Is it fair? To say I’ve loved you for so long? I say it like it’s worth something; a real badge of honour, a testament to how I feel. I’ve loved you for a hundred years feels the same as I’ve loved you for ten minutes - I felt sick after ten minutes, I feel sick now and I said that once, to this guy, do you remember him? He was short, with big brown eyes and a great smile, he stayed for a summer. He’d come to my room in the middle of the night, lock the door and when he smiled at me it was all I could do; smile back. Afterwards, I spoke about you, sometimes. He said, “What’s love like then?” I didn’t know what to tell him, in the end I said it was feeling sick all the time. He didn’t look impressed, but with love or with me, I don’t know.
(Source: hurryuppleaseitstime, via hurryuppleaseitstime)
ANWEN: For so long I told myself, and I was right really, that couples - relationships that revolve around being in love are just weak because look at how fragile they are, look at all the things that ruin them, forever and that’s it, we’re done, we hate each other now. Look at it next to relationships with family, or friends or both because they are so much stronger and stouter and they last so much longer. A lover isn’t going to be that one, central, constant person in your life, they’re not going to be the one that puts in all the hours, or the years and they won’t ever make it easy for you. When was the last time a friend, or a brother said, “we need to take some time, we need to work on our relationship, it needs work”? Like them together is a thing outside of them, this seperate entity, this “us”, this “we”. That doesn’t happen so often.
So, I’ve decided, I was telling myself this because I was bitter and sad and whatever, but there was something in it, I just didn’t follow it through, I didn’t get to the root of why two people are so, so different when it comes to romance and I’ve thought about it and I think it has to do with meeting a person. Who remembers the day they first met their siblings or their parents, that friend they’ve known their whole life? It’s just a day, one that gets completely lost and forgotten and stops existing, but when you fall for someone… Even if you don’t, even before you do, you make a note of it. It’s an important day, it’s one day out of the thousands that won’t get away from you. When you meet someone, when you’ve fallen in love; a relationship like that takes a day and puts it somewhere safe, preserves it, keeps it pristine. A reward for all the disappointment and misery and crap that will inevitably come your way. People really care about memories, you’d be surprised just how many of them - that’s all their lives are. So I guess it’s worth it, to them, to me. In the end.
ANWEN: Did you know that I’m a pacifist? I’ve been thinking, maybe I should be a vegetarian too, they seem to go together and the smell of cooked meat… A pacifist. I always thought of it as a description, not a way of thinking or this, like, staunch, idealogical belief; just an identifier. For me. I thought it said something about me. Like, maybe that I have a gentle heart or a kind soul, a sound moral compass, a better way of doing things. That I’m shy too, which is stupid, as if people who shut themselves away don’t have violence in them. Sometimes that’s why.
But I’m a pacifist, or I always was, I don’t know. With him I kept thinking, how satisfying it would be to just… smash his skull in! Just, punch him in the head, over and over, like I was trying to break down a door. That’s what it was like anyway, talking to him.
Do you think it was on purpose? That he said so little and did so little and was so little? He would never have chosen a word, any word to describe himself. Not shy, not violent, not smart, cool, quirky, cowardly… The rest of us do it all the time, every day, we want to be sure, we want to be clear. It had to be on purpose. Sometimes I’d get so angry about it. I’m still a pacifist, I think, but I wouldn’t use that word now, it doesn’t say anything about me any more.
I hate it when someone sticks furniture in all the corners of their home, like they have no idea what an important thing a corner can be to a person, a safe thing. Sometimes they’re just the safest place you can sit, sometimes I think my back’s become a right angle. Corners are an architectural coup d’état… You get round rooms right? In some houses. But that’s not ever going to take off. You need something to be backed into, you need a limit, you need something in your life that you can bash your brains against that’s bricks, that’s there.
Not everyone’s the same, some people hate a building, some people never figured out that the best hiding place is between the wall and the hinges when the door’s thrown wide open. I know the difference between enclosed spaces and open ones, even if they both press in on you, it’s what’s worse. Everything’s worse than nothing, it has to be.
CHARLOTTE: I do care, I do, I care about you. Please Peter I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it. I just… I say things and I don’t mean them.
PETER: Why?! Why would you say something like that? Why would anyone?
CHARLOTTE: I don’t know, I don’t know. Sometimes I want to know how much I can say. Sometimes I want to know that I could be the worst person in the world and completely unrecognisable and it wouldn’t matter, you wouldn’t leave. I’m going there anyway, I’m headed in that direction. Worst person ever is cooking, she’s in the oven, she’ll be ready for you in a month or so. The recipe made no fucking sense. The secret ingredient is crazy bitch. And a pinch of salt.
I’m sorry, I am, but I keep thinking… I need to know how long it’s going to be, until it’s just me here.
CHARLOTTE: I am, I’m alright. I’m just trying to say… I wish that they made Science and Maths and those things more beautiful and I don’t know, I wish they tried to get it through to us more, so we understood it properly. Because I was done with school by the time it clicked with me, what atoms and everything were and what that meant. I wish I’d got it earlier so I knew more and I could explain it more. Because I think that’s the best way to, to… It’s just that I can be a bit pathological you know? I can’t sit still and I’m always buzzing - which is good I think, I like it, but I want to say something still, I want to give you something still and certain and if I just knew what I was talking about… I feel like I fell asleep in biology or physics one day and missed the lesson on why every cell in my body wants to be a cell in your body.
Wolf
We wrote
a live-action novel
with sentimental contents.
Love, and such, legends;
the sort that exist
and involve moonlight.
You were almost prehistoric
we knew, aware of your
enduring an age (several).
Surviving what the Mammoths,
the Mesonychid,
failed to. Not mythical then,
but old. A veteran.
I, your sly, red cousin,
(so honest until I stopped)
have no such nobility.
No pride. No deep,
guttural, howling pride.
I reek of bins and night,
of concrete streets, of chickens.
I have that common way, moving
between parked cars, past
young women, around
fences. I loop the loop -
you loup-garou.
I was so honest ‘til I stopped.
You were driven from The West,
are more prevalent now amongst
forests with taller trees;
white pines in the
soils of Eastern Europe.
I inhabit the suburbs these days,
and sly, and slow,
I prey upon the pretty pets
of happy children.
I am so very sorry.
We have not met in months.
Legend says that you will
rip out the throat of a liar.
I took far too many photographs last year, so many you can’t even count them, hundreds of the things. They’re blurry, messy - close ups of my thumb and demon red eyes. A few good pictures slipped through, as they will when you work that way. I think it’s like the rule of infinity: an infinite number of monkey’s with an infinite number of cameras.
There’s a photo of the two of us by a tree and she is so much shorter than I am and shinier too, a bright blonde bob that week. When I stare at it long enough her hair seems to change, like it always did, in constant flux. She never knew what she wanted to be.
It’s not one of the good ones, this picture. The sun was in the wrong place, our faces fall almost completely into shadow and we are stood so awkwardly, posed with our arms slung around each other’s shoulders. We weren’t usually tactile, hardly ever hugging because there was no need – hugs and kisses demonstrate love and you don’t need to tell your sister you love her, she always knows.
Your sister is not your best friend. She is not someone you can share everything with. She will have a whole other life you are completely unaware of, she will be a person you could never know or understand. She will fall in love and keep secrets – she will think thoughts you couldn’t possibly imagine. Your sister is as close to yourself as you can get. Mine looks up at me from a badly lit photograph and our jaw lines are identical, our noses, our cheeks, our wide foreheads… The eyes are the same shape but hers are bigger; a deep, dark blue. I can hardly see her but she is so alive in that picture, she exists so absolutely that I believe it and I just know that someone so real can’t have stopped, I know it isn’t possible.
I don’t know why I’m trying to articulate this – what it is to have a sister, because it isn’t words and it isn’t something to discuss or figure out, it’s something to feel. It’s always there, only dull because it’s absolutely consistent; this is the one thing I would die and kill for. This is the selfish love of a narcissist, loving someone who comes from exactly the same place as me, made of the same stuff but it’s also as pure as you can get because there is no ulterior motive – no parental obligation or daughterly need to please, none of the conditions and demands that friends and lovers bring to the table. We lived so closely, in each others pockets and we were there before we became who we are. I met her when she was nothing, a few hours old and underweight. Not a beautiful baby with chubby cheeks but red, wrinkled, skeletal, waving her papery limbs. They let me hold her but stayed close by; it wasn’t that long since I was the same size, no matter how much I looked the little grown up with my serious face and dark hair already past my shoulders. There is a picture of this moment too.
Oh we were never afraid of water. We learnt to swim fast and well, we flung ourselves into the cold English sea, we pushed each other’s heads under the surface at the pool, paddled to the deep end when the wave machine came on. She was always scared of spiders and I carried them from the bath for her. I wanted to have been haunted by dreams of fathomless depths, of struggling to breathe, of flooding lungs and heavy clothes pulling her down. That is the way it would have made sense, if I had seen it coming, if it had been a great bird of prey, constantly circling overhead. Cruel fate, destiny leading her there is kinder than chance, it has meaning, it can be picked apart.
She died and I don’t know what that is, I don’t know where she is. I’m so scared she’s nothing now, less than that day I held her and she was so thin and ugly but it’s all I can think because we were never afraid of water. It doesn’t all fit together, it doesn’t make sense, it’s just hundreds and hundreds of photographs, taken at random and occasionally one will turn out well and it makes me think she’s gone completely, shut down while everything that made her and made me rots away. I don’t know why I am trying to explain this, what it is to have a sister who you love and who leaves you, because what good will it do and I can’t anyway. All I can do is cry, it’s all anyone can do. We cry so hard and it hurts so much and that’s all I have to hold onto now; that there is a place that isn’t your body that can feel such pain.
Anwen: Who are you when you leave? And where do you go when the lights go out and is it a place you’re afraid of or somewhere you’d stay if you could or both? What do you remember about your seventh birthday? Who were your friends and did you cry every other day because you thought you might lose them? Because children are fickle, because playground politics are brutal, because they were all a cut above and you could never seem to pick the right coat, or backpack, or words. Did anything like that ever happen to you? Would you remember, every day, if it did? Who will you be when you leave this room?
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