Whatever Climbs Back Inside Won’t Be Me
The bus windows at night are the worst because the city fractures me into a machine of parts, my jaw flaring in one pane of light, my mouth somewhere else entirely, my eyes floating like dead fish in the stretch between, each fragment moving at its own pace so I arrive in pieces, never whole, and the glass throws me back at myself in a dozen overlapping versions, all of them possible and all of them wrong, the smell of wet asphalt and brake fluid curling into my nostrils as if the road is whispering its own disease into me, sodium lamps igniting the ridge of my cheekbones until I feel like I’m under police interrogation, and the night air crawls over my skin in a language I almost understand, the same language you hear when strangers’ hands brush you in doorways and you can’t tell if it’s an accident or a claim, and I imagine the city leaning in, pressing its unwashed face into mine, close enough to taste the metallic film of its teeth, murmuring with hot breath that it knows exactly what’s coming and has been waiting, that it’s been mapping my routes and marking my stops, recording the way I duck my head or tilt into wind, how often I slow down before glass. I step into headlight glare for the dare of it, for the brief violence of light across my throat, because in that second I’m undefined, a smear the drivers can’t categorise before they’re forced to slow, and there’s a twisted power in that moment, in making them witness me without naming me, but the power is paper-thin, it evaporates as soon as I catch sight of myself in a pane and the raw unedited truth lands like a flyer no one wanted, curling at the edges, already obsolete. I move through dates like reconnaissance missions, mapping the terrain of faces and light sources, avoiding the kind of shadows that sharpen me in the wrong places, speaking with my hands to keep attention on my wrists and rings and the way my bracelets clang softly when I shift, perfecting the art of sending my laugh across the table so it fills the air between us, so it becomes a sound they drink in rather than a face they interrogate, and every compliment is a forged passport – eyes, voice, presence – I wear them like counterfeits that will dissolve in the rain.
I go to their beds and strip my body down to noise and movement, I make myself a storm loud enough to drown the architecture above my neck, my skin a sheet of percussion, my bones an unscored film reel, and sometimes the light blesses me and I can stay inside myself, but other times a shadow will knife across my profile and I am gone, hovering like a dispassionate god above the bed, watching the scene collapse under the weight of what I’m dragging through it. At home I run experiments in the mirror, pull and press the borders of my face with the calm of someone cutting a wire on a bomb, tilting into shadow to learn where safety lives, pressing forward into brightness to see if seduction is still possible, rehearsing the ghost I’ve been building for months as if it’s already sleeping in the next room, breathing through the pipes, curling into my mattress when I’m not looking, and the horror is in how easily I start to believe it’s real, how naturally I feed it with my hands, how quickly I become the caretaker of something that doesn’t yet exist. The city runs its lessons into my soles: the pitch of a shout from a hundred metres, the direction of a glance heavy enough to carry intent, the silent geometry of doorways that can swallow you without sound, and in exchange I give it my bootprints, my reflection in corner-shop glass between the crisps and the lottery tickets, my hair whipping in back alleys like a flag for a country no one will ever visit.
I keep the flat in winter order even in August, the kind of clean that anticipates inspection, I buy gentle contraband – straws, soups, creams – stash them under the sink like they’re illegal, chart the days in a colour code only I can read, sometimes wake in the night and sit under the bathroom light that bleaches me into something pale and waiting, the patience of a locked door with footsteps on the other side. The river bends my face into shapes I don’t recognise and for a moment I think maybe that’s the truest version, a version not making demands, not asking for loyalty, not pointing a finger, just weather moving across a black skin of water, changeable, inevitable. I touch the cold glass like I’m checking a pulse, tell the reflection you’ve done your job, you kept me alive this long, soon you can rest, and the light will flicker and in that strobing second she’ll tilt her head like she heard me, but I turn away before I find out what she’d say back.
There are mornings when the city feels like it’s made of damp cardboard and bone dust and I run through it in a band tee that smells of mildew, letting buses exhale around me, letting dogs sniff my ankles like I’m salt, sweat turning my face into something slick and radiant in a way the mirror will never acknowledge, and we’ve learned not to face each other in the aftermath of exercise, we respect that boundary. There are days when I lean on a bar and let my eyes turn into a lighthouse – pulse, pulse, pulse – and watch strangers blink exactly when I want them to, drawing them in and then stepping back just far enough, preferring to be the storm behind glass, the dangerous weather you watch from the safety of indoors. Control is not cruelty, control is rationing, control is knowing that once you’re past a threshold I didn’t name I’ll be tender, I’ll be ruinously soft, the kind of soft that lets the woman on the bus tell me about a ring she lost in 1978, that helps a kid find the right platform, that says after you at a doorway and means it for the next ten minutes until the world inevitably reminds me what it’s made of.
I think about taking photographs of this face as it is now and then I don’t because it feels like photographing a condemned building the week before the demolition, like kissing a corpse in its coffin, reverent and ghoulish at once, so instead I catalogue with words, jaw stubborn, mouth sometimes kind, eyes blue when they feel like it, throat guarded territory, skin a map with no legend, writing it in a notebook at the bottom of a tote bag with lint and receipts, and if I lose it on a bus some stranger will think it’s poetry and they won’t be wrong. In the kitchen I stand in a shaft of sunlight and feel dust orbit me like patient planets, I think of all the faces I’ve worn like borrowed coats – pulled on in club bathrooms, in family kitchens, in the awkward fluorescent light of an office corridor – and how I’ve survived them all, and the coat I’m walking toward will be expensive and sharp and will still not save me, but I will wear it like a weapon, like evidence.
I promised myself not to make a religion out of the mirror and failed in the first week, still carving, still committing small violences with my fingertips, still scouting lighting like I’m planning a crime scene, but lately I’ve been doing something else, standing with hair back, chin up, the full burn of the overhead bulb on me like interrogation, staring at everything I’ve been told to hate and saying thank you for your service, which is not forgiveness, it’s record-keeping, it’s writing the names of the dead in the margins. The horror is patient, it’s not a knife in the dark, it’s a chair pulled out at a table you don’t remember sitting at, it’s the sound of your own voice telling you to open a door, it’s the click of a latch you didn’t touch, and some nights I hear it breathing and open the door anyway, splash water on my face, meet my reflection without flinching. The trick isn’t to be fearless, the trick is to be frightening in the right direction.
On the last Friday before the weather system hits I take myself out, leather boots, cropped tee, boxing shorts slicing my thighs, I want the pavement to argue with me, I choose a bar where the light ruins everyone equally and stand under it like a challenge, someone says you look different tonight and I shrug, I am different, I say, and it’s both the biggest lie and the only truth I’ve got. On the walk home the river holds the city with its greasy grace, I lean over the rail and watch my face fold and unfold in the water, for once it doesn’t look like an accusation, it looks like a storm cell forming, inevitable, unhurried, and I could stand here all night narrating it but the city is quiet and I am tired of my own voice, so I turn away before the next wave erases me, go back to the flat, let the bathroom light buzz, undress and step close to the mirror, eye to eye like two boxers before the bell, wanting to say something ceremonial and deciding against it, touching the cold glass with two fingers as if checking its pulse, you’ve done your job, I think, you’ve kept me alive this long, soon you can rest, and the light stutters and my reflection tilts her head like she heard me, and I turn the switch, let the darkness take us both, walk through rooms that know the shape of my body without needing to see it, outside the air shifts, the weather changes its mind, begins to move.
Sometimes, in the half-sleep just before morning, I feel it starting; the slow, unkind separation of skin from skull, as if unseen hands have hooked their fingers into the seams and are peeling me forward, down, inside out, until every tendon in my jaw sings with the pressure, until the cartilage creaks like floorboards under weight, until the whole mask of me comes loose in one damp, trembling sheet and I can’t tell if I’m breathing or screaming because the sound is stuck in that torn space where my mouth used to be, and what’s left underneath isn’t blood or bone but a wet vacancy, a pulsing absence, a hollow where the air rushes in like floodwater through a broken window, and I know – with the kind of clarity that makes you want to claw your own eyes out – that whatever climbs back inside won’t be me.
WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE
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