A Different Body Experiences
A Different Universe
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re-interpretation
re-formation
Lives
She tore the diary from his hand, hating him with every thought she'd ever had. She would mangle him like he had the book. Nothing would remain not the cover, like this one marked by the ferocity of his nails but withstanding it but she'd have none of this. She lurched towards him, hatred melting space between them. He, taken aback, cowed a little, unusual as so absent usually, no look, no feeling. She drove him to it, he would say but his lies gathered inside her, inside the room and over balanced all that had gone before. As he tried to re-cover, composure seeping in dank spurts, she turned for a weapon; would have wrenched the door off, had it been closer. She didn't see it, assume it as a weapon but as the fulfilling of all their life together. Suddenly she became quiet, almost as if she'd heard a low whisper and was attentive. Then she whirled round, like a shot put at the throat and flared at his face, no, lower, his neck. She seemed magnetized, both still, then falling away. She jumped again at the blood spurt, with her hands tore open wider seeing this tangled array of his contents, the contents of her future, splayed out, ripped out in her hands.
Her tongue moved over her lips an unconscious grimace at the new flavour. Then, as if her mouth came alive for the first time, she put fingers up felt with uncertainty this new place. Her fingers moved deeper into her mouth, pulled round her teeth following her tongue in it's muscular movements. It flung forward debris, that's what she called it later, debris of their lives, which together hadn't been her life but theirs, a new thing, murdering her first.
Sidelives
She needed something to happen to change things. Of course this sudden interruption, veering disruption, wouldn’t happen; it never had but then she wasn’t living her own life. Someone else should rightly be living her life if she hadn’t so embedded (handful by handful) herself there by trickery and dint of persuasion; of herself mainly.
Sidelives
The first time she remembered consciously moving into another life was
when she was seven nearly eight, at a party.
I
thought about how it had developed; its history. The first time I remember
a conscious attempt at pushing aside into another life was at a party
when I was a young girl, seven nearly eight. There was a raffle, or a
lottery I called it, and a bunch of little girls in frilly frocks, all
pink, lemon and white froth, over excited about scraps of paper, bumping
into one another, dropping their tickets and missing the first announcement
of the ticket number as they sorted through them. I heard though and I
knew which child had the winning ticket. When the second announcement
came I went out to the front too.
As he said, “Sorry but your ticket’s the wrong number.”
I looked startled.
“Of course it is.” I said.
Then apologising, someone else asked, “Did you drop it before?”
They’d seen the cluster of children drop their tickets.
I said, “I’m sorry. I know it’s the wrong number.”
and blushed but didn’t look down. Instead I looked over-excited
but about something else, of course; a tear came from the oddity of realising
what this meant. The other girl, with the right ticket, appeared overwhelmed
by this too and started to doubt that it was really her ticket.
I reassured her saying, “I never had that number” and “I
can remember I didn’t.
The man giving the prizes was about to be satisfied with this, as men
do, problem solved but the other girl quickly gave me her prize. I let
it slip to the ground; startled at the afrontery. I turned and went off
the stage.
Clearly what I had wasn’t the winning ticket and I hadn’t, or had refuted, a losing one. Factually it wasn’t a losing ticket, as it wasn’t for this raffle at all but a found number in this place of games and parties.(Not first person?)
Of course, it didn’t start then. Learning to do the right performance was shaped long before. As an infant she could recall tearing the wallpaper off bit by bit because, even though she pretended to disapprove, it made amusement escape from her grandmother’s face. They both smilled and giggled for this joint act, getting the timing right and even expanding for other relatives, until the disjointed times of being shouted at wore it out. Her grandmoher shouted when she tore two horizontal strips from each wall, making four parallel lines of torn edges around the room.
It didn’t stop there. She unknowingly prepared herself for the moment at the party, and what developed afterwards, by learning a number of distinct performances for situations and even shaping situations for this range to form.
What she developed after the party was beyond this natural, well, assumed to be natural structuring. It wasn’t that much loved, yet probable fantasy, of ‘re-creating herself’ or creating her identity. It was an often futile, she thought, attempt to play it off side, or from the sideline, except it wasn’t that either.
John Donne said, "It
(death) comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes."
but equality's not much use when you're dead.
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Bodies
of Difference
A Different Body
Experiences
A Different Universe