These are my hands, my knees

It is a bit like giving birth, when, to cope with the pain, you must focus on your out-breath, there, there, blow out, blow. You’ll live to blow out again, focus. Except that this baby you don’t want born, you want it sublimated back into your body, you want it just to quieten down, for the infection to settle and the growth to shrink. It doesn’t matter what you do, you can go and do something totally random – go to a floating sauna, whatever (in the olden days you would have got drunk, no doubt about it) – what you’d really want would be to curl up, wrap yourself around yourself, just sit and hold yourself together, all the while nursing this monster octopus of anxiety, your one true baby, your real flesh and blood – but that demands aloneness, and that is not available to you at the moment. So you arrange whatever removedness you can, because contact would make the monster thrash around, stronger, and under no circumstances can you allow this baby to be born, because you’d have to give birth to it through your heart and your mouth, and your heart would explode and your skull be wrenched apart, and the monster would taint everything, everything, everything. It might die in the process, too, but the void it would leave inside you would cause your body to implode, and the dead horror of it, in full view of everyone, would taint everything forever. It is better – the only possibility really – to carry the pain, dull but horrendous, as the monster devours you inside and turns your life force into rancid yellow pus.

AND. Of course, getting pissed is an option, too, even nowadays, even though it stands for failure and for giving up, but what does it matter, really? The second very strong cider in a smoky rock-pub after your stupid and random floating sauna increasingly feels like home, yes, just get drunk and be done with it, be embraced by the relaxation it will give your body, your body, your poor body where you live, where you escape to, where you suffer. You will feel the familiar feeling of the possibility of momentary escape, you could do the momentary escape into your body, your body drunk and relaxed, you could be drunk and dance and not care that the world is falling apart and you yourself are imploding and that onlookers will sneer because when pain becomes flesh, it is ridiculous.

JUST GET DRUNK AND FACE LOSING HOPE WITH GOING INTO SNEERING AUTOPILOT AFTERWARDS.

NO. I wish there was another way, it’s what I’ve pinned everything on.

Yet the lure of having a third, a seventh, a seventeenth, is so potent, so potent. Drunkenness holds me so much better than I can.

I occupy a space around me, like an egg of pain, that people shy away from, don’t penetrate.