Woman. In Bits.
Part One.
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I.
I cried this morning. Quiet tears that ran over the top of my ears and soaked my neck in the kind of grief I have avoided examining for ten years. Ten years I have swallowed whole and barely tasted. Sitting like a stone in my gut. Forgotten. Denied. Ignored. So today I dipped my finger into the salty water pooling in my collarbone and I tasted vulnerability. I tasted terror. And I tasted rage. Rage. Old as bone. A wet, electric knowing.
II.
What else have I buried in the architecture of my body?
III.
Left to my own devices, I would live on Stilton and Malbec. And nothing but Stilton and Malbec. Veins of blue and the syrupy drip of the stuff of life. Sabotage dressed up as pungent indulgence. Devoured defiantly. Daring common sense to stand between me and a slow suicide note. I would sip until my teeth darkened, crumble cheese between my fingers, and call it sustenance. Stilton, collapsing at the edges, sharp the way regret is sharp. Malbec, thick with plums and truths that drip off the tongue in its aftermath. Hunger and thirst as ritual, offering, worship.
IV.
Letting go. I own just three pieces of furniture now. The rest banished along with all my yesterdays. I can barely make sense of it. I have always been furniture. I don’t know how to live without it. I don’t know how to be. Yes, I was always furniture—curated, arranged, useful, lovely at a glance. Scratched upon closer inspection. It was what I knew how to do. A woman of sideboards and iron beds. Of bookshelves. Of chairs that held more than just bodies. It has in so many ways been me. Who I am. Even what I did, once upon a time. But that which has furnished a life like this one, whispers and screams its stories and I had to be free of its remembering. Because the sideboards and the iron beds, the bookshelves and the chairs - they bore witness. They whispered, scolded, consoled. They murmured and shouted and worst of all, they sighed. They knew too much. And I could no longer look them in the eye.
V.
I am both terrible at knowing what I feel and all at once besieged by it. I like labels. I crave taxonomy. Dewey decimal levels of classification. I want to pin it all down. To name the lump in my throat—ah, sorrow (there you are). To chart the ache behind my eyes—yes, that’s fatigue, or is it grief dressed as fatigue, or a brain tumour? I don’t know. Tell me how to know? Give me a spreadsheet of emotion and pain: colour-coded, alphabetised, cross-referenced. Give me tags. Give me labels. Let me sort this chaos into folders marked rage, longing, shame. Let me make it tidy, manageable, small enough to hold between finger and thumb. Because the not-knowing? The blur of it all. It’s undoing me.
VI.
Squint with me. See the taxes unpaid, or worse—paid blindly, in full, with interest I didn’t understand how I came to owe. See how undiagnosed neurodivergence etched itself into the meat of me. Not metaphor. Not theory. Flesh. I have worn it. In my gait. My gut. The weight around my middle, my ankles, my name.
I have bartered away potential like it was cursed. Seeing it flinch when I touch it. Bad ideas, though—those I cradle, like all the other babies I didn’t have. They shimmer briefly, become tactile. Graspable. Mine.
Count them. The late fees. The missed calls. The text messages unsent. The rooms I didn’t enter. The parties I watched nursing a drink. The years I folded into silence. Hid. The life I traded for something that felt survivable.
No one tells you that a disorder unspoken becomes a debt. One your body pays, over and over, without ever seeing the receipt.
VII.
Love, I’ve learned, is mostly repetition: buttering toast, folding socks, waiting for your key in the door.
VIII.
Perhaps the problem is that I don’t really believe in anything. My brain will not reason with religion, spirituality or mythology. Instead, I believe in Anne of Green Gables. In castor oil. In flannel sheets and lemon balm. In small, domestic miracles no one writes psalms about.
Maybe this is the drift: no god to hand my pain to, no myth to make it make sense. Just me, casting a net into nothing. Hoping it snags something more than lint and longing. So I build routine. Arrange rituals like sandbags. Try to keep the chaos at bay with meal plans and moisturiser. Call it faith, but it’s more like choreography—steps I follow to feel tethered. Not saved. Just tethered.
IX.
I cried this morning. A letting.
X.
Home became a foreign concept. A postcard sent from a place I used to live. My life has been in boxes. Books beside frying pans. Scissors beside grief. No furniture of my own, which is to say: no surface for memory to rest on. No walls to hang my longing.
This house became a waiting room. I called it temporary, so I wouldn’t have to belong to it. A breath held between endings. But tonight something stilled. Not the house—me.
I saw what I hadn’t: that I have been home here. Not the kind I have known before: not cushions and curtains. No, not that. The kind made of people who wave as we pass by. The alarm call that is bottles being emptied into bins behind Iranian restaurants. Of a cat disappearing down the alleyway. Of beautiful people sat typing furiously on laptops at the cafe bars beyond the grove. Of love standing on the doorstep, again and again, as if it lives here.
Even in the chaos. Even with damp making its way across the walls. Even in the not-knowing. I am home here. I have been. Because we do not choose home. She chooses us. She speaks our name when we’ve stopped using it. She holds the door open and she waits.
Even when we are halfway gone.