don’t be alarmed
bloodstained shadows
smear my skin
it’s almost three
and i can’t sleep again
i promise
i tried everything
music and ice cubes
and drawing in red ink
don’t be alarmed
this is just
my new routine
where i hide scars
underneath my sleeves
bloodstained shadows
smear my skin
i hope you don’t notice
again
Pike Hill
Many a day passed before someone started to connect the dots – and even then it mattered not. The dark-red-almost-black splotch on the path remained despite cleansing rains and snowfalls. Indeed, it had grown beyond the spot where some passersby had seen the decaying body of roadkill that was somehow not on the road, but rather on the footpath, to encompass quite a bit of the walkway.
Many an animal had succumbed to the throbbing pulse of the blot on the path, ignorant, despite more acute senses, to the threat beneath their feet; but it wasn’t until, several of the bipedal type disappeared that notice was taken.
As several people disappeared, and testimony was given, a rookie officer with detective aspirations, noted that each of several said to have disappeared from his sleepy town, were last seen heading towards Pike Hill. On his day off, he hiked the path from the center of town to the peak of Pike Hill, and noted that the path was discolored in one spot – darker, for no apparent reason. He took to returning over and over again at different times of day, and the spot remained, despite many a rainfall.
What he didn’t do, was venture out at night. Had he done so, he may have seen the path buckle and shake. He may have seen a certain sinister light evince impossibly from the dirt beneath his feet. Had he trampled the spot, after the sun disappeared in the horizon, he would have felt, only for a moment, it’s true, a certain ripping, tearing, draining before he, too, like so many others before him, was a mere memory to be forgotten, while his energy lived on in the ever-growing, pulsing, sucking force that lived beneath the path of Pike Hill.
Shadows in the Mirror
We have these shadows,
these echos of ourselves.
My own face, reflected
back at me a million shards
over in that broken pane
of glass above my bed.
I see my own shadows,
growing from beneath
my eyes until they form
another me, another time.
In these parallel words,
Who am I?
She pulls up her sleeves
to those parallel lines,
one for each insecurity.
She pulls down her hood
to cover the glistening in
her eyes, hidden in the
darkness writhing within.
She snakes her hand through
another’s, willing to be
whomever they need her to be.
As long as it isn’t herself.
She drowns in her own bed
because it’s not worth facing
the saturation of the sunlight.
In these parallel words,
Am I any different?
What if every version is equally as broken as the next?
We have these shadows,
these echos of ourselves.
I watch them with closed
eyes through the cracks in
my mirror, fearful of the
blood-stained shadows.
Fearful that I might be
looking at myself.
blood-stained shadows
it rests on your fingertips so gingerly, you don’t quite know what to do with it at first. your fingers are frigid, though your skin's still smooth; yes, complexities like simplistic things to live on. so when death offered you his hand, did you expect to touch something so warm and welcoming? no, i suppose you didn’t; ’cause why else would you stagger back from him so surprised and quickly. then you drop your gaze at the shadow (you don’t dare think of his name again) and notice the blood on your finger- here we are again, where we started.
two seconds, that’s how long you hesitate, but it’s enough; just enough actually, for the sun to dip behind you and disappear, taking death (but without you). since he knows the favoured parts of you best be attained in the day, when he can do more than walk with you, but dance alongside with you. and perhaps when he comes back, with his midnight looks outlined by his version of eternity, you’ll be ready to take his hand.
but until then, you merely touch it here and then, only to draw back in fear. you do this again and again. every time blood comes away with your hand, it’s like a parting gift, from a friend. since your close calls must be remembered in the forms of scars and bruises, with blood of remembering and knowing. yes, for now, he’ll leave you thinking of his blood-stained shadows awaiting the day you let him dance with you.
the Male gaze: a blood-stained shadow
I have to put Lolita down, torn between disgust and arousal, my mind confused, memories slipping back under my skin. I slip into two-piece swimwear, and throw on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts, because we have seven builders about the house. I walk over to the pool, feet bare on the drying summer grass. The pool is bright blue, glistening, and when I let myself in, the pleasure is sensuous.
There are many kinds of pleasure to swimming, just as there are different pleasures to running. Sometimes, when I swim, I feel powerful, like a shark, like a woman. I plunge, I dive, I strike. I climb the horizontal waves, feeling more triumphant with every lap. Today, I feel a different kind of pleasure. As I close my eyes and drown out life around me, I am consumed with the caress of water on my skin. I could float here. My mind rivets with the sexual tension between those pages of Humbert’s narrative.
As we grow older, as we learn to reason, we become righteous and aware of our own power. The fetishisation of young girls is abhorrent, and as we, women, grow older and more confident in our sexuality, we shudder at the possibility of anyone having corrupted our youth.
The tragedy, is that young minds do not know the consequences of corruption, and watch wide-eyed at any possibility of falling further into the core, the beating heart of life. My schoolfriends and I used to whisper wide eyed about the wars, the deaths, the fighting the lovers, the knights, the passion.
When I was twelve, out at a restaurant with my family, I noticed a man watching me. Perhaps it was the self-consciousness of that age which made me notice. The inevitable introduction to over-sexualisation of young girls had already happened. I had been wolf-whistled by men in a park, I had watched and consumed popular culture and I had also, by that point, read Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, in which the young Mary becomes mistress to the king.
There is a possibility that I am misremembering, that it was my own perverted curiosity that led me to feeling uncomfortable and flattered. I remember thinking that he looked like the descriptions of a young Henry the Eighth, large blue eyes, a ginger-tinted beard and a wet, rose-bud mouth. I can still see him now, sitting across the leafy terrace, talking to his friend. Whenever I would take a quick glimpse at him, our eyes would meet.
Had I read Lolita at that tender age, I know I would have felt no repulsion at the contents of Humbert’s mind. I would have been intrigued, even, by his plans to sedate and seduce her at night, if seduce really is the right word. With no preconception of sexual immorality, I would have normalised the story. I remember how impressed I was when my school friend, a year later, told me her boyfriend was eighteen, almost nineteen.
I am thankful I never laid eyes on it.
Sexuality, like any unfolding thought, is vulnerable. We attach to it what we see, what we hear, what we never understand. For a long time, my sexuality, and therefore a component of my identity as a person, was defined by the male gaze. The thing about this male gaze is that it is internalised. As if I am no longer simply a woman, but man behind a window, watching me play out the part of a girl, of a woman. This, is my blood-stained shadow.
Still now, part of my pride in myself can be influenced or manipulated by how sexually appealing the blood-stained shadow finds me. When I swim, I can be overcome by the idea of myself, of the droplets of water which skim my limbs, the way they will glisten down my legs when I step out.
I am not a narcissist, I’ve taken the test several times. I have been led to believe that many young girls, who, like me, are fed the narratives of white male supremacy, have thoughts about their own body. The first time I read a description of a nipple, and the thirty-fourth, do not result in a direct comparison, but I become more aware of the youth of my body, of its flaws, of its beauties. Before we all seek to stop every young girl from reading any book ever again, I will add that this perception of women exists not only in literature, in film, in art, but in real life, too. Which teenage girl has not had older men breathe down her neck and been told how beautiful she is? Seen the eyes of an older man run appreciatively down her body?
I don’t see how this will ever change in our current systemic policies, nor is it the greatest tragedy that ever was. There are far worse prejudices, far more important battles to fight. But I was reading Nabokov and thinking how easily I suspect my younger self would have been entranced by this narrative. And I could not shake it from my mind.
This, of course, is not an accusation to every man living and breathing. It is a narration of my own experience, of how a blood-stained shadow was born inside of my mind and has followed me ever since.
drained
blood
stained
shadows.
echoes
of pleading
voices:
please please
no don't
stop.
twisted
into,
woven
around.
the walls
are bloody
too,
more so.
the shadows
are
abstract
the walls
are
concrete.
like
a masterpiece
painted
in
three
shades-
black,
white,
and
red.
so much
red.
too much
red.
the shadows
hold something,
a notion,
a truth.
this orchestrated
scene,
it's silent.
standing
in the middle,
she's there
wrapped in
the shadows,
like a coat on
a scorching day.
"i didn't do it"
Guilt
Guilt.
Tripping,
dancing,
singing,
prancing,
All.
Over.
Inside me.
Kissing my heart.
Squeezing my lungs.
Digging holes in my brain.
To create blood-stained shadows that leap in my eyes,
slither to the nooks of my soul,
and search out the corners of my mind
to blind my conscience.
My being trembles.
Trembles under its wieght.
And collapses.
Guilt has won?
Yes.
Yes it has.
It.
Always.
Does.