Four
HE SLEEPS LIKE AN APOLOGY.
Itold him later. I remember saying it, the word doing its small useful job of buying me a night I wasn’t ready to spend properly, and later arrives the way later always does when you’ve actually meant it and not just used it to get out of a room: on its own schedule, a few days on, a Sunday with nothing else claiming it.
He comes round for tea, ordinary as anything, and I make it properly, loose leaf, six minutes, the timer on my phone because I don’t trust my own sense of when a thing’s steeped enough, and I put the mug in his hands and sit him at the table rather than the bed, on purpose, because what I’ve got to say needs a table between us, furniture that means business.
‘You said you’d tell me the words,’ he says, before I’ve worked out how to start, which is exactly like him: he doesn’t make me find the opening. He hands it to me, plain, the way he’d hand you a tool you’d asked for without making you explain what you needed it for.
‘I did.’
‘So tell me.’
I’ve drafted this conversation more times than I’ve drafted anything in the notebook, which is saying something, because I draft everything to death, it’s the one professional habit I can’t seem to leave at the restaurant door.
I’ve imagined making it clever, making it funny, wrapping the whole thing in enough charm that it doesn’t sound like what it is, which is: a map of a body that other people have narrated without permission for the better part of a decade, and a list of the words they used while they did it.
The rules didn’t come free. That’s the part I don’t put in the notebook, and won’t put here beyond this: every line of that map got drawn over the top of somebody who’d already had a go at sketching their own, in pencil, without asking.
There was one who called the workshop by a word I’d told him not to, mid-way, breathless, like the word was a compliment and I was ungrateful for flinching.
There was one who treated the place further back like a door I’d left unlocked by accident and he was doing me a kindness pointing it out.
There was one who was gentle, genuinely, and who narrated the whole of me anyway, a running commentary on what I was and wasn’t, as if a body needs a voiceover, as if I couldn’t be trusted to follow the plot of my own skin.
So I wrote the rules the way I write everything: because the draft that came before was wrong and I couldn’t stand to leave it uncorrected.
The zones. The words that are mine and the words that are retired.
The flat fact that nothing about me is a favour anyone’s granting me.
I drafted them alone, out loud, in a run of flats where the walls learned them before any man did, and by the time I put the mug in Ron’s hands at this table I’d been rehearsing the speech for years, arming it against the follow-up question, because there was always a follow-up question.
I don’t do the clever version. I look at the table, at the ring going round and round on my own finger the way it does when I’m choosing a sentence carefully, and I just say it.
There are two words, family words really, the ones a doctor or a form or a childhood used before I had any say in the matter, and I say them once, flat, unweighted, so he’s heard them from me in a voice that isn’t ashamed of them, and then I tell him they’re retired.
Not forbidden because they’re shameful. Retired because they belong to a person the paperwork invented and I’m not required to keep paying rent on a name and a set of terms I never chose.
There’s a place I call the workshop, low, the part of me most people would reach for first out of habit, out of a script they didn’t write and don’t examine, and I tell him: touch it like everything else, don’t touch it like it’s the point.
Let it be one instrument in a room full of them, not the reason the room exists.
There’s a place further back I don’t have a joke for, and I tell him that too, plainly, that it’s mine, that it isn’t unavailable forever, only unavailable until I say otherwise, and that when I say otherwise I’ll say it in words, not in silence he has to interpret.
The safe move, the one those first couple of years would have counselled, is to keep quiet about a door you’re not ready to open.
I told him because a locked door somebody doesn’t know about isn’t a boundary, it’s a trap, a thing that turns into a wound the first time a hand tries it in good faith.
The men before him didn’t fail me at the door.
They failed me before it, by never being told there was one, so a no arrived to them as a surprise and a rejection instead of a rule they’d agreed to keep.
I wasn’t going to build that trap for Ron.
I told him the door exists, and that it’s mine, and that it opens in words and not in silence he has to guess at, precisely so that the day it does open, if it does, he’ll know it was a choice I made and handed him, and not a lock he happened to pick.
That’s the whole difference between the map and a wall. A wall you run into. A map you’re given, so you always know where you are, and so does the person walking it with you, and nobody ends the night having trespassed somewhere they were never told not to go.
He listens the way he does everything, with the whole of himself, no fidgeting, no rushing to fill the gaps between my sentences with reassurance I haven’t asked for.
When I finish he doesn’t say thank you for telling me, which is what most people say, a sentence that’s really about them, about proving they’ve received the information correctly.
He says, ‘Right,’ the way you’d say it after someone’s shown you where the stopcock is in a house you’re about to live in.
Useful. Filed. Not going to be the last conversation, just the first one done properly.
I keep going, because I’ve drafted the whole speech and a speech interrupted is worse than one not given, and I tell him the last part, the one about the words.
That when he wants me, in the moment, he’s to use the ones I’ve handed him and not reach for the ones off some script he didn’t write and never examined.
That the map isn’t a restriction on him.
It’s the difference between a man touching a person and a man narrating a body he’s decided he understands.
‘I don’t narrate,’ he says. Not defensive. Checking he’s got the spec.
‘Everyone narrates. Mostly in their head. I can hear it anyway. You get a look.’
He thinks about that, genuinely, the way he thinks about a wall that isn’t sitting right. ‘What do I do instead.’
‘You ask. Or you watch my face, which you do anyway, you’ve been doing it since the bar. You already know how to read me. Just don’t stop reading and start deciding.’
‘Right,’ he says again, and this time it lands different, because he’s not filing it, he’s agreeing to it, and that’s a distinction I didn’t expect him to catch and he caught it.
Then, after a while, the only follow-up he asks all night, and it isn’t the one I armed the speech against: ‘And if I get it wrong. Reach for the wrong word, or the wrong place, some night, not meaning to.’
‘Then I’ll tell you. That’s the whole point of telling you first. So a mistake’s just a mistake, and not a thing you’ve decided about me.’
He nods, slow. ‘Good system,’ he says, and means it as the compliment it is, from a man whose whole trade is systems that hold load, and something under my ribs does a thing it hasn’t done for anyone I’ve handed this map to before, which is unclench, because he hasn’t taken the rules as a wall he’s been shut out behind.
He’s taken them as the drawings. The thing you build from, together, so the structure stands.
‘That’s it?’ I say, because some old part of me is braced for the follow-up question, the one that turns a person’s whole self into an interview.
‘That’s it. Unless you’ve got more.’
‘Not tonight.’
‘Then that’s it.’
I want to be exact about where the rules came from, because the easy version — trauma handed me a rulebook — is a lie by omission, and this whole book is my war on those.
It isn’t a wall. It’s a text I authored, revised, and stand behind, about a body I’m the sole living authority on.
The men before him didn’t teach me the rules.
They taught me I’d need them, which is a different and smaller gift, and I’d not thank one of them for it.
I’ll say the other part plainly too, because the version that only tells you the wound is its own kind of lie: it isn’t only rules and retired words and men who got it wrong.
Some nights it’s just good, uncomplicated, the plain animal fact of a body that works the way bodies work, and I’ve stopped apologising for that truth to the part of me that would rather the whole subject stayed noble.
It doesn’t make me anything. It doesn’t unmake me either.
I carry it, the way you carry any fact about yourself other people form opinions on before you’ve finished forming your own: not a flag, not a wound.
Weight. Worn under the clothes same as everything else I don’t lead with.
Some days I don’t think about it at all, which is its own kind of peace nobody warns you is available.
Some days it sits wrong, a low hum of somebody else’s idea of me that I can feel even with the door locked and no one else in the room.
The organ’s never been the difficult part.
The difficult part is what a stranger decides it means the second they clock it’s there — the word they reach for, the box they tick, the version of me they’ve built before I’ve said a single true thing about myself.
That’s the actual weight. Not what I’ve got.
What everyone insists on reading into the fact of it.