Lozium

I locate my anger in a cab with people I consider friends. It is a hot tingle on my right earlobe. I am shouting shamelessly; words as evidence slipping on my tongue, sliding out of my mouth disordered. There is a growl at the base of my throat. I gag on the dryness and have to stop. In that moment, there is a space for the memory of a particular therapist and I remind myself to breathe. 

Shit. She got mad. 

I hear this between their silences. My right earlobe is throbbing. I am already feeling the guilt of having lost my temper, and shame at my lack of self-control. 

But I told them this would always be a possibility. I told them they had been pressing against my nerves and veins all evening. 

I’m gonna put on some music. 

And Joe puts on some chart queen’s promise to girls everywhere. But I know the artist is rich, beautiful and engaged. Not angry. Not like me, shouting at people I considered friends. 

All I want is a joint by the river. 

​

*

I am often late. Minutes and hours roll into each other and the only thing that changes is the light. 

On an uneventful journey home from work, there’s a moth on the Underground, in my carriage.

I watch it flutter aimlessly around. 

Tash was trying to explain relativity to me and I guess she gave me the simple version. When I get off the tube, the moth will cease moving in my inertial frame.

 

Later in an Uber from the station to my house, I think about the moth, wonder if it got off the train. 

I too get myself stuck in small places, before remembering my claustrophobia.

​

*

I can’t tell the difference between dream and premonition: Q will come back for me eventually. If Q is coming back, I don’t know when. 

I wake up and Tash is asleep next to me. I always wake up first. Just in case she opens her eyes and tells me it’s over. I am not the kind of person someone else could fall in love with. 

I walk from the bedroom of the East End flat she shares with Eddie, her roommate, to the kitchen. I nicked one of Tash’s tees and I breathe her scent while the kettle boils in case it’s the last morning I get to make coffee for her. 

But it isn’t. Because two weeks later, on another hungover Saturday morning, I am making Tash coffee and wearing one of her tees.

​

*

I think of Q sometimes, when I am with Tash. 

Tash holds me differently, puts her arm just under my boobs and gently grasps my shoulder. 

Q would always put her arm around my waist. 

I can still feel the way I fitted under her arm, as if I was sculpted with her body in the creator’s mind. 

I’m never sober. 

 

I always smoke a joint before I leave the house because that way I feel calm and not angry. 

I tell myself that Tash is something new, not a point for comparison. 

Because I still get angry when I think about Q. 

‘Everybody’s got exes. What’s the story with yours?’ Tash asked one day. 

I shrugged as if it was the same as a verbal response.

‘You know about Stace,’ she urged. 

Yes, I did know about Stacey. But it wasn’t a trade deal. 

‘Why won’t you fucking open up?’ 

My right earlobe was hot so I said nothing. 

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Q was going to come back. And how angry that made me. 

​

*

​

Joe calls me when I am at work one Friday evening. 

The restaurant is quiet, and usually I would answer, but I slide my phone into the cupboard underneath the coffee machine until it stops. I have stopped keeping his company. 

I leave work late and it is a struggle because I am drunk and high, but I remember Tash’s address. I have to piece it together in my head, remembering it only because it is the kind of address I would have made up as a child : 81 Mercury House, Wisdom Road. 

 

I am nervous in the cab from the station, in the hallway, in the lift. I am nervous outside her door, taking a breath before knocking three quiet times. I am not nervous in the darkness of her kitchen / lounge. 

‘Go to bed,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll be in in a minute.’ 

It doesn’t feel like we are just fucking; in the darkness I study the lines of the kitchen to figure out the fridge. I take a bottle of cold water and pour a glass, taking a deep breath, preparing myself for the physical closeness that is about to follow. 

‘I didn’t bring pyjamas,’ I mutter childishly, pulling my jeans off awkwardly. I catch myself. ‘It’s cool – I’ll improvise.’ 

I leave on socks, knickers and my long-sleeved tee. I slip in beside her, place my phone under the pillow, lay there for a moment. Tash switches the lamp off, rolls into me. I am going to miss myself for the next few hours.

​

*

​

Tash knows I smoke but she doesn’t know why. 

When my grandmother was dying, she asked me if I thought of everyone when I woke up. She said she thought of everybody, when she woke and before she went to sleep. 

My grandfather gave her cranberry juice at the hospice, told me that where there is life there is hope. 

After my grandmother died of lung cancer, having never smoked a cigarette, I wanted to punish myself as if I were the very cancer that raged through her. 

Tash doesn’t know that after Q left me, I needed something to do with my hands.

 

I want to tell her how broken I have been, how I am still rebuilding myself. But I don’t. 

Her plans alter so we don’t spend the weekend together. I had already altered mine to fit her schedule. I don’t tell her that either. The efforts I make in my endeavours are very rarely noticed. 

I didn’t know my grandmother was dying. 

​

*

​

Grow up, I tell myself. You are a woman now, I tell myself. 

And it is different with Tash, because I am not a teenager. We are not going to be caught in the act by her parents or my younger siblings. Nothing is because of hormones anymore and I am confronted with words like ‘lust’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘consent’. 

I apologise for the drunken messages and the phone calls. I don’t know what else to do. 

you were very intense

i’m sorry. i was drunk and i freaked out. 

you freaked me out

i didn’t mean to do that to you

​

I still haven’t learned how to not fuck up in the first place. 

I still don’t feel like a woman. 

Sometimes I don’t feel like a person at all. 

​

*

​

Anger is hot and immediate and it swells up like a balloon inside. And it forces itself out of my mouth, and when that balloon pops, it doesn’t pop, it blows up. 

I can’t get my head around things when I’m angry. Can’t see the simple reasons behind people’s ways of doing things. 

Sometimes at the restaurant, when I have left my thick skin at home, I hold onto demonstrations of impoliteness or rudeness, unable to unclench my teeth in the bite of the moment. 

The tension makes me want to scream at them just say please so I have one less thing to bitch about – I’m really on the fucking edge here. 

It’s like a hungry worm, burying itself into the fresh flesh of a just-buried body.

​

* 

​

My grandmother used to visit the cemetery every Saturday. Looking back I realise she had still been grieving for her son, killed on a New Year’s Day. It shaped every New Year’s Day after. Sometimes my mum would be very emotional, spend the whole day listening to songs played in the minor keys. Or she would try to be normal. But she would always drown when the tide of her grief started to rise. 

I would hide my own tears, hold them back until my cheeks felt like they might split from the pressure inside. And then I would exhale, and my powerlessness would rise to meet me from behind my own eyes, until my right earlobe tingled and I could see through a reddish-brown filter. 

​

*

​

When we were younger we had a husky. 

We had to rehome her. 

 

I have been thinking about that dog a lot recently. How I used to get home from school, exhausted. I would lay on the cool tiles with her and stroke the fur where it was thickest, on the underside of her neck. 

I miss that dog. 

I miss the wholeness felt when walking with a companion at the side. 

I have lost so much that I cannot bear to lose anything more. 

This weakness makes me angry. 

​

*

​

It is almost always cloudy when I exit Holborn Station. I walk to work feeling placid. It won’t last long.

I’ve been thinking about Q. The last time I went Facebook stalking I saw the picture of her smiling at her boyfriend like she idolised him. I don’t remember her ever looking at me that way. 

I guess she never made me feel that way either. I remember feeling invisible. I was always there, next to her, not holding her hand in case people saw. 

Sometimes I serve people at the restaurant who hold hands across tables or sit next to each other on tables meant for four. It makes me angry that Q never gave me that. 

And then I remember all the other things Q did give me, and that makes me angry too. 

​

*

​

I had a boyfriend in high school. We knew our classmates would tease so we didn’t tell anyone. I was a secret, invisible as a lover. 

 

And when Q finally said yes when I asked her to be my girlfriend for the fourteenth time, we agreed not to tell anyone. And I was a secret, invisible as a lover. 

Sometimes when Tash and I touch it seems like we’re one hitch of the breath away from i love you. 

I don’t ask Tash to be my girlfriend. I don’t make any suggestion of the sort. 

​

*

​

Every day I am praying that Tash is not leading me on. Every emotive admission makes me feel shot through with a bullet. I word things as carefully as I can, but the letters still stumble out awkwardly. 

The shift is demanding and I am tired. I take my medication four hours later than I am supposed to, and I darken. I message Tash hastily between seating customers, making milkshakes, and training the new girl. By the time the restaurant finally closes, I am tense with trying to stay calm. There is a hurricane in my head, and it rages until I am alone in the silence of the office, doing the cash-up. 

Tash is out drinking, she messages that her ex will be there. 

I have to recount the five pound notes I am holding. 

That’s it, I think, immediately. This is over now.

But it isn’t, because the next day I am still texting Tash at work, between seating customers and making milkshakes and training the new girl. 

​

*

​

I can’t stop thinking about the city in my dreams, with its forests, tube stations, housing and entertainment complexes. I am almost always lost in these dreams, trying to make my way home in the darkness of the nighttime. 

 

I spend all restless nights in that dreamworld-London, complete with graffiti-stained alleyways, infrequent buses and steel subway systems with glass escalators. Upon arriving wherever I dream, I find myself in a darkened space, a low-lit museum or school, gliding through corridors and hallways and staircases, always looking for something or someone and never knowing what it is. 

Sometimes I see my grandmother, and I remember again what wholeness feels like. 

Sometimes I see Q, who goads me with talk of her boyfriend, tells me that after these years, I have come to nothing. 

Sometimes I am lucid enough, and can direct myself away from Q. In another place I might stumble upon Tash, before the dream twists itself into something else. 

I find it curious – I used to dream about fantasy worlds. Now I dream about real life. 

But I always wake up the morning after, sweating wet, knickers and t-shirt stuck to my skin. 

​

*

​

This has happened before. 

But this time, I am the one wondering if I should keep the one night stand to myself. 

We are undefined, Tash and I. 

And within that vagueness, it was enough for me to grab a stranger in the rush of my first cocaine buzz (because the dealers in Central London don’t sell weed and I’d already learned that the hard way), in the early hours of the morning on my dead grandmother’s birthday. 

 

She wouldn’t have been pleased. 

I have made every effort to forget the things that sting to remember. 

The stranger was a sloppy kisser and he fulfilled a base function: to fuck. His skin didn’t alter the shape of my memories. His tongue couldn’t wash my mouth with the promise of better things. I knew that, and had little to say to him in the morning. 

I was angry, dirty from hurting, and stained with something that made me unlovable. 

I needed someone to take that out on. 

​

*

​

They don’t rap about the comedown. 

I know my serotonin levels are depleted. I know I am dehydrated. I know that even dehydration increases anxiety. I want to stay in this – my – corner of the world. In sleep, nothing happens. 

But I have the evening shift. 

I am late, even when I push the shift back an hour. 

I lean on the counter between taking orders and wonder why I snorted it. 

I go back to the moment in the alley with the guy no older than me. I remember wanting his sweatshirt for its print. I remember him offering it up on my bank card. I remember the bitter taste at the back of my throat. 

You wanted a blowout. 

You didn’t want to think about it. 

 

It is Q’s voice, telling me what I already know.

​

*

​

hey

you ok

​

We last spoke three days ago. 

I don’t tell her about the spiral into my what-the-fuck behaviours. 

She doesn’t need to know. 

I used to believe that the truth was as wholesome as freshly baked brown bread. 

The truth is nothing more than a too-sweet doughnut that leaves a sticky residue on the fingers, and a strange thirst in the mouth. 

*

Tash and I continue exchanging messages for the duration of the Summer, and it no longer angers me if we don’t speak for days. 

After the cocaine, I lay low. I go to work, serve the people, smoke joints after my shifts with the chefs. 

I hang around Camden Town and Brick Lane with my Polaroid camera, looking for signs that something is about to change. 

Sometimes I think about Q. 

If she ever comes back, I will have been waiting all this time. 

And that makes me angry.