Creep

This is women’s way of feeling time pass, that sinister clockwork inching round the roundness of the body; the slow gathering of endometrial cells, a nesting, a fluffing of pillows ready to receive guests, the ripeness of the womb, fleshy and welcoming, all neat and tidy and, yes, ready to receive guests, even one, just a casual visitor, anything. And then realisation that the arrival time has been and gone, and no one is coming; the tearing of the wallpaper, great swathes of it, and tears of disappointment, of ageing, of loneliness. The womb revolts and shudders. The painters are in.

Dear god is there not more to life than this? I sit and I watch others living their silly little lives, and I am ashamed to be a woman sometimes, though it is no wonder this is all we have: a desire to be small, to stay small. I know it well, from looking, from scorning, from wishing it were me. Berry-pickers, baby-raisers. Chaste and childlike. Burned at the stake. Ducked in the pond. Hanged by the neck. Stays, stomachers, corsets, girdles, Spanx, SKIMS; whalebone then steel then rubber then spandex, bodies winched into letters V and S, or numbers 1 and 8, gaining and losing value through body weight, beauty, and biological clocks. Mysterious, veering, treacherous codes: long, loose hair is innocent, until it’s whoreish; tanned flesh is lowly, until it’s exotic; cleverness is charming, until it’s embarrassing. With everything we give, we get smaller – and if we don’t, men take it anyway, pinching and nipping and penetrating. We pat creams around our eyes, cover upper arms, as men coarsen and grey good-naturedly.

Listlessness does not become you, my mother used to say, but I always had the feeling that nothing on earth would ever become me: listlessness, earnestness, short hair, fringes, dark nail varnish, stripes, bodycon, A-line, tomboyishness, girlishness, androgyny, bohemian carelessness, New York uptightness, smartness, sports kit, sports, sweating, civility, dresses, make-up, wistfulness, confidence, prudishness, sexuality, sexlessness, body hair, body weight, being overweight, that T-shirt of my sister's that I longed for - the one that I stole and wore and spoilt. Your father's daughter, my mother would say, turning away.

Lost and aimless, I joined a drama society and met, or rather saw, a boy, the flame around which we, dull moths, amassed.

Love is this: when it is your greatest desire to slice open His chest and crawl inside Him to rest.

I feel bruised; not my body, but my being, aching and soft and numb.

I would punish myself by pinching up fat handfuls of my thighs, my stomach, and twisting. I must have not done enough, not punished myself enough. My nails dig sickles into the padding of my palms.

Three times this year, I have taken a sick day. I am never actually ill; no matter how throbbing the headache, wrenching the pain, thick the cold, weak the limbs, oppressive and weighty and anguished the thoughts, I go to work, banking the day as one owed to me – one last-minute, guilt-free day off (for, inexplicably, I know I would feel guilt otherwise), when I wake up and the sky is too blue to stay indoors, or the wind too bitter to go outside, my mind too wretched.

I fear old age, and death, the slipping away of youth. But don’t we all, I suppose?