Page 95 of Monarch
She can put up with my nervous twitches as she sips her G&T and flicks despondently through the in-flight magazine. She can express her annoyance with it through tuts and throat-clearing. Shecan give me and my tattoos and my piercings and my shaved head all the dirty looks she wants. Nothing can hurt me as much as my own family has hurt me.
That is, until Mari and Roos.
Not that they have hurt me. No fucking way. They are good people with pure souls who have treated me with more kindness than I deserve. But this limbo we find ourselves in – the being together but notbeingtogether – that is starting to hurt. And not in an itching, irritating, irrational way but in a marrow-deep, raw and real, debilitating and devastating kind of way. It’s a piercing pain and an open wound. It’s a disease and it’s spreading. It’s a virus for which I don’t have the cure. All I can do is try and treat it the best way I know how.
And this – flying to the source of the pain – is how I choose to try and treat it.
The flight is turbulent, which feels apt. It makes little difference to my fear and agitated state. In some ways, I’m almost grateful for it. It helps my body prepare for what’s to come. It puts me on a high alert that I know I need to maintain.
I only have hand luggage – I am not planning on sticking around – so when we finally land and disembark at Heathrow, I march off the plane without looking back. It takes me a moment to get my bearings and find signs for trains, but once I do, I push forward. The train isn’t busy – it’s the middle of the day – and it feels like a miracle when I lean against the backpack in my lap and sleep for half of the journey. But it makes sense. I didn’t sleep at all last night.
After watching Roos fall asleep, I allowed myself ten minutes. Ten minutes to watch both Mari and Roos deep in slumber – twitching eyelids, pouting lips, chests rising slowly and rhythmically.
And then I left.
It was the very early hours of the morning when I emerged from QISS, and while it was much cooler, it wasn’t freezing. In fact, it was possibly the first night of the year where the temperature stayed above freezing, and I suppose that signalled that spring and summer were just around the corner.
I took advantage of this and walked the streets of Amsterdam, up and down the ring canals, through De Wallen and up Damrak and back again. I walked until the sun came up, and I had blisters on my feet. I then headed to Centraal Station and caught the first free ferry across the IJ to my studio. I hadn’t been back in months, and I half-expected it to have been broken into and raided, or maybe claimed by some squatters, or perhaps even some of Amsterdam’s green parakeets or grey pigeons. But it was exactly as I had left it, albeit with a thick layer of dust covering everything.
I found clothes, a sketchbook, and pencils. A spare phone charger and jacket. I changed my outfit to jeans and a jumper, packed everything else in a backpack, and finally sat down to book a flight on my phone.
An hour later, I was at Schiphol drinking a terrible coffee and yawning into a vegan croissant I was sure had been baked two days ago.
I thought about texting Roos and Mari. We had a group chat after all, but when our last messages to each other were sharing logistics and excitement about our night at QISS, it didn’t feel right to tip the tone on its head completely and announce I was off to confront my child-rapist grandfather.
Also, I didn’t want their replies. I don’t want their concern. Or their anger. Or their confusion.
I just want to do what needs to be done.
As my train pulls into a station where I have boarded trains probably a thousand times, it feels like I start to levitate. I leave my body and I’m hovering above my physical form, watching as I put mybag on my back and disembark. I stay like that, detached from myself, as I leave the station through the main exit. It’s deadly quiet – as it always is outside of rush hour – and I swear the employee manning the ticket barriers is the same one who I would run away from when I used to jump through the gates as a teen.
I decide to walk to my childhood house. I don’t call it a home. Won’t. Can’t.
It takes nearly forty minutes, and the whole time I’m still floating somewhere above myself. It’s a sensation not dissimilar to when I’m lost in my art. But I know enough about myself to recognise this current experience is actually the complete opposite of what happens when I find my creative flow.
When I’m lost in my work, my mind and my body blend as one so perfectly, I couldn’t strip them apart if I tried. I’m not really in my body because my mind takes over. But this, right now, this is the very opposite. This is me disassociating. This is me actively leaving my body. This is my mind losing itself, not to art, but because of life. Because life is too fucking hard sometimes. Because accepting my reality means accepting the unacceptable.
But that is what I came here to do.
That’s why, when I stop at the corner of my street and I spot the semi-detached 1960s house I grew up in, I take a deep breath. Then I take another one. I look down at my hands – they’re shaking – and I tell my body that they’re mine. Just like Sarah tells me to do. I tell myself that they’re my hands. And this is my body and I’m here. I’m really here.
I’m here and I’m whole.
I’m not broken.
I’m not weak.
I’m scared and in pain and a little lost, but I’m whole.
Just like I was on the stage last night.
Just like I was when Mari blessed me with countless kisses as I cried.
Just like I was when Roos and I played our favourite game, a game I know she was deadly, deadly serious about.
I’m whole.
And I’m here.
