I Want To Be Spoken To

It is the hottest period of the year and I am settling for sardines on toast. I remind myself that their softened bones, that vague chalky crunch against my molars, contain enough calcium to last me the week. I think about seabirds swallowing fish whole. I think about calcium tablets in hospital cups. Eating fish feels like a pure thing to me. Not morally pure. Structurally pure. Clean in the way silver is clean, or something.

I feel more connected to it when I fry it or press it into bread, oil soaking into toast. When I grill diced beef I do not feel the same way. It smells heavy. Inland. Last night my dad secretly fed me lamb and it was okay. The first time he made it, when I was around twelve, it was slimy and inedible, grey-pink like something dredged from a drain. This time I was okay with it, the softness, the youth of it on my teeth, the wet velvet of it. I still prefer fish. Fish feels pure.

I am resigning myself lately to the idea that I will never get what I want in my relationships. Maybe something bent sideways in my early childhood. Maybe my heart is shaped wrong. Maybe I am just too much. Maybe I am nobody’s type, or worse, everybody’s curiosity but nobody’s choice. Maybe I'm just so boring that I'm fascinating. Something so dull and pretentious that you keep around for the fun of it.

There is a space I keep finding myself in where I want to establish my own agency and leave a situation, but I also want an apology. These two notions rarely survive in the same room. It always feels like my choice to abandon, that well thought through evacuation plan, is treated as a larger sin than when others abandon me first. Like I am meant to be estuary land. Just take what flows in. Salt, debris, runoff, some apology-shaped nothing.

I am told to accept that my loneliness is not a symptom but a climate. A permanent weather system. High pressure system parked directly above my chest. I find myself completely faithless in what I thought could be the beautiful fact of dating in my early twenties. It feels like I am atoning for something I have already apologised for, again and again and again, like reciting a liturgy in a church that has already burned down.

I like my friends, but I do not feel understood by them. I feel like when I try to talk about feelings, which I now understand is apparently not allowed unless it is funny or ironic, they scorn me or misunderstand me and think I am being edgy. I was trying to explain my view on dating after my round at the nightclub, after the fluorescent sweat and metallic tap water and bass vibrating my sternum, and the realisation that even if I found someone’s skinsuit attractive, it really was not enough. I never feel compelled. I am never magnetised. But I want somebody, and desire and want are very close sisters, sharing clothes, sharing cigarettes outside the same venue. I don't smoke.

It is unlikely I want this for my ego. I am aware of myself. I accept myself as I am. There is no compliment you could give me that would get past the epidermis. It lands, it sits there, it dries out like sunscreen residue. It never metabolises. It means success is expected of me and failure feels like it will liquefy me entirely.

In a perfect world people would apologise for leaving me. For misleading me. For playing with me when I thought we were equals, or at least co-conspirators. But maturing is realising you do not get that apology. The world does not send receipts. Then one of us has to leave. And it is going to be me, because I cannot handle looking at your life and knowing that for some reason I was not enough to be part of it. Sometimes I place my hope somewhere and think things will change. That someone will act. That someone will choose me loudly, publicly, decisively. But they do not. They never take action. Why am I always the one holding the knife, even if I have already been grazed by everyone else’s weapons? 

I feel trapped inside myself and I do not know where to go. Why do my mind and my flesh not communicate. Why are they two countries with no shared language. But at the end of the day, in a few weeks, I will have to cosplay a postgraduate student and just get my classes done. I am teaching this year as well, for an advanced unit. Nobody really understands what that means to me. People do not really know anything about me anymore. Because I am not a relevant topic. I am infrastructure. I am someone built to listen.

It sucks to be on vacation and still be angry all the time. It is meant to be a relaxing time but all I can think about is what is wrong. And it is hot, and I have reverse seasonal depression, summer pressing on me like a heavy hand, and it makes me sick. And I am sorry you had to read this.

Edit: Sent an impulsive letter that was entirely self-serving with these notions in mind. I regret not making it an object of closure. I could've been wiser but I was emotional about it. I think I just hate saying goodbye, even to those who have hurt me.