Man killed woman

this is lethal. this is green acid tentacles lingering on the top of my skull. i cannot think. but my entire body is shaking.

i don’t know if it’s hate that i’m feeling. but it’s something close to it. it is screams and hollers, rapid smoking and two bottles of wine running through my veins.

i wish i had someone to fuck me to pieces right now. just fuck. i don’t think i remember how to make love.

***

i love a girl in gothenburg. she has pain. we connect through that pain. i have it too.
but she spends her evenings with the man who ripped my heart out. and she likes it.

is it mere obsession? compulsive lunacy driving me up the walls? i light another cigarette on the stub of the previous, coughing up some phlegm and having another glass of wine... maybe i should just call her?

i try to focus on the needs of a person made of splinters. how she needs validation, confirmation, hugs - like i do. but instantly my mind goes green, cracks from drops of acid running across it, and i think: just not from him.

and then, coughing again, sipping some wine in order to swallow the slime down, lighting yet another shitty cigarette, feeling the damp and sour taste as the smoke whirls down my throat, i start to think in headlines:

Man Decapitated in Car Crash;

Mutilated Man Nailed to Floor;

Cut Off Penis Found, No Owner.

but most of all, through all my nightly actions - the coughing, the drinking, the smoking and the yelling out loud - i think this:

MAN KILLED WOMAN.

***

MAN KILLED WOMAN;

i pronounce it over and over, and it never stops. but during my drunken murmuring, it strikes me that at some time i must have known how to live without him? i can still remember myself, though faded now, walking and talking and coping before i even met him. how come i’m in such bad shape now? why can’t i just snap out of it?

another glass of wine will tell me, and another cigarette. turning up the speakers’ volume and singing out loud to the music, turning wild - THIS IS WHERE IT ALL STARTS, THIS IS THE END OF THE WORLD - and i remember how he used to have to persist on seeing me, stubbornly claim his love and devotion, time after another, simply in order to convince me to let him in. i was never the one asking for him, longing, waiting, and if i did, i never let it show. for the woman i was when he met me - that woman that could walk and talk and cope without him - she did it without a heart. she had chosen not to love again. and, fuck me if this isn’t true, she had sincerely promised never to do it again. for she knew that she didn’t have the strength to manage.

maybe he was right when he said that he was good at doing what he did, for he broke through all boundaries i had between myself and a long lost, broken and chopped off heart, and i came in touch with my own warmth again. my love. and, oh,

it was fragile.

***

when he said he didn’t want me anymore i wrote a short journal, this is how it went:

"how am i suppose to kill the person he almost brought back to life?"

that’s my true love story summed up in one sentence. i used to be dead. he found me, gave me some mental mouth-to-mouth, and almost succeeded. but then he stopped.

it doesn’t sound that awful, spelled out like that, but it was. it IS. the complications hidden underneath the words i just scribbled down are these:

a dead person is okey with living in despair. she’s fine with it, she doesn’t hope for anything else to exist. but then some fucking distorted samaritan decides to break that spell of oblivion, and tries to show a dead person what life’s about. an although the dead person is repelled by his moves and tries to go away, although she screams and is fragile and bleeds a lot, the samaritan still persists. and in moments followed by others, he shows her love. how it’s like to open up to someone, how it’s like to cry in someone else’s arms and not just one’s own. and how it’s like to share. how it feels like, starting to believe in a future again.

it feels fucking lovely.

and when that is taken away from the previously dead person, all she has learned is that THIS is what people have in their lives. this is why people stay alive, and why they LIKE their lives. and she has gotten a sense of how that feels like, LIKING life, but what she’s learned is that that state of mind is something she’ll never have.

***

i know this. i know how a life feels like. how it feels like to feel good when you wake up in the mornings, how it’s like having someone in your life that you actually want to see, someone you long to see, that makes you stay up all night writing love poems or wait at a train station for too long a time simply in order to be able to stare into that person’s eyes. i know how that feels. and THAT is what makes it awful. i know i am without.

so it’s a fact:
MAN KILLED WOMAN.

***

i write my words down. i’m drinking from the bottle now and i feel a sense of settlement. smoking in style, trying not to cough that much, but i’m still thinking about my girl in gothenburg, and i’m still asking:

baby, don’t see him. see anyone you want and get your confirmation. just not him. walk around with glittering metal nipples and be the one that shines, but, please, don’t walk around with him.

i miss you. i need you. and he contaminates my world of you.

Av Annakarin Josefsson 22 jul 2002 14:42