DIMINUENDO
iii.
I am listening again to the sound of his voice. I am losing it. I should probably stop. But imagine a moon, and a tidal wave, and a girl who can’t swim falling into the sea. That is him, and his voice, and me. (He says his wife is an optimist, but she probably shouldn’t be when he acts like this.)
He is telling me that in Utah they would have these dance parties, where you would turn up at, say, seven thirty on the dot, dance for just half an hour (What music do ultra religious weirdos even dance to anyway?), and then leave. No turning up fashionably late or milling around or leaving early. Just pure, unbridled, uninebriated fun! (That was nine years ago.) He spoke with the movement of a puppet’s jaw. “And when I was in Oxford,” (Five? Six? Three years? God. He really is old.) “I tried alcohol for the first time at one of your British parties. It was so bad. It was just people, drunk in a room. I had an absolutely awful time. And it proved to me that you don’t need alcohol to have fun.” (Sad.) Funny that I’m sober now too. In my head, my sober is not his sober. It’s not the same, I mean, I’m sober because I’m sad that he’s sober because he’s been brainwashed by people who raised him in a cage that only I can see. (God just have a glass of fucking wine. If the priest can do it, so can you.) But in my head I know what his stomach looks like. So there’s that. And I don’t think it was the alcohol making me sad. I think I just am. Sad.
Alone in my room is where I know him best, isolated beyond any belief, because I was raised to think for myself. And no one can say that I’m not just because they don’t like what I'm thinking about. What am I supposed to do if I’ve bled onto all my clean sheets? Hold back a moan, try not to recall the taste of – oh Jesus, it’s down my knees, and now I am down on them, choking on incense and elderflower. I am a modern woman who is living in the age of sexual liberation! (He has to have someone under the bed moving the mattress!) I am listening to more than his voice, but trying to tune out all the others harder than I try to make my own sound good. Trying to find it. To fade away into monody. I am forgetting if I ever enjoyed this.
He likes to act as though he knows me, as though he can tell me who I am. I let him. I am navy blue, clarinet, a regency romance protagonist, his toughest critic. I tell him I don’t like his facial hair and he’s clean shaven now. (I’m his but he’s not mine.)
I am the half-girl at the beginning of the world. I am his sacrificial lamb. He doesn’t have to use force, doesn’t even have to tie me up because I just stand there so very still and my lovely lamb voice is sweet and quiet and barely there. They even have to tell me to sing louder. The knife hasn’t fallen yet but I know that when it does I won’t scream or cry like a petulant child. I’ll take it. And when he is done I will faithfully squirm back out of my guts and my carcass as a new fresh little lamb and I will be his favourite because I never die and I never resent him for cutting me with a blunt knife when I know he has a sharp one that he could use but chooses not to. He always chooses me and not the other lambs because I am the youngest and I am his favourite. (He said I have the best hair out of everyone in the choir.)
ii.
Whatever this feeling is, who else is going to help me get it back? What if I can never write again?
However I feel, it’s you, and I don’t think you’re evil, I don’t think you’re ruining my life on purpose, you’re too good. (I have to believe because the alternative is–)
I’ve been writing since before I knew how to spell. I got my pen licence before anyone else in the class. Mrs Morris told me I was born to tell stories. Let me tell you about that for a minute. I was a girl and the font of all fiction. Visions of things I had no reason to know, all my fantasies flowing like water around a drowning girl. Gold stars everywhere, stars so gold that I became one.
How much strength does it take to tear up a piece of paper? What if I can never tell a story again? And what if that’s because of you? Then I’d have to find some other way to spend my time. But it’s impossible to drown twice. I can’t die a second death. I can’t tell the same story twice, at least in the same way. If I went back and rewrote the story that got that first gold star it would probably be about you instead of a dragon that blew bubbles rather than flames.
“Anyone that teaches you how to feel is important,” and “This person, whoever they are, you think you’ve been denied them, but maybe you were spared,” can go fuck themselves.
Listening to your voice turns my body into something so holy that no Son of Christ can escape it. You should be grateful that there’s a plaster over the open wound because if you saw the blood you wouldn’t be able to help yourself. I am the only true and living girl.
You probably think that in this light I look like your wife.
When people ask what happened, I’ll say that it’s easy to get lost in America (–that you hurt me on purpose.)
i.
I would rather be a doorkeeper of Heaven than have a bed in Hell, so I went to the City of Angels in hope that I could find one. (I wish–) The sea by Santa Monica state beach is the kind of blue I love to know, a blue like no water you would ever find in an old university town, and swimming in it again felt like being a little boy again. I think she feels it too, dancing on the sand in her Sunday Best with the other teenagers. (–he could take me with him.)
When my Visa runs out, the next step is to start a family and when we’re home in California they'll be enlightened like I was. They’ll sing whether they like it or not.
“Picture this: it’s 2013, seventeen year old me, walking down the corridor of my high school with broken earbuds strung under my graphic t-shirt and a skateboard slung under my arm. Would you have gone out with me then?” (Would you have gone out with an eight year old girl in a navy blue pinafore and knee socks?)
(This is the fakest fucking city I’ve ever seen. Everything looks like it’s been airlifted in from a warehouse on another planet. There are more cars on the road than I’ve ever seen in my life. I look out of the coach window and think about all the animals that might have been killed in this very spot, how they wouldn’t have seen it coming. I think about crashing my mum’s car.)
In Pacific Palisades there’s a crucifix hanging from the ceiling of the church, suspended by wires. In this light the shadow of it looks like a black star. The audience applauds.
Maya Stubbings, 18, Cambridge (currently) & London (usually) - UK ✯ IG: @6thlisbon
“Maya Stubbings (she/her), 18, is a first year student of English Literature at the University of Cambridge (usually/emotionally based in London). Writer by day (vampire slayer by night).”