to be honest / aug 26

 

 

To be honest, it wouldn’t be August if it didn’t come with a grand and seismic change. I won’t lie to you, but I’ve tried something like this before. In 2024, right at the end of the summer, after we moved here but before anything had been confirmed with my contracts. I applied for a job at a hotel in a part of the city that was too far away for me to easily get to. I was interviewed by an Italian mother of three who lived even further away. She offered me the job on the spot, and I said yes after a day. I was just out of a relationship. I didn’t tell anyone. It was a professional affair, but one that was made by the mismatch in sexual rhythm. I still wanted to be seen as an academic, and this was something I wasn’t really ready to let go. There was a great deal of personal weight and meaning put in terms like ‘lecturer’. I had a place in the world and also I didn’t fuck with the Holiday Inn Uniform. It wrapped weirdly around my legs. I couldn’t walk how I wanted to. I was younger, then -- I am younger, now.

We were living in a flat that sometimes smelt like cigarettes and sometimes smelt like home. It was too small to be something of importance, our neighbours knowing the brittleness of the walls and floors and ceilings. Sometimes, I could hear the Upstairs Patriarch snore. Sometimes, I'd stay up just to listen. Sometimes, when his son-brothers would fight, I would watch from the stairs and imagine that this was the nature of all familial living. All senses perforated by a knowingness to these people could surround me, and I’m mostly nothing to them. 

The job was fine, but it kept coming back to the tempo. We were right next to a bunch of military offices, and the MOD would use the hotel as a place for our brave men in full uniform. I took the job because I knew I could make it easy. The job was fine, but the job expected constancy. I would sleep overnight there for, never more than six hours, all rest just to wrangle the Sunday faithfuls towards their breakfast. The kitchen shut at eight, but we were expected to serve food all night. I would elect to cover the kitchen, if only for the respite from the front desk, and the time to clean something.  

Enough of the time in the month I stayed there, there wasn’t any point in bussing back home at 23:00 for a 07:00 start. I stayed long enough to start to know the smell of every room, to know what needed repair but never to be able to afford the equipment or the manpower, to want something that loved me. Whatever. The job was fine, so what if I stopped sleeping? All that was light, edible, safe, liveable was meant to be tested underneath the weight of liminality. On the nights at the hotel, all I could know was that innumerous and careless families, soldiers and other pre-secularites would need need need need need their all-included continental breakfast. On those nights, I would dream of the men. I knew their room, but I always saw them coming to me. They’d knock, if only for the gesture. They wouldn’t know what to do with their hands so I’d bring their fingers to my mouth, where I’d bite at any flesh that took. They’d take my uniform off, and I’d apologise that I’d still smell of the microwaved dinner. I’d warn him: The scrambled eggs come from blue bags of milk. The shower doesn’t work. I’m far away from home. I can’t fix this.

Obviously, I left under feeble conditions. I broke easily. This should surprise nobody. Everybody cheered. I wrote a worrying email. I spent two days unemployed before another zero hour contract arrived via Teams. Lecturer was back, baby. The office in the flat was neither a home, nor an office, but I pretended I could live for a tempo that knows me. There were some promises of creative practising, as though I had more time to warm up. I wrote an expression of interest and included a bibliography that lacked meaning. I quit, but this time over a forethought abut whether this was or wasn’t the right time. I was praised for my decision, though I regret failing to commit to it properly. This will be a recurring note until August twenty twenty six, until I fail to follow my own career through and make a shift for my own fiscal consistency. Please don’t hear me wrong, I taught, and worked, as much as I could bear. I want you to know I cared about this job. I cared about the title. I cared about writing, about meaning, and conveying the latter through the former. I’ve left because I also want to live, as much as I can. 

Long after I’m done with the Holiday Inn, I start estrogen. The upstairs was quiet. I needed total nothingness, so that if I die here, my embolism could come off as a gracious and well earned suicide.  My ex had talked about stabbing her girlfriends on Saturdays before locals. It seemed efficient. I wanted in, but I had never phrased the correct way to ask. You could watch tutorials on youtube for how to hold a needle, how to guide, how never to pause, and when / where to panic — but I’d never done the cursory work of starting. It wasn’t August then, but the change was there. I was getting closer to myself, the shape I was supposed to fill was becoming clearer. I wasn’t thinking about work, but instead about death on camera, broadcast to a select group of writers across the globe.   

Once more, I sit with the needle but never let it past the skin. It’s been another year of minor successes, but I can’t tell myself it’s anything more than nothing. I can’t say I’m proud of what I am. I know I’m still a feeble thing, or that I’m fickle about the details. I know that all of these symbols are made meaningful by their repetition. I press and I wait. I watch the same video again and again. The woman says that one time, she hit an artery and lived. I don’t know if I’d be so lucky. I think about how much easier it would be to have another pair of hands here, take the work, do it for me. This is the only time I am ever really, actually in my body. I am alone, and I am worried, but I am here. It is a long, long way until August comes by again.  

So, when it does, and the patterns repeat themselves, I become committed to the idea that now is the time to think about my future (again). There’s probably something to be said about leaving, especially a place that let you be there for nearly three years. The truisms knead themselves into my skin. Flexibility is a luxury: you have a body that cannot relax: the dream of death is a teenage one: this is what you wanted: your ingratitude suggests this role would be better spent in a younger, smarter academic: you have lost your sense of smell, and you have no chums. 

Over the August past, I spent more time absolved in the light of my laptop than looking at the grass restore itself. It’s green again, and I’m another year older. That’s marking, baby. I get two more tattoos. I get older. I recover from an injury only by staying still, and abandoning all of my instincts. I feel myself become less. I get sick. And, of course, it was the right time to leave. I’ve felt fairly professionally stagnant since December 2024. I’ve felt creatively untenable. I’m a writer with no practice, who commits time to teaching that goes unpaid, unmoved, unshifted. 

So, I see the wound as it appears in every fold of life before me. There it is, bleeding. I count the centimetres around its shape. I ask if I can know it, and I hear nothing. The longer I touch, I get closer to learning that noise waits within.  There is something looking back from the other side. Somewhere, where the measurements have meaning, where everything that I'm working towards can already be seen, somewhere past the bleeding, there’s another hand tracing the edges, seeing the reflection, studying and studying and studying. I don’t know her future, other than that she has one. Just like me. I ask her if she worries, too. She stays away, far away, and I can only watch her watch me, trying to remember the numbers, and the house I grew up in. 

So, whatever happens at the coming job, whatever I become, I want to know I can live through it. I don’t want the totality of my lived experience to be spent worrying about employment, or the effect I give. There’s so much more to living than the insistence that I’m only ever a half-thing. All of my pains will lift. I can cycle to some other home. Regardless of how I am measured, known or seen, the stain cannot be washed out. I find great comfort in coming home to you. 

Obviously, I resign under feeble conditions. I break easily, though I am told I have sustained myself well. I worry about the decisions I am making. I will always worry about the decisions I am making. I worry about the writing I’ve haven’t written yet. I worry that I’ve lost the spark, that I’m spent, that I’ve overperformed once and now it’s just shadowplay. I’m awake enough to know that if it doesn’t work, that it’ll be my fault and there will be nowhere else to go. Catastrophe, I am flirting with reverence for you. Still, my writing hasn’t left me. Still, I’m here. Still, the needle is pressing the skin. I don’t know how I’ll bleed when I remove it. I don’t know how much it’ll hurt, but I’ll stick with it anyway. It’s all a part of me now. There’s no alternative to this, except go again next week. You can get it over with, or you can feel the sinew give and go. There’s no rhyme or reason for this. But, if I’m being so so honest with you, I enjoy it all the more. 

 

 

 

I was skinnier then, for sure. There's more weight on my bones now. I'm better for it.