Coming Undone by Terri White (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) ๐
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- Author: Terri White
Read book online ยซComing Undone by Terri White (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) ๐ยป. Author - Terri White
Less than a week later, I arrive home, to the room thatโs really a box, and there, proudly, defiantly, in the centre of my bed is my weave. I look down the hallway: thereโs no sign of the landlady. I look around for clues. And there under the bed is a pair of purple knickers I donโt recognise, that arenโt mine.
The hot madness inside our apartment in the sky continues to build. I wake up one morning with tiny red bites on my body. I scratch my body, the bones that have made an appearance. โI think the apartment has bed bugs,โ I say to the landlady.
She reacts furiously: โYou must have brought them in!โ
I struggle to remember why Iโm here. I feel like Iโm serving time, but Iโm not sure for what. I work as hard, harder, than Iโve ever done, but my job leaves me feeling exhausted, emptier still. The women I meet smile and slip their hands into mine, the corners of their mouths never moving to meet their ears. The conversation stops when I enter a room. Words are said quickly, with sharp edges that cut, when Iโm out of rooms. The person Iโve come here to be remains further away than ever before. I used to be able to see the outline of her, just ahead, but sheโs long gone now and I walk alone.
Iโve lived with loneliness before. I was a lonely child, a lonely teenager, a lonely adult. I have spent the majority of my life alone, mute, hiding. Itโs so soft and quick off the tongue, so easy to claim, romantic, even. But it becomes clear in this city that Iโve never experienced true loneliness before, not the kind that you wear like a cloak of invisibility. Loneliness layered upon loneliness until you wonder if you are, in fact, not just invisible, but dead already. Your existence snuffed out, suffocated.
I walk down Eighth Avenue and I believe, right down to my toes, that I canโt be seen by a single person around me. The end result of the disappearing act I started a few months before. Now Iโm in the air. In the sewers. In the spit on the sidewalk. Everywhere but in my own body.
When I was a kid I thought that the world was watching me โ that human existence was me, and everyone else was just watching me. That the world started the minute I walked into a room, and stopped the minute I walked out. That I could communicate with the world through the mirror. That when I spoke into it, they listened, they saw. Now Iโm not sure if Iโd ever existed. That me, Terri, my consciousness, is a figment of someone elseโs imagination โ maybe my own, if that is even possible. I try to talk to strangers just to check Iโm there, here.
โHello?โ I ask the woman in a trench coat hurrying down Broadway on a Saturday afternoon.
โExcuse me?โ to the man jumping into the cab Iโve hailed.
Neither so much as flinch in my direction.
I feel my identity, my sense of being crumbling. Who am I? Where am I? What am I? Am I? Maybe company will bring me back to life. I crave it: the look of recognition, familiarity in anotherโs eyes. The fingers attached to the man in the bodega graze mine when he hands me my change after I buy cigarettes one night. The hairs on my arms stand to attention as 350 volts flood through my body. Itโs the first time Iโve been touched in months. I miss it so much. I miss feeling something, anything so much.
The drinking, the pill-popping continues. One night after a party at a friendโs apartment, I take a handful of sleeping pills, half a handful more than usual. I feel myself drifting off, on the warmest, softest wave, and as it laps at my eyelids I think this may actually be it. Itโs not the first time Iโve felt this in recent months, but it is the first time Iโve so joyfully welcomed it. The relief as I sink further and further into the thick blanket, the arms of someone I love. Iโm woken a day later, when my friend stops by to check Iโm OK, still breathing, when I donโt respond to his messages.
The cycle goes on, the darkness chokes, even in this place in the sky, in the light. Eighteen months after I left London, I decide itโs time to go home. If I donโt, something bad, something worse is going to happen to me. And it wonโt feel like that when it comes; it will feel good, like something better. It will feel like sweet, sweet escape. I quit with no job, for the first time in my career. For the first time, I choose life.
CHAPTER 20
Iโm home, back in London. Within days, he appears, seemingly out of nowhere. But from the first half-moment, the first apparition, I know heโs been there all along, moving as I move, forever just out of my eyeline. Heโs the one who was meant to find me, who I was going to come together in the hands, under the eyes, of.
He has a partner. I know this without asking or without him telling. I find it strangely, shockingly irrelevant. My usual concrete moral core barely flinches at my transgression: the joining of our bodies, his mind folding into mine.
His partner has nothing to do
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