak to me, j ust
glared at the wall. I pointed the desk
lamp at his face and inspected the
wound. Cleaned out the blood with an
alcohol wipe to expose the tissue. I
used a small ruler to measure the length
and depth as best I could. 2 . 8cm long,
0. 8cm deep. Superficial, but gnarly. I
pulled out a mirror and marked out my
face as though this were a pre-operative
procedure. I guess it was.
When I was 6, I spilled a drink on my
dad’ s lap. He ripped my favourite toy
rabbit, Fluffy, from me and tore it
apart with his bare hands. I ran crying
to mum, hysterical at the destruction of
my favourite toy, and she gave me a
cuddle and stitched Fluffy back up.
Paternal destructor, maternal healer.
‘ I wanted to smash the cunt, I tell ya, ’
this guy said, trying to get a look at
my face as I measured and marked up my
cheek.
‘ Seems he was the one who smashed you.
What brand?’
‘ Huh? I reckon he was an Arab, the
fuckin-’
‘ The bottle. What brand was it?’
‘ The what?’
‘ This, ’ I dug an alcohol swipe over the
laceration and he flinched, ‘ what brand
of beer bottle did this guy use?’
‘ Fucking bitch! Jesus, I don’ t fucking
know. Why the fuck does it even
matter?’
‘ Because, bitch, ’ I dragged the alcohol
wipe through the wound again, ‘ that’ s
how this works. The more accurate the
instrument, the more ideal the result.
Where were you?’
‘ Dogs. ’
I grabbed a Heineken from the selection
in the bar fridge. I upended the bottle
and downed it. I smashed the bottle
against the sink to try and contain the
destruction. The guy flinched. I spun
the bottle around, found a particularly
sharp edge of the bottle and marked off
0. 8cm in.
I positioned myself in front of the
mirror and held the shattered bottle by
to my face. It had to be done in one go.
A glassing in slow motion.
I lowered the glass and let it dissect
the skin, splitting it so that the
layers fell inside out, presenting
themselves as though in an anatomical
diagram. It took about two minutes to
get to the appropriate depth according
to my pre-markings. It was done.
I stared at the wound I’ d inflicted on
myself and in the distance I heard the
guy babble the cursory exclamations of
witchcraft. I didn’ t look at him. He was
moving around me but I didn’ t feel I was
there. He placed a wad of cash beside
me.
He left the apartment and the door
slammed shut.
I sat in front of the mirror, quietened,
still holding the bottle. I could see
that I was crying although I didn’ t feel
it. As though in a trance, I bought the
bottle back down into the mouth of the
wound. I drew it over my face as though
I were a child applying their mother’ s
lipstick, continuing the wound downward.
By the time I’ d stopped, it was shaped
like a question mark in reverse.
I stared at my face and let the blood
fall freely.
I picked up the money the guy had left.
That made 2 800 this week.
I staggered to the bed, dripping blood.
Picked up the letter. The reminder of
the case in its two-month entirety;
recounting the worst night of my life
over and over, the analysis of my
previous work environment leading to the
sharp shock of the acquittal. The
expected contingency fee that morphed
instead into a full-blown charge.
A lump sum of six digits, split like
skin cells into monthly payments.
I held the overdue letter to my chest
and wept.
Amethyst teeth ground to dust-
borderline; the lapse between
calamity and
discord, the
ennui of festering bedridden bodies
fettered in the eye of this hurricane.
Geometry of the
heartline; a kaleidoscope of capillaries
connecting you to
I.
Jubilation and devastation and Atlas
fallen to his knees under this
unheavenly burden;
knowing with such intimacy the spectrum
of
lavish, ripe happiness to
monumental lows-
no rest,
only
purgatory.
Quiet & disquiet; one or the other-
ridden with the dej ection of imagined
abandonment,
shattered opalescent heartache which
leads to
type A Positive-sotted sheets, an
undressing of millennial Ophelia with
open
veins.
wilting limbs lain open with
xiphoid instruments,
yielding saccharine slips, the lifeblood
of this
zymotic illness
 Agaricus

I have this force swilling around my

insides, a presence of a better self,
a potential which lines my skin and
hides between my organs, flitting
gold-brittle and ideal. Any time I am
not chasing her is wasted, because she
is who I need to become. She’ s
prophetical, a vessel
to transcendence. Some gosling-clouded
winter mornings I wake with her
already there, having settled behind
my corneas as I dreamed. I exhale and
she latches on as a second skin, an
armour.
 Dissociation

Because of this
Here
Sliced out of myself staggered
Into multiplicity
Layers of consciousness lain
Like a dissected cadaver
The skin of my sentience is
like tissue paper on a Rolodex
And I flit through these
like cinematic reels
Fast forward and underwater and
removed
Above myself outside myself
And what’ s in here doesn’ t make
sense
Spliced sense of self
Drugged
With the poison of something
unearthly
 Samsara
My psychiatrist asked if it had been a
suicide attempt. I told him it had been
an exorcism. Apparently that wasn’ t very
funny. But honestly, what a stupid
fucking question.
I had de-shelled a formidable amount of
blister-packaged pharmaceuticals
prescribed for my chronic sadness and
cradled handfuls of lolly-hued capsules-
2 56 oblong lavender pills and an
assorted bag of various tried-and-
failed-to-help SSRI’ s and SNRI’ s. These
I chased with a bottle of desperately
cheap champagne. I lay in bed as a haze
formed about me, a pulsating chasm that
vignetted around the room and moved
inward like gravity. Dizzy and with my
heart cluster-ba-booming I felt
everything accelerating, tightening, and
then at pitch-speed it slowed down so
that I felt I was underwater. I blinked
a few times and saw my room, bland,
starch. I’ d cleaned it beforehand. God
knows why. It felt necessary. A part of
the ritual.
The first thing I remember were the
ribbed blue tubes, two of them. Like we
used to clean the pool with. It was a
while before I realised they were
protruding from my mouth like ectoplasm.
And immediately I was angry. My lungs
had listened to me and given up and
someone had forcibly, violently,
mechanically reversed that. It made me
wonder what had happened when I was
unconscious. I’ m not sure, even today. I
never really asked. Just apologised for
the inconvenience and seethed
internally. I had been out for 2 4 hours.
Long enough for mum to look more bored
than distressed. Did you know that they
don’ t allow flowers in ICU? I still
don’ t know why. By the time I got to a
general ward all the bouquets that had
been sent were wilting.
A week or so later I left hospital
barefoot and sat with a coffee outside
the emergency room. The skies had opened
into a torrent; bloated clouds
swallowing the sky upended themselves
upon the city, flooding underpasses and
uprooting trees. And I sat with my weak
flat white on an aluminium-barred chair
and the umbrella above sank inward with
the weight of the rain. There was a
flurry of passage from carpark to the
entrance to the hospital; it was January
and not one person had an umbrella. I
sat there in the aftermath of my second
suicide attempt and it was noon and it
looked like it was midnight. A flash
flood is what they called it. I sucked
on a cigarette and let my coffee go cold
and hailed a cab. The driver spoke in a
thick accent about the bizarre weather
and I fondled the plastic hospital
bracelet.
I sat in the armchair of my
psychiatrist’ s office the next day and
stared at the carpet.
‘ I need to go back into hospital. ’
A different type of hospital. One
without sick bays and equipment that
kept you alive. The type you go when you
want to hurl yourself out of this world
and they placate you with calm voices
and board games and PRN. The night
before I had dreamt I was walking
through the house and in each room
static blared from piles of TVs, each
televising a different disaster;
flickers of floods, fires, war, famine,
riots. I walked through these rooms and
saw disaster in my peripheral and kept
walking.
‘ Yes, I think hospital is a good idea, ’
said my psychiatrist, and I wanted to
ask him how many of his patients had
killed themselves but I thought it best
not to.
And so I was back in. Dragging a blanket
down the hallway with flayed forearms
gulping down clusters of lilac pills
like bird’ s eggs. When I was little a
baby bird had flop-fallen into the pool
and dad pushed me out of the way to
rescue it. I think of some drowning
analogy and dismiss it immediately.
Daddy issues. That’ s the start of it.
It was a month to the day after we’ d
buried Oma. Maybe I was envious of her
passing. My going to hospital wasn’ t as
much an admission as it was an
incarceration. Just like she’ d been put
in that home. We’ d been to say goodbye
six weeks earlier. She had a lung
infection and was on morphine. My
mother, a nurse, stoically advised we
all go and say our goodbyes. There had
been so many close calls- heart attacks
where they didn’ t bother putting a stint
in, strokes where we had to confirm she
was DNR, and she’ d always pulled
through. She started asking us to kill
her. A pillow over the face. She wanted
out and she wanted it bad. I asked mum
why Oma didn’ t j ust kill herself. My
poor mother. Caught between two
generations of women who wanted to die.
Mum said that she didn’ t have the guts
to do it.
Does that make me brave?
We got to the nursing home and weaved
our way through its labyrinthine depths
and nestled at its heart was her room.
Nurses with their heads bowed and us
with words sitting stale on the
underside of tongues. They’ d propped her
head up with a rolled handtowel. She was
grey and green. Her eyes were half open
and her mouth was firmly closed as
though with discontent.
I’ m so sorry. The nurses were
muttering.
Sorry for what? I had thought.
And then it hit me, the weight of that
frail grey body was nothing more than
that, a body.
She passed five minutes ago.
I had never seen a dead body before. It
had a shocking weight to it. A presence,
a gravitas. The air in the room was
permeated with it. Years and years of
being suicidal and here was the reality
of death, thin-lipped and grey-haired
and with a single plastic flower lain
over her chest. She was j ust gone.
Minutes earlier she had been here. Now
she wasn’ t.
She looks like she’ s asleep. My aunt
said through sniffles.
No she doesn’ t, I thought. She looks
fucking dead.

Can you guarantee your safety?

I’ ve always found this question odd.
Can anyone? I suppose it’ s j ust a
matter of legality. An insurance policy
against me inflicting damage on myself.
You have to say yes. Or else you get
your ankles tied to the bed in Short
Stay. They asked me that as I lay in my
would-be deathbed, throat swollen and
irritated from the recent extubation
and unable to talk. I j ust nodded. And
I thought that this must have been how
Oma felt. Too frail to hurt myself but
holy hell did I want to. I thought to
wrench out my arterial line and let
myself bleed out. Can’ t really do that
with a nurse hovering over you 2 4 /7 .
So I swallow pills like prayers and try
to read books through the daze of
benzos. I dyed my hair black and
stained the carpet in my room.
I can’ t bear it. One woman was crying
to a nurse. My room is a coffin.
And I thought nah hon, it’ s to prevent
you from landing yourself in one.
Another woman had tied a ligature and
was pulled from garden room with a
purple face. I saw it on my way out for
a cigarette. She was spluttering and
wheezing. We all seemed to crave death.
That absence. To leave our corporeal
form and all the pain it held for us.
I fucking hate being around other
suicidal people. Girls with slick strips
plasticked to their fawn limbs. Counting
admissions like trophies. Mirror mirror
on the wall, who’ s the saddest of them
all?
People come to visit increasingly less
as your admissions enter double digits.
Mum’ s in Berlin now and I haven’ t even
bothered to tell my friends I’ m back in.
Last time I saw them we were sitting
cross-legged on the floor at Prior’ s
friend’ s place. Someone handed me a
glass bong and I blindly passed it to
the person sitting to my right. Under my
sleeves were 2 6 stitches puckering
surrounding scars. I’ d laughed when I
counted them. One for each year of my
godforsaken life. The guy with the bong
asked what I did with myself. I
answered, I’ m studying, but not right
now, j ust taking some time off, you
know. I generally avoided socialising
j ust to avoid this fucking question.
Hospital was monotonous. I wrote and
read and drank too much coffee and
painted female nudes in watercolour and
avoided meals and smoked. But hospital
isn’ t forever and outside stressors were
mounting. I had to look for a new
housemate soon. Fuck. What the hell do
you put in the descriptor for that?
Must be mental health friendly? Or do
you j ust not tell them and let them
find out when the first of the
ambulances inevitably comes blaring
down the street?
That hadn’ t happened in a while. The
last time I had lost half a litre of
blood and called Ettiene crying because
I didn’ t know if I had hit an artery
and could he please come drive me to
the emergency room again and I’ m so
sorry and I swear I won’ t get blood on
the upholstery. He called an ambulance.
Slick yolky sacks of fat and membranes
of nerve and the meat of muscle,
shockingly dark. A living, bleeding
medical book illustration. I don’ t
remember much else. Not because of
blood loss or shock, but because my
memories of hospitals are like threads
of fairy floss clumped together. It’ s
too messy to pull the strands apart, to
discern when a particular incident
occurred. Attempts, stitches and
depressive episodes have left me
hospitalised more times than I could
say. Sometimes for three hours,
sometimes for three months. So what do
you do with yourself? I’ m full-time
mentally ill.
If the attempt was an exorcism, it
wasn’ t a very effective one. And so I
stave off dark thoughts and swallow
pills and oversleep and try to shower
and avoid phone calls. And still there’ s
no foreseeable ending to this. Still it
goes on. This sadness won’ t shift. I
doubt it ever will. Maybe I’ ll wind up
like Oma, withered and wilting and
asking my one-day daughters to kill me.