Blood-Letting

Fragments of an Aftermath

At the moment I can only write in a trance. Organisation and clarity evade me: I have decided not to resist it, but to embrace it as method. If my body insists on remaining in this dreamlike state, I will simply observe what it produces.

I cast about in my mind for antidotes. But then, is this not actually the way to suck out the poison? I can just lie here, emoting.

This was one of many times I wished I was a musician. If I made ten songs about this, it would simply be an album. If I write ten essays about this, I will seem deranged.

I felt a pang for last summer. During the heatwave, it became impossible to sleep at night even with all the windows open. So he and I decamped downstairs in the lounge, and made a bed up on the sofa. Something about it- perhaps the novelty, or the reminiscence of childhood, made us giggly. It felt fun; it felt like freedom. I had him in a good mood and I would do anything to keep him there. There is a photo of him I took, stretched out like a cat, shirtless, across the two armchairs we pushed together. He is smiling, which he didn’t do as often as I would have liked. I often asked him to. Look at me. Smile at me. I can see you.

What consoles me? I don’t know. It panics me.

Seeing that he had been online ten minutes ago felt like I had just missed my flight. I had made these decisions. The choice to end it, to etch it so deeply, to demand no contact, and then to eulogise it publicly. I thought of time like an accordion- all those pleats neatly together, and then forced agonisingly apart, with a groan. I could slip between, re-inhabit the episodes of my life like looking at photographs through a glass slide.

I wanted the essay I was writing about an artist to get right down to brass tacks. I wanted my writing process to be faster and better. I wanted to feel less guilt.

I have to keep a document tab constantly open so that when I have to pause, and feel the Grief, excise it, blood-letting, I can write something in it and then go back to what I was doing.
In my head, it was turning into Bluets, but in actuality it was a load of shit.

Artist credit: Troy Brooks

How do I long for him less? I had once treasured our friendship. I wanted to speak to him- all I could do was resist. I would have to place myself within a state of constant resisting for some time. This would be how things were. I had to deliberately call to mind times he had humiliated or berated me or been a burden in company. The ways I had to contort myself to conceal discomfort in myself or others. I knew that those who really loved me wanted me one thousand miles from him and it was this that I had to place my faith and belief in. How had I adored this cruel personality? I had seen, not the light hitting the church floor, the shadow it cast, but the colours of it in the air.

Being a woman writer has a specific brutal romance to it. She is in many ways impenetrable. Her personality is obscured, through a little hole, upside-down on the wall.

For a while, my phone was constantly in my hand. I had to medicate myself with torpor. Hinge notifications made me furious and I turned them off. Who are all these desperate, wanting, ugly, boring people? Some of them old enough to be my father, begging me for their attention. ‘You’re out of my league’. Correct. ‘Everyone must say you’re so pretty so I won’t even say that’. Okay, prick. ‘We need to work on your smile’. I would not care if you died. I had this new, vengeful anger which would flicker through my nervous system. He had poisoned me; perhaps I am becoming him. I had one thousand unread messages. It just made me furious. Stop asking so much of me. Stop wanting so badly for my company. Stop offering nothing in return. Stop only wanting to stand in the knifeglint luminance of my beauty. It is mine only. And you cannot have it. I felt like I was becoming an object in the eyes of even people who knew me. Their lurking desire for me repulsed me. You just want, want, want. You have nothing to give me.

The muscle memory went deep. Each time I thought I had reached the bottom layer of sediment, there was more. I felt a ghostly pang of excitement to see him, which like a plume of a smoke signal diffused, unanswered. I wanted to ask him something. When the fucking Prime Minister resigned, I wanted to tick it off our list of 2026 predictions.

Nobody would understand if I ever spoke to him again, perhaps least of all him. This ugly, knotted thing, wanting and hating and pitying and loving, like a tangle of hair inside me would just have to live as long as I had something to feed it, my fucked-up little baby. The only baby he would ever give me. Look at its black hair and its tadpole eyes and its enfeebled soul, just like its mother. It would be the only thing of us that we would make together. It was always hungry for my care. He had left us too.

I would write for a bit and then stare at my phone for ages and ages and ages and ages and ages and ages and then switch back to writing something and then do it again. Look through this little pane of glass at people under palm trees, porn, poetry, and things I cannot afford.

In the very palest hours I still thought of him, the rising and falling of his breath. There was yet more to grieve.

When I was not engaged in an activity, I would sometimes feel this yarn-pull of nerves. I felt something within myself sliding off-kilter, on the threshold of disappearing. and then I would self-correct and regain balance somehow. At these times, I would stare very intensely into nothing, and sometimes come back from myself as from a dream.

If I had the money, I would fly myself to some wellness centre, a spa, for a week, a month. I would take long baths in an unfamiliar place, have anonymous hands unthread the interlinked chain of stones in my shoulders; the driftwood, the flint. Some dark oceanside was running up my back.

The worst part was that I had been, with such deft hands, lied to. And lied to and lied to. I believed everything he said. A crack had gone down the window through which I saw the world.

Lately I’ve been feeling so tired, sleeping terribly. I miss how easily I would fall asleep with you. When things were okay, you could be so peaceful. I found you deeply comforting. Your body, your voice, your heartbeat, your breath. I found a piece of writing from several months ago. I described lying down in bed with you one afternoon when I was getting a migraine. I lifted up your linen shirt and fell asleep on your bare skin. I used to love doing that. I loved your body so much, it felt like home to me. So what fucking now? Now I lie awake until four in the morning and then I wake up at eight and then I stare all day long, into the middle distance, where sometimes I feel you glance back at me.

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