I am an appetite
hunger, seduction, lingering fear, momentary goodness
No one saw me crying in the cinema when Ellen yelled at the beast that haunted her and then laid herself down, wrapped herself around him and let him feast. I think I wished they had. “Wait, I’ve met him”, I type and delete a joke. Moustache scratch, half a torture and half a story to tell yourself as you fall asleep, a good day, a daydream to be mistrusted like a night terror. I will watch it on repeat and hunger for fangs. I will watch the interviews and desperately press rose quartz into my face, trying to dig holes like hers. I will rate it four stars and likely over time forget why I got upset, so I save the lines that got me in my notes app cave where I live, but it’s grown too large to see everything I gathered here. Salad and begging him to stay. The last time I bled and a list of names.
I was 10 or so, stood in the entrance to that cave, somewhere towards York I think. Teddies hung by mouldy strings, a boot now a brick. A beam of light shining up and getting caught in a million tiny little cracks and holes, so many little dark corners in itchy stone; a witch statue that followed me home. I punctuated the day by crying, first frozen still as the other kids watched, parents pulling them away from my distress, and then at home, when the darkness of my room made it feel cold and stoney too. I refused to sleep for almost four nights, thinking it wise to outrun the nightmares. But she sat with me, long after my parents had given up trying to soothe me and grown tired of telling me off, when they’d simply shut my door and trapped me in there to deal with it myself, she sat on the edge of my single bed and I sobbed and sobbed until she reached out a rough hand and I reached out my own. I logged onto the family computer and found her each day, scared stiff but running to it. I found the image of the tourist attraction horror again and again, cried myself sick, stayed awake all night holding her shape in my mind, and did it until it didn’t bother me.
I pull your foggy face to the front of my mind and argue with you in the shower. I never get to win. One day I will. One day, I will.
I noticed Ellen was soothed when he came. Just appeared there, almost anticlimactic when he was suddenly in her room because, really, he always had been. Now it was physical, there was a calm to it, even as he loomed over her or threatened her with what she already knew. “I am an appetite” he said and my stomach growled. Filthy, hateful, shameful hunger. To fear something so much it is comforting. To detest something so bad you want to consume every piece. “Would you taste of me?” she whispers soft. It’s only when she sees herself in his eyes that she screams.
What I’m trying to say is wouldn’t run if chased, I don’t think. I have fawned my way through everything, twirled my hair and pressed my lips to an attack. I’ve walked back down the path I should have run, crawled on my hands and knees with a love letter in my mouth to be placed in the palm that hit me.
I fled the living room, scared from the Dr Who episode, but only to the hallway, hid there in the dark, listening to the haunting voices, hypnotised by it, hating it, wanting more, wishing I’d never turned on the tv.
I just tried to make an appointment to give blood, tried to do it urgently like an itch I needed to scratch till it cut through. How bored do I have to be to want to siphon bits off? I ask the question like an exaggeration and each week I learn that it’s not.
Sometimes I wonder if the girls from school still have twilight theme passwords too. You should know I told yours to a friend lately and we laughed about it – I don’t know why I remember that. The smallest fraction of you. I guess a kind of key. A peephole look into who you thought you were. Inflated ego even in the privacy of a character protected box. I think I remember your grin when you told me but maybe that’s just a movie scene; Jack Nicholson, a wolf with a grip on sheep soft cheeks, a Kubrick stare I came to romanticise, Lynchian death behind powder beauty, neon 80s and harsh edges that were glamourous too, for a time. I loved you for too long, so long it scares me. Now I mock your teenage choice of words and numbers at dinner and I think of you, when the girl loses her mind and all the men can do is fail her.
“I have felt you like a serpent crawling in my body.”
“It is not me. It is your nature, your own.”
How long do you have to be gone before I start assigning the affliction to myself instead?
I think I want to curl myself around something horrific and feel pure in its arms. Laid on the chest of a beast, I will glow like light. I will be a feather. The bad bits of me burn away in the casual cruelty of their look up from a cigarette, staring daggers into the world, spitting venom I clean up with a laugh. No chemical in me murkier than the taste of their lips, drinking darkness from the tap until my goodness cuts through or gasps for air in the coming daylight, but not yet. Share a bed with rage, tattooed and callous, let my body feel small. The imbalance in me holding still as they look at me like an angel and I don’t fall in love with anything beyond the middle of the night, when I can watch myself being sweet in the black of their eye and no one else will ever see. He leaves mid-morning, I wash the sheets, I don’t talk about it. I chew shame and left over affection until it fades and I turn to the world again with the burden of myself back in my hands, flecked for a while with left over fur and claw marks to tend to as a reminder of easy, disgusting heaven in a reminder of the beast and me.
I think I want to be the better one – but only in flashes. One night of health. One night to be gorgeous, when all the worse of me lies there, fleshy. One night rationed on occasion, every few months, when I kiss the neck of the things I hate in me and I sleep like a dream in its arms, feeling evil but not as evil as him.
“It feels good. It feels good. It feels good. It feels good.”
“Unite with me in the abyss.” I would crane my neck and kiss death too if he said so. Run to the relief of hell where all the effort it takes to hate someone or respect myself drops. Limp sin, limp danger, limp fear. I yearn for surrender when I hear the cinema crowd wince.
always love your writing💌