Status: under construction
Heavy
PROLOGUE
I’m lying in the bath and I’m warm warm warm all over. It’s a shallow tub, nearly overflowing with burning hot water – the steam catches the dim light from the single bulb and makes my skin glow. Under the water, my body is warped and bent, my neck at the wrong angle to my shoulders. I know it’s just refraction, but the quiet disturbances of my shifting arms and the rise-fall of my stomach make my thighs shimmer like a mirage.
I run my hands down this body of mine, an intrepid exploration of the familiar unfamiliar. I move in it every day, but this shape is a stranger. I can rarely face the bare illuminated reality of what this body has done to itself. Has done to me.
My cheeks are hot, and covered with salt. There is a hole in my chest, under rolls of ripe flesh. I look down at this foreign shape, this mass that feels so distant from my own self – I feel my own phantom hands reach forward and strike repeatedly between my ribs, over and over again – and I hear his voice, saccharine sweet and tender,
Have you gained weight? Have you gained weight?
Have you gained weight?
We met in the spring. I can barely remember the day or the exact moment I first saw him – he was just another array of features, another formless face in a crowd of strangers.
He asked me what my name was and I had to ask him to repeat his question over the noise of the pub. He said he had seen me before and I was confused, because I hadn’t ever seen him. I thought how strange it was that the world should exist from a different eye, that I was ‘another’ to him. We talked for a little while, maybe ten minutes, and then we separated again. I’d almost forgotten about him by the time I saw him again at Lucy’s birthday, when we climbed her garden wall together and he kissed me on the mouth with no warning. Under a street light. Sometimes when it gets bad and the picture fades right down to grey I can close my eyes and feel the warmth of the light on my dark hair, and his fingers digging in to my back.
I slowly fell in love with him, with my Ru. I would wake up every Saturday morning and open my eyes to his long nose and messy brown hair and wonder how I got so lucky. How did I do it? How did this big, lumbering body, this uneven smile, this mental sense of humour manage to find someone who cared, who wanted, who loved it all? He was a riddle I couldn’t quite understand. He is an equation of parts that I will never solve. He is a tsunami I never learned to predict.
Where did it go wrong? When did he stop looking at me with golden eyes, with warm butter and his sweet sweet smile? Lying in this bath I open us up like a map, I unfold every crease and rub the dirt off parts left long buried. I suck in oxygen and wiggle my toes. It is time to try to stand.
I run my hands down this body of mine, an intrepid exploration of the familiar unfamiliar. I move in it every day, but this shape is a stranger. I can rarely face the bare illuminated reality of what this body has done to itself. Has done to me.
My cheeks are hot, and covered with salt. There is a hole in my chest, under rolls of ripe flesh. I look down at this foreign shape, this mass that feels so distant from my own self – I feel my own phantom hands reach forward and strike repeatedly between my ribs, over and over again – and I hear his voice, saccharine sweet and tender,
Have you gained weight? Have you gained weight?
Have you gained weight?
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We met in the spring. I can barely remember the day or the exact moment I first saw him – he was just another array of features, another formless face in a crowd of strangers.
He asked me what my name was and I had to ask him to repeat his question over the noise of the pub. He said he had seen me before and I was confused, because I hadn’t ever seen him. I thought how strange it was that the world should exist from a different eye, that I was ‘another’ to him. We talked for a little while, maybe ten minutes, and then we separated again. I’d almost forgotten about him by the time I saw him again at Lucy’s birthday, when we climbed her garden wall together and he kissed me on the mouth with no warning. Under a street light. Sometimes when it gets bad and the picture fades right down to grey I can close my eyes and feel the warmth of the light on my dark hair, and his fingers digging in to my back.
I slowly fell in love with him, with my Ru. I would wake up every Saturday morning and open my eyes to his long nose and messy brown hair and wonder how I got so lucky. How did I do it? How did this big, lumbering body, this uneven smile, this mental sense of humour manage to find someone who cared, who wanted, who loved it all? He was a riddle I couldn’t quite understand. He is an equation of parts that I will never solve. He is a tsunami I never learned to predict.
Where did it go wrong? When did he stop looking at me with golden eyes, with warm butter and his sweet sweet smile? Lying in this bath I open us up like a map, I unfold every crease and rub the dirt off parts left long buried. I suck in oxygen and wiggle my toes. It is time to try to stand.