Catégorie : Écriture libre

ONLY A ROOM

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I feel like I am a slug

Yes a slug

when I’m supposed to be a snail

but I lost my shell

And in every fear I meet,

I’m looking for the shelter

and the reassurance of a house

as fragile as it can be.

And in every fear I meet,

I’m looking for the welcome rug and the fireplace

and the dart game and the tea before bed

And in every fear I meet,

I’m looking for the chamber 

to be naked in my body and in my soul

I’m looking for the words I haven’t heard I haven’t felt I haven’t said

And in every fear I meet,

I want to be closer and closer

in the small space that is the carapace of their arms

I’m not a slug, I want to find my own house, that I left behind when I

was born into this world

When I left the womb

unable to carry on my back the weight of the foundations the bricks

the plaster the roof and its tiles

In every fear I meet,

I’m looking for a builder to erect a conservatory, when really

I should set up my own room only. 

The shower curtain

Every time I enter my bathroom I feel I’m in fucking Psycho. The shower curtain is closed, to avoid the mould to grow, and when I go to brush my teeth and experience great pain doing it, I imagine there is someone sitting in the bath, waiting for me to spit the toothpaste to appear. A bit like Bloody Mary but eh I wouldn’t have to call his name three times while looking in the mirror. By the way, the Lost Mary is definitely lost and apparently my gums knew about it before the main English papers. I’m glad. I’m glad I stopped doing something before it became actually banned. The empty honey pot is on my shelves, with their name, and their address. Also on my Amazon account. How do you let go of someone if their name is engraved in every corner of your existence? I received the parcel. The last word of his mum. An X. A speaker won at the Golden Blog Awards. A headband that is not mine. Perhaps another ex-girlfriend. Or one of his sisters. I will never know. I don’t want to know. Every time I enter my bathroom I feel that all my feelings are hiding behind this curtain, between my tea tree soap and their expensive verveine shower gel and that they will jump on me when I’m going to wee at night. My head is like a shelter, where I protect myself from the bombing like in Chatsworth Road. I go back to it, to explore every little situation I have been in. I look into it with a magnifying glass. And I see over and over again the details that I might have missed. I watch them carefully, I touch them and like the statues in Musée d’Orsay I polish them with my hands until they’re no more than a smooth surface without asperity, without edge. Until they turn into 2 dimensional image that I can’t open anymore. Like when you’ve opened every door of your advent calendar at Christmas, and now you can just throw it away. It’s useless as it is. Until the situations become abstract memories that I can let go of. Until there is nothing to break behind the curtain anymore. 

Rupture – du latin rumpere – to break

J+13

Can you roll me a cigarette? 

Yes please. You haven’t rolled since you were at uni. And even if it was windy you could handle a little paper, tobacco and filter. But now you’re 32. You thought you were better than that. You thought you could live on vogue – they’re too expensive, bloody £16 for a packet – or vape – you never had so many gum disease in your entire life. So yeh, you’re back into the rollies. Menthol filter at least. But you dropped your tobacco everywhere and your cigarettes look like diseased chicken. Or children you’re not sure. But you don’t care, because eh you’re in charge of your life. You’re responsible for it. People say you need to prioritise yourself, you’re the most important person in your life, and you need to do what makes you happy. But what if nothing makes you happy anymore? What if you wake up in the morning and it’s like someone died over and over again. What if you don’t see the point of washing your face and your feet and your face again. What if you cycle 2 miles to get one more beer when everyone is going to sleep. What if you see his name everywhere, in the street, in the cinema, on youtube. What if you don’t recognise your face in the mirror anymore. What if you want to move to China for good? What if you want to burn the table and move to China? What if you’re actually so angry you can’t get angry? What if you want to walk and walk and walk and walk and walk and walk until no one know your name and your face. What if you disappear. What if you transform into basil and you can be picked up for some chinese recipes. What if you transform and you’re just soil, and dirt. What if you go back to France and you get nurtured by your family and friends. What if you give up on anything and everything and anyone and everyone. What if you just get depressed for a bit. 

J+2

The San Miguel fell off my handlebar

Mercury is retrograde since the 23rd of August. You thought about it, warned your ex lover about it and bam it hits you hard. 

Still. 

You can’t reach the admission team, and Scottish power is being flaky. You can’t fit all of your spices, and the bathroom is already full. Your pink towel is filled with holes and their wok is vintage. Probably from Asia. You don’t have any olive oil and sneak theirs when you want to cook your stir fry from Tesco. They wanted a pescatarian flatmate but you’re coming with your chicken sweet and sour ready meal that stayed out of the fridge for a day. So now you’re afraid of eating it. But you’re also afraid of letting it in the fridge because they wanted a pescatarian and now there is chicken in the fridge which you hope they didn’t notice. You’ve got too many jackets, too many for one body but you can’t get rid of it because that is the only thing you think is stable in your life right now. Your jackets. The raincoat from Petit Bateau that you bought when you arrived in London 8 years ago, and the rabbit fur jacket you bought from your Thai friend because I don’t know, it’s second hand so that’s okay. But now you can’t wear it because you fear your flatmates will disagree because they have a dog and surely they will disapprove on a rabbit fur jacket. Especially because they have a lot of rabbit oriented items in the flat and it must mean they really love rabbits or have a rabbit in their life. Your chopping board is in plastic, and it’s filthy, you had it since you left your parents, so like 15 years ago now. Can you actually keep a plastic chopping board for that long? Surely not, but that is the only chopping board you have, and you like it, because it’s part of you and who you are. But it looks dumb next to their beautiful wooden massive chopping board. You fill the fridge with powerade – the blue one – and cans of beer sometimes, because you’re sad but you feel you shouldn’t cope like that because you saw on Instagram that actually if you want to heal you have to go for a walk, take a bath, read a book and definitely not drinking beers on the terrace by yourself. You’re thinking about writing standup but you can’t even spend a night with your friends without thinking it’s too much to handle, and you have to smile and put a brave face on, because you spent two weeks crying and pacing in the staff room. You think that now is too late to be sad and grieving. And even if everyone is telling you the opposite you still think it’s too much to put on other people. Your phone is not charging, you’re having aerophagia and you lost the little cable to charge your portable charger. Mercury is defo in retrograde and that is not the right time for it.  

Jour 8

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday to you dear H.

Happy birthday to you

Hip hip hooray

Hip hip hooray

Hip hip hooray

Clap clap clap

He sang the song out loud, to himself, celebrating his seventh year on Earth with some hairy monsters and a few dolphin poses. Some will say he needs to stay out, some will say he’s disruptive, some will say I have to start my lesson now, some will say he’s really cute, some will say aww, some will say he shouldn’t be there, some will not say, but they are scared, some will not say but I know what they want to say, some will say they couldn’t do it, some will say they wouldn’t do it, some say I do a great job. Nevertheless, he doesn’t have a choice, and the world is a tricky place to be born into. And to be fair, it’s a tricky place to be born into, for me, for my dad, for my best friend, and it looks like hell sometimes, if hell had very expensive sourdough bread and a lock that is the same for the building door and your front door. This is a true story and it has been for a year and a half now. I can already hear you – WHAT? HOW CAN YOU ALLOW THAT? YOUR NEIGHBOURS CAN ACTUALLY OPEN YOUR FRONT DOOR? Yes, they can, we tried before. We are living on edge. We are very similar to hippies in Christiana (Denmark). To be fair, people in Christiana probably all have their own individual lock. How lucky! In London you settle for whatever you are fortunate enough to have. And sometimes it’s a local pub, sometimes it’s a lock that no one else can open. You choose. 

Jour 7

I’m taking myself on a date

Bunch of fritto misto and some italian missus from the centre of Italy. Apologies, I can’t be more accurate, I didn’t understand the name of the place and I hate to ask again. The last table is late, they close the kitchen at 10pm. It’s Jojo’s playlist, the one we like. How do you make friends in London outside of work? I don’t think it’s feasible. Actually, my colleague said she made a friend in her pottery class. She was quite proud of it. It’s just showing really, how hard it is to make friends in this country. And when I say this country I mean England. And more specifically London. People back home think I’m smothered with friends. I’m not really. You meet people, you love them, and they leave the borough, the city, the county, the country. You meet people, you love them and they leave you. You meet people, you don’t really like them but you think they are alright, and then they disappoint you anyway. It’s hard to relate when you’re French, or Italian, or German. But really the people in your life, they won’t stay. And it’s okay. You learn to mourn quicker. You learn to accept they are just a picture on your wall or in your bedside table. You might remember their voice, and their smile. You might remember their red hat or their stupid shoes. But at the end of the day, they are not sharing orange wine or closing a restaurant with you, they are not spilling beers along the Thames or walking in the Cesky Krumlov castle, they are not leaving you their babies – anymore. They’re gone. Like dead really. It’s how it feels. Like everyone is dead despite the fact they still live somewhere on the planet. And you know what? That’s okay – again. Because I still chat to the bouncer of the pub next to mine, and to the Turkish shopkeeper, and to the tfl worker in St James Street station. Everyday I feel connected to this place that is London. A place so harsh to live in, when you don’t have your mates from uni or your mum and dad, a place with black mould on your wall’s bedroom, where salted butter is more expensive than gold, and some drunken man is entering a lady’s car near Hackney Downs. Because eventually it is my home and I have learnt to embrace it. 

By the way, this date title was the base of another story originally.