I Think If You Tried to Drown Me I Would Float

And for her next trick: she discovers multitudes.

You wake up to storm clouds at the foot of your bed. 

You unfurl yourself from your duvet and your feet meet a puddle on the floor. 

There’s been some rain overnight. 

And suddenly, when you thought the skies were clear, you are drenched in sadness, sodden with panic. 

You forgot the rumble of the storm clouds, you witness them roll in like it is their very first time. But it’s not their first time — you are an expert at floating when you’ve been pushed under water to drown.

And yet still. 

January delineated in that shade of surprise. It was hard in the kind of way you are surprised at your own capacity to be surprised. It was charged and electric and dazzling and awful. It was, as a contained sequence of events, a reminder of what it means to be alive by its contrast of sometimes not wanting aliveness at all. By which I mean, relentless in its back and forth. Elastic in its multitudes. 

All I know is that during the first week of January my voice shook and I couldn’t make words come out in a straight line. Their order was jumbled, my tongue trepidatious as if trying to sidestep a mouse trap. I got back into bed at two in the afternoon, swallowed whole not by my duvet but the anxiety that led me there. I overate cookies to the point where it felt like magma was throbbing against my mind and I fretted about the unprecedentedly low funds in my bank account. I filed my tax return, legs crossed on the sofa, not drunk at 1am or standing in the middle of a tropical rain storm like I have done in financial years past. Which is some consolation. I read a novel about a girl who was afraid of reality, who suppressed to herself the knowledge of her pregnancy because she didn’t want to believe it, until her belly swelled — 5 months gone. I thought about how I too could see myself committing such an extreme act of avoidance.

I finally stopped with the shitty instant coffee and became a French press girly. I slipped in impromptu lunches with friends when they passed through my city or I passed through theirs. I followed a boy through a pulpy river, water pouring in through my Converse and then he followed me to bed. I steamed myself alive in a hot tub with a hen-party in Chester and some hardened thing shifted in my ribcage. I stayed out too late and made bad choices and collected good stories. I got blisters on my heels, running around the city and dancing under domes, hugging strangers in the street. I turned up to the club in my cardigan and loafers like a misfit who’d veered off course on the way to the library. I padded in socks on back garden patios at midnight, hopping foot to foot to prevent the cold bite of night seeping through to my flesh. I called for an early night and then an invitation found me walking home only when the sun was coming up. I stood engulfed by smoke billowing from a church, light beams like scissors across my eyes. My hand limp in my pocket because the guy next to me never wanted me enough to reach for it. Acoustics rumbling so strongly underfoot I felt a part of the vibration, a part of this whole larger thing, rather than it being something I feel bounce against my fascia, impenetrable. 

I published an article that changed everything — a declaration to live more on my own terms. Set in motion things I do not yet know, can only anticipate with some inclination, with some fear. I found my voice and then didn’t know how to use it. Realised the gulf of all that I had been sitting on, before I opened my mouth. All that I’ve been meaning to say.

I often feel mutually pinned to the ground by desire and solitude. I have never really found a way for such opposing forces to coexist, to have their moment in the sun without the other prematurely tugging on its sleeve, saying it’s time to go. Similarly I have never felt very capable of contemplating the pendulum of life’s ups and downs. I haven’t quite figured out how you’re supposed to learn to live with the bad in favour of the good. What it means to feel everything and nothing. Or how I am both okay and not. 

In the no-man’s-land between Christmas and New Year I let my feet take me across the city, walking nowhere in particular, walking just to see where I’d walk. Of course I found myself moving across familiar landscapes, stumbling upon corners of town that appear infused with my golden touch. Streets which echo with the impressions of a person who has really lived within them. I realised, I have really scooped out this city to its kernel, ravaged on its meat and yet, I never knew it.

So much of my life in the first year beyond rape didn’t touch my brain. I was head down, chasing survival. So much of my life preceding rape didn’t touch my brain, either. Those are stories I have been edging towards slowly, for a long time. 

But lately, when I make my bed in a morning I am dumbfounded by all that has happened in the time elapsed since I did it the morning before. I am surprised at how much life can happen between sunrises and how many emotions I will charter through in a day. I am not yet quite acclimatised to all I am capable of experiencing now I spend less time in my head with my rapist. 

January was just a month that came and went, but it was also more. I passed some silent threshold where I was able to hold the lows in one palm and the highs in another, feeling the weight of them both somehow working as a whole. I started sinking my teeth in. Sometimes feeling them judder against the hard clash of the stone. I wasn’t aware I was living before, but now I am.