Coming Undone Terri White (ebook pc reader TXT) 📖

bill in four, slipped it into her hand underneath the song slip I’d filled out, clutching her hand for a moment as I pressed it in with a smile and a raised, knowing eyebrow.

I always drink the same drinks: a beer and a Big Apple (an apple martini in a plastic glass with a few cubes of sticky ice). I sit at the bar, waiting for my turn. When I’m up, I leap to my feet, clasp the microphone with both hands like my life depends on it, which it basically does. Sometimes I pull the air into me through my fists; at others I bend my knees, before my body lurches back upwards; on the worst nights I fall to my knees, head bowed towards the concrete floor as I pray and sing.

I never remember leaving. I wake up after each karaoke night at home. I can’t tell you if I’d walked the blocks or got a cab. I can’t tell you when or why I ordered food when I got home – curry, burgers, chicken, a cheese toastie – the detritus in the morning sometimes in a pile on the couch, sometimes stuck to my thighs, sometimes under my head and squashed into the pillow, sometimes scattered across the sheets like wedding-night confetti falling out of underclothes.

The next night, four drinks in, I walk through the door at the top of the stairs, the heads of the staff who pour the drinks and cue up the songs jerking back, recoiling in recognition. And it begins again.

I imagine that I’ll find solace in the space between the songs and the sadness and the drinking. I’ll find myself, crouching from view. I think that the songs are a path to the emotions I can no longer access naturally, only through the spit and shriek of public singing. In those moments, I feel full; I feel love, hate, fear, lust, anger. The feelings building, swelling and shrinking as the music moves. When it ends, fades away, the emotions leave me, leave my body, and I stand as empty and cold as the moments before it began.

The darkness is back, in full song, draining colour and life from everything.

CHAPTER 22

Karaoke was a doomed saviour, but one I sought out, because my condition was worst in the evenings. As the sun set, hope swirled away to be replaced by deep, cellular fear, my entire body erect and alert. Growing in dark corners, like the night-blooming cereus, waiting for the moon to peel open her petals and welcome life in. But I’m not welcoming life in. I’m welcoming the absence of it. I know every night I lie spread wide: everything is at stake again. Will I make it to the other side? To the rising of the light again? Will I be happy that I have?

Trying to place my arms, even my hands, around the fear is not just difficult – it’s impossible. It’s a totality I can’t comprehend. But I can see and identify and speak to shapes, fragments of the fear.

The fear is this: that I’ll never live happily and quietly, only violently and in pain.

The fear is this: that I’ll never love, truly, never be loved, truly.

The fear is this: that I’ll never be stitched together; my secrets, my indignities, my humiliations, my violations, my shame will flap, slap noisily against the loose bones that rub my skin red, rub my skin raw.

The fear is this: that the fog will snake and choke, trapping my breath. That I won’t wake, won’t stand and put my left foot upon the floor. That the moment will have swallowed me whole, swallowed me alive.

The fear is this: that the fog won’t snake and choke but choose to let me breathe. That I’ll wake, that I’ll stand and put my left foot upon the floor. That the moment will pass, as it always does, before blooming in my belly, curdling as it swells.

Every morning sees the beginnings of hope, the promise of growth, and then every night it turns inwards and withers all over again. Once the taste of death has been under your tongue, lodged along the edges of your gums, it never leaves your mouth. Ever. It’s not always the first thing you smack your lips at when you wake up or the last thing you savour before your senses shut down for the night. But you can hack and rinse and spit as much as you like – it always remains and it takes little to bring the taste vividly into the present. The sight of the sea through a window. The sound of waves crashing against rocks. A butter knife glinting in the sunlight that hits the cutlery drawer as you open it.

I sleep very little, just lie unconscious for a few hours, so spend hours in the dawn light imagining the various ways, the minute intricacies of the methods on offer. The fantasies set my pulse racing, my heart skipping: I stick a pair of scissors in my neck, mouth pulled tight, silently screaming at the cracks in the ceiling; with all my strength, I pull the blade of the knife down, across and around my throat in a circular motion as the blood shoots out and the fatty skin swells and contracts. I feel the thick rope between my fingers, see my body standing on the bed to loop the rope around the light fitting, feeling the rub against my neck as I place my head within its jaws. I taste the pills as they speed over my tongue into the back of my throat, falling down into my belly. I stand on top of the cliff, wind whipping my hair, and close my eyes as I jump: first my right leg and then the left trailing a little behind. They flail and whirl as I fall fast, my body breaking into pieces as it hits the concrete water. I steal a red