letter #4 - Jesse Darling

Used to sing. Still remember. Cycled the canals making up songs not going home yet. The melodies had to rhyme with the words. Sometimes the music came easy: on good nights it would come rushing up into my mouth from the ground as though powered by the hiss and hum of the spokes on the road. Sometimes the words would be there too, all at once like something fallen from the sky, but though I would race to write them down they never made any sense on their own, lying there silent and naked on the page. They were mawkish, awkward. The music was their redemption and mine.

Everybody said the songs were weird. Like show tunes but pop, but not. I felt they were very delicate entities that never saw the right kind of love but god knows I would take just about anything that called itself love back then. I couldn’t protect them or anybody. My voice died in the mic, in my mouth, at the end of somebody’s finger, when the cops pushed me into a corner. My voice was a bad shout on the tape at the bottom of a pile-on. The boys all grinding and hammering down on each other and everyone smashing out their I-am like a whole apparatus. It was a scrum. Couldn’t hear a thing couldn’t feel the feeling so I just screamed in the face of it, keening and careening drunk. The song was a roaring machine, a blast furnace. Chugged booze like it was kerosene so as to burn so as to become, but the drink just doused what was left. Sick and swaying I stood and my voice a lost dog that wandered out of the staves and never came home. And the band played on, and on, and on and on, and so on, and by the end what was there (once, nearly) was gone. Stayed at the bar waiting up for so-and-so, you know how it goes. So that’s how it went, and in this way the short years passed like stomach-drop cycles on a fairground ride. A juddering halt at the top; then the downswing, inevitable, almost erotic. The whole-body fear feeling of being just about to fall.  

*

Alone I felt like the cradle and the stem. I was the hole in the world and from the hole a voice came singing the old wet sorrow with the hitched up corners, like a laugh or a sob rending the dark silk of forever with a shudder of now. But I never sang alone except on my bike at night, arpeggiating like mad, wild goose chasing a wave. Sometimes with the boys there was a kind of tenderness, when we’d get high and mess around and the rhythm was right. It was a poem punctuated by arch em-dashes on the cymbal and snare, rim shots on the tom like a row of oxford commas. The keys would ask a question, catch a word in the open hand of a chord and hold the thought for me. It was dirty like a joke with a long build-up & the bassline went nudge, wink, nudge. There was a saxophone; big hairy brass tongue with its long money hole gargling out of tune, and the guitar up there corroborating the story. We conspired.

They were pissed off when I compared it to sex. Not everything is about sex, JD. What did I know about sex anyway? Sex was a word for something one did that was supposed to feel like something. What sex often didn’t, music sometimes did. Sex had to do with love in some vague capacity or at least with exchange. Love had mostly to do with exchange and sex sometimes didn’t. It was supposed to feel good but mainly it hurt. Music hurt too. And most other things, a bit. When it was living, the hurt was most of what you had to work with. Love was a spreading bruise under the skin.

*

The third time it started with a crick in the neck. Knew I shouldn’t go. A hanging melancholy tugged at my tails all day for a week, fed on everything, grew heavy and rancid like wet wool. But chimerical curiosity battled the warning and won, flung me out across the ocean in a plane saying over and over you only live once. Living only once has nearly killed me a number of times and still I do and I don’t and I do. Two weeks later I was back and the pain was ringing through me, singing so high I asked my bad lover to bite and break through the skin. That they refused to do it only deepened the sense of being out of time and place with the wrong person and against my own principles but god knows I would have done anything for love.
 

The pain is hard to describe from the outside because it is a form of spreading interiority that swallows the world. The pain sings too, eloquent; but defies words and sounds, dances dumb and blind on its stumps with its many teeth chewing up the day and night. It is bright white, dark red, dark green, sick purple—but it greys out everything, like link rot. It is invisible, Euclidean. It uses all available memory and most of the processing power as the machine goes into partial automation in order to carry out basic tasks. There are glitches in the automation as the middle brain tries to drive stick shift out of the quicksand. The pain courses and spurts: sticky liquid, granular discord. It is a circle, a hole.

Time becomes viscous, a sluggish pipe connecting your body to the world.

This goes on for however long.

Before I flew I told myself it would be all right if we didn’t talk too much. Not that our bodies had much to tell each other but in our best attempts at violence there was no harm done. Mostly it didn’t feel like anything. But the words ate away. Let’s just stop. Talking, I said (it was over). And over and over and over again.

*

When the pain receded, my voice went with it. Took the breath from my lungs. Voltarol, Salbutamol, Ventolin. Nobody knew why or how. The specialists had me in their offices and surgeries, monitored my peak flow, put their fingers in my mouth and around my neck. They threaded tubes into my nose and peered down the gullet. Then they folded their hands. We don’t know why it happens, they said. But it happens to some people, sometimes.

Mouthing and gasping: How long. Before I. Can. Speak? The words writhed in my silence, fish out of water.

Maybe a year. With speech therapy. Some people don’t recover, so that is a possibility too.

And what. About. Singing? Words hurt, breath hurt.

Doc stood up and shuffled some papers on his desk. You’ll probably never sing again.

Case closed. Big fast tears running down my face and the tube in my nose. Whole head leaking a wet splutter and the hole of my throat. But it’s. What. I. Do.

He studied me politely but there was nothing else to say.

Well, you may have to find something else to do. Not unkind. He plucked the tube from my head and sanitised his hands and showed me to the door. I think he wished me luck. 

*

Years passed and I forgot about singing, forgot about pain. Forgot about the men with their tubes and their fingers and the boys. Started to think I could be one of them, even. Had a friend who saw it on me. Hooked me up with the little striped vials and taught me how to drive the needle in. I felt better. Carried the boys around inside me, wore them in my blood. Walked with my head up. My words became muscular and instead of melodies my hands found ways to shape the things I couldn’t say aloud. The shapes travelled the world in crates like circus animals and brought home money for food. Working the metal was like the instrument I’d never learned to play: hissing of steel and humming of clay. Songs in space and silence, quick with the rhythm of the world.
 

Making things was like love in the sense of a melody meeting a bassline. It was like sex when you felt something, which was like violence: a juddering halt at the top just before the fist comes down.  

*

Fast forward. Things happen. And the fourth time they caught it: pinned it down by the long end of a needle, gave it a name. After the forceps and the scissors and the cannula and the catheter, the osteopath and the naturopath and the ECG and the MRI and all that blood on the floor in the corridor. It was the men again, though some of them were women. The things they did to my body and my voice died in my mouth, on the gurney, in any one of the many tubes that went in and out of me. Died in the consultant’s office as they wrote down a list of red flags and underlined them: patient has been injecting testosterone, no prescription. Patient has a history of anxiety. A history of addictions. A history.

Suddenly there were so many names for everything, all the words grinding and hammering down in polite silence while the pen scratched out its little tattoo. Comma, parenthesis, period.

In the first long days back home with her—a new human with her strange wise silence—the pain was like singing in the blast furnace. Wordless into my cupped hands hitched up inside my body like a stringed instrument. Rocking and singing and listening and listening to the screaming in my body and the humming in hers. From the very beginning it was like music, in the sense that it was like love. A hurting. A bruise in the face of the world. And the world was suddenly so small, curled up in my body like a fist.

When the pain receded it took my right arm with it, from the pointer finger all the way up to the shoulder. Walked slowly like a wingstuck bird and my legs buckled under. Wore a stick in the daytime, bad drummer on the sharp tarmac; oxford comma, oxford comma. A shaking left hand landed egg pulp and mush down my front in the sludge of summer and the milky stillness where my work had once been. Said I didn’t want people to see me like that and for a long while nobody came.  

*

Words kept rushing like piss through seams, clattering into my phone by a left thumb and the skin of their stumpy teeth. It was nothing like sex or anything else. Pictures broke the surface of memory and ducked back under into darkness. Dreams came and went in the dawn of afternoon. Things kept happening. I learned to draw again, and it hurt like I wanted, took my mind off the pain and the grey. Sometimes, without words, I sang to the baby. She taught me new sounds and I never wrote them down. Melodies fell out of the air like they’d always been there, brainstem shaking the tree while I stood in the yield, gathering. 

*
When I got back to town it was a different place. The boys were still there but we had all become men in the meanwhile. Things happen. Some of us were sober. It had been fifteen years or more. Children, marriages, divorces. A hundred shitty jobs between us. Some habits, some rehab, some resolutions. Money and the lack. Diagnoses, diseases, god knows.  

We were tender with each other, awkward. So many lives had been lived inside and between and there was very little to say. I had forgotten most of our common language and talked like a child. Nevertheless I had planned to stand my ground: adjust the monitor, admonish the apparatus. Because I didn’t sing anymore the songs were all that was left, and this time I wanted to care for them properly. My voice was a different colour because of the testosterone and the old meanings had caved in years before, but the melodies were forgiving, elastic.

The brain understands music as systematic; the memory center lights up in anticipation of the next beat, the note that follows the last. Time falls into line and chaos finds a shape. The shape hangs in the air, or courses around the cerebellum on the fine rhythm of synapses all conspiring to tell the story as the nerve system starts jamming along. Comma comma oxford comma, exclamation, dash!

All this I wrote just to talk about how it felt when they started playing. But the words don’t work without the music and the music doesn’t matter anymore. 

*

Used to sing and it mattered so much in the way it matters now that I stay alive: not forever, just one more night, one more day, just one more drink, a love story. Tapping out the old I-am with the bad machine of my right hand on these toneless keys, comma comma. I’ve a broken string.

Back in the band room with the boys I almost wanted to be young for them, to be girl again, to be the fairground ride at the end of the bar all whistles and bells and flashing lights, rotting halo of booze above my head like a welcome sign. But instead I kept time with my foot, grinding a little furrow where time connects to the body and it was yes, yes; yes, yes; yes- yes- and yes. The saxophone swung its wide end out and the boys joked about sex with your ex. Not everything is about sex, I said. But I knew what they meant. Sex when it feels like something is what the words can’t touch; old simple mystery we solve and solve again and still find a wordless question at the endless other end. A circle, a hole through which to pour yourself and gather. And there we were.

Things happen; things happen;

no end to it and no point to it, just a period at the edge of a line. Held in the hole of a fist. A love story.

We play in a scrubby field in between the toilets and the bar, just as the light starts fading. People come up and tell me I’ve still got it, but they are new people and younger than I and they don’t know what it is that I lost. There is talk of a reunion someday but I say we could all be dead by then. And that’s how I tell them yes, though yes is just a word among others. And things happen; things happen. Things happen all the time.

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