There’s this conniving little space between moments, sometimes, probably close to 6am and closer still to bare skin, it slips in slowly and steals the sleep from our tear ducts. It’s that gap we all have to jump if we’re still awake, usually with newborn limbs and absent eyes, an enormous yet fleeting fraction of acceptance, forced upon us by the persistence of sunlight through bedroom windows that (in my case) hide nothing at all.

Contingency plans and over-formed concepts are wilted in the milky haze, the heart-wrenching conduct of that theory called ‘normality’ is belittled until it is finer than dust and even less significant, so thin, so sparse, we simply consume it with a single breath. The abstraction of conformity is debased, blanketed by the nonchalance of a Sunday morning sunrise, and we ask, no, we sigh: ‘oh, why can’t I live this entire life here within my room?’

The answer is a slow-moving vehicle manned by Hollywood jaw lines, sharp enough to slice through marble, and eyes that do nothing more than shade the horridly arid form of a hollow man, and it’s all made from splinters of the days where we forget normality and expectation; pens and ink, reeds and guitar strings, soil and seeds, only the delight of such things is all frozen and deadened in a snail-slime lacquer they’ve used to keep the colours from running.

And that’s who’ll you meet at the destination, that’s who you’ll marry your life to, this stale, tasteless mass of tailored thoughts and standardised feelings, sensibility sighing from the pores like a puff of mould particles exhaled from a crack between a musty, shed-dwelling couch when sat upon; be so careful to keep your eyes closed and your mouth shut tight; this is infectious, this is contagious, this is the defining moment, be so careful.

Ride that space between night and sunrise, between rest and wake, and let it carry you, as though you were a precious baby, to the one place you’ll never have to leave, that corner in your chest that floods so frequently with a fervent yearning for an absolute solution. 

By Tess Van Deyk

‘Please, tell them to take the machine out of my body.’

In the emergency room, everything is tidal. The systematic ebb and flow of patient and doctor, of pain and relief, of life and death. A new kind of white noise, a collage of mechanical bleeps, incoherent moans, wheels, keyboard clicks, intentionally hushed murmurs upon clean breath with dirty news.

I think most of us are porous. We all soak up remnants of each environment we’re subjected to, whether it be voluntarily or otherwise, even as we walk, situational particles cling to us, like the dirt upon our shoes at the end of each day. Maybe that’s why I never polish mine.

In the emergency room, my receptors are at the peak of their purpose. I can close my eyes and almost see the chemical chain reactions unravel beneath my skin. Electrodes spark and shoot lightning-fast tendrils through each hairline-nerve, down to my quivering thighs, my sweating palms, my palpitating heart. To accept the truth can be hard. But it is important to remember that the difficulty of facing integrity can be even more exhilarating than it is frightening.

We all live inside of a vessel, a vessel of which we think we own, a vessel of which we think we know, a vessel of which we believe to control. It’s moments like this (overstimulated, nauseated, hyperventilating and irrational) that occur to remind us all: the connection between mind and body is feeble in most. Perhaps it is nature’s way of achieving its very own egotistical high. Hello, being, hello, undefinable existence. Know me, and know that I know more of you than you ever will.

‘Please, tell them to take the machine out of my body.’

I am very aware of my paranoia. I can feel it creeping up on me, personified in my mind as a liquid form of black so dense, that if dropped, one teaspoon of its substance would fall right through the earth. My shoulders rise and freeze with its touch, my eyes close to the silence of its voice, and I feel comfortably secure in my state. Yes, the nurses watch me with judging eyes, the doctors know my mind is gone, they all see my here on this dirty, plastic chair, as a gargoyle, perched and anticipating a trigger, a dangerous creature in the guise of a girl. They see my shaking hands, and they exchange nervous whispers, so I purposely hook their glances and reel them into my gaze. I hope for them to feel guilty for their assumptions when we lock eyes, I hope to see them make an attempted correction of their anti-humanistic behaviour with an insubstantial, forced smile, paper-thin and fleeting. Remember, I am only a girl.

Across the hall, the patients lay in boxes made of washed out curtains. Back to where you all started, I think to myself. Back in a box, helpless, incoherent, while the nurses tend to your bodily functions and record every vital sign. I suppose we’re all going backwards, in a sense. At least you can leave, though. At least your box isn’t four solid walls and a locked door, I envy you, because that’s where I’m going.

The man directly in front of me is writhing in pain. He doesn’t speak English, so he moans loudly with each slight movement, each breath, eyes squeezed shut, knuckles whiter than the sheets they’re wrapped around. The right side of the man’s face glistens under the buzz of the fluorescent lights, his cheek glazed like a bakery delight. The folds of his skin like a partially melted beeswax candle, heated and cooled to form irregular ridges and valleys and drips, frozen in animation. The man is burned. His pain is visible. His pain is confronting. It is ugly and earnest as it weeps and glistens under the buzz of the fluorescent lights. The nurses swarm to him, like crows to road kill.

‘Please, tell them to take the machine out of my body.’

The warden passes for the fourth time, guiding a patient in a hospital bed. Each time he passes with a different patient, he slows, and says: ‘couple of speed bumps’ as the wheels of the bed jolt over the seam of steel across the sterilised floor. But this time, as he passes, the hook where a bag of fluids dangles and drains snags a tired blue curtain, and opens one of the boxes like a poorly funded community theatre play. There, centre stage, lies our star, naked, wrinkled, pallid and still.

My dark, dense friend loosens its grip on my shoulders, and I can feel the air slip between the gap that forms between my back and it, and goosebumps crawl across my skin. My attention has been diverted. The mystery voice, our star, is now in full view. His blankets are twisted and askew, revealing a bare leg of skin and bone, and a protruding hipbone, as sharp as a blade. He is wide-eyed and unblinking in a bewildered stare, his thin, wide mouth curved in a permanent frown. His complexion is lined with creases, as though a reckless artist has lined and relined each feature of his face with a heavy graphite pencil again and again, each time, altering the original placement.

The man slowly lifts a bone-thin limb, tipped with a hand that appears too large for it, and makes a vague grab for something only his eyes see. I strain my vision, focusing on his wide-eyed stare, and there I spy a sparse and feeble tear, seeking out the crevices of his age-bitten cheek. He speaks: ‘nurse?’ with a wavering upward inflexion ridden with uncertainty, as though he could be considering the idea that the passing people in uniform could be nothing more than ghosts. I could be inclined to agree with him as each and every one fails to hear, their strides unfaltering as they flock around the crying man with the burns on his face.

It is here, that I feel my thoughts distil, pooling evenly to the deepest part of my conscience, it is here that the room becomes redundant and shapeless upon the edges of my vision, it is here in this moment that this man and I occupy, as two in the same; the man is dying in silence, and so am I. In a flash like something out of a movie, I hear the voice of the lecturer from my last first aid class, and he’s talking about the configuration of priority on an emergency crisis, and he’s saying; ‘some will kick and scream and bleed, and you’ll want to help them first, but don’t, because it’s the ones who are silent who are in dire need of help.’ But no one seems to go by that advice in here.

‘Please, tell them to take the machine out of my body,’ the dying man whispers. Well you’ll have to speak up, friend, because out here, the silent all perish. 

By Tess Van Deyk

(Source: tessvandeyk)

‘Dissociative’, he barks from behind porcelain teeth, spectacles perch precariously on a Hitchcock nose, liquid eyes that leak from the edges, not because they’re sad, but because they’re tired, and not because of lack of sleep, but because of glaucoma. This is a man who observes the world through a watery sheen acquired through years of comfortable monotony, like a hermit spying the streets through a rain-soaked window, this is a man who is too afraid to really go ‘outside’, and he’s telling me I’m the one who is sick.

(Source: tessvandeyk)

The streets were naked but the air was sweetly syrupy with the noise of terrace parties and the smell of burnt onions, and so the footpaths laid vulnerable to monstrous city beetles that flittered and rattled like the sounds of those comical skeletons from old fashioned films, from gutters to garbage bins, in search of a meal, but the bins had been emptied and the gutters were clean, except for the tarnished oak leaves that rested there like pencil shavings or maybe sawdust.

Day three, or maybe four, I could’ve known, for I’d been marking each wake with a dark line on my wrist to keep track, but the bottom of my rucksack had drunk the last of my ink, I think, although I was soon reminded of the date when I zigzagged my way past the shoebox green grocer where the nice foreign man worked and talked on his phone, he’d always wish me a good day in a way that felt real when you looked at his coffee-stained smile and his eyes that folded at the corners like the veins in an autumn leaf, eyes that said ‘I’ve been here a while, but I still know my name’, and the fact that he’d cramp his store with fresh fruit and vegetables instead of coca cola and cigarettes makes me think he knows what it means to be alive.

My broken-heeled boots tapped like a lady’s high heels, and I’d noticed, because I’d watched as men turned to me, un-pretty sunflower faces stretching for the sun that was the anticipated sight of a bare-legged broad, but those eyes would meet only a messy-haired girl with a bare face, tired eyes and a rucksack. I was nearly home, but I bumped into my friend from five houses down, he looked glad to see me, so I sat down in the gutter, amongst the scuttle of city beetles, I mean pencil shavings, I mean leaves, and he pulled up a seat beside me.

Neither of us had much to report, obviously, as we’d been spending the long weekend alone, spying happy couples strolling the parks, families laughing and children hunting for eggs made from chocolate in the gardens; him and I just watched and smiled on them all with a somewhat dulled, suppressed melancholy that crept its way from the heart to the tonsils and lingered there until something washed it away like a gulp or a set of rapid blinks. Anyway, he eventually had to go because he was pretty sure he saw a city beetle or a pencil shaving or a leaf scuttle across Castleborough St, so he trickled into the shadows with a liquidity no other creature could match, because like water, cats always find their level.

And I thought to myself: I need to find my level.

By Tess Van Deyk

(Source: tessvandeyk)

I stand a matchstick breathing warmth against the lids of this house’s eye, and it sighs a dull, oblong gaze onto the asphalt seashore song of vehicles, homeward bound, an eye within an eye, a duality finely paired, disgustingly obsolete, furtively incompetent, wholeheartedly empathetic, and more silent than a stone.

Her walls are cold to the touch, as mine are, and I love her inanimate presence, that concrete breast to rest my head, a still and sturdy embrace forming my very own human cage; I close my eyes and just know I am that peach-faced love-bird that watched the butterflies fly free in the snowflakes that fell outside of her cage in that book of poems I read as a child.

Only I think I’ve realized now that her door was always open, she was just afraid of freezing on the outside.

By Tess Van Deyk

(Source: tessvandeyk)

So beat me, until the whites of my teeth are framed with red in a shark-faced smile and my eyes roll back brimming with crocodile tears and my hair knots in steel-wool clumps between the bones of your knuckles that stretch the skin so taut they could just be cold cling-wrapped stones and the veins in your arms, your hands, in you, they swell on the surface and throb with the rush of your psychopathy, they writhe, the entire length of those blue snakes that I want to kiss and kiss, oh I love you, I love you.

By Tess Van Deyk

(Source: tessvandeyk)