she must be mad
Charly Cox
A mental coming-of-age documented through poetry and prose written by someone who’s still in the thick of it
copyright
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ 2018
Copyright © Charly Cox 2018
Charly Cox asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in this work are of the author’s imagination. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events or localitites is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook edition © July 2018 ISBN 9780008291679
Version: 2018-09-17
contents
title page
copyright
For the men who broke my heart...
she must be in love
love part 1
to you
she moves in her own way
mourning routine
mesh of kisses
anatomical astrologist
otters
weight of you
lipstick
lovebites
with his assistants
doubletree by hilton
porn
evolution
snapple lid facts
kaleidoscope
rosie cheeks
app cheats
first west service
you sit with your tongue...
the first time
love part 2
she must be mad
mind part 1
‘she must be mad’
@saintrecords
doctor, doctor, don’t help me
selective feeling
I wish I’d not spent so long crying in bed
rapid cycling
funny
I prescribe you this
I know that truth is always beautiful
all I wanted was some toast
a voice I know
wonder of worry
amber meal
unidentified businessman
mind part 2
inner gold
resilience
dysthymia
wrong spaces
kindness
your mind is biased
she must be fat
body part 1
stuff
shoreditch house
kale
kale reprised
wrigley’s extra
trump
filters
london pervs
women’s tea
imposter
hunger
sobriety
cellulite (sells you heavy)
fat
body part 2
bodies
sexy
she must be an adult
age
goldman sachs
I’ll be home in the morning
too young
say you’re sorry
they came out and I stayed in
E1W 3SS/Billy
pint-sized
whatsapp
roots of them/sorry, jacob
kids
forever
baby ella
adult
seaweed – for grandad
expectations
yellow cabs
hospital visits
you will choose...
acknowledgements
about the author
about the publisher
For the men who broke my heart, for the beta-blockers that slowed it, and a chunk of what is left to the sisterhood with a gift tag wrapped around it reading: let’s try and figure this all out together.
I owe this all to my madness and those who have suffered it. I never thought I’d be a poet. I never knew one day I’d slap a title on a cover that encased sometimes lonely and sometimes excited thoughts and say, ‘Here it is! A book of poems! By me, Charly … The Poet!’ But life shocks you and here we all are. In that never tense, I didn’t know a thing – I just knew how to feel. I took to feeling like a sport and I exercised every one of those achy heartstrings that had festered in cliché drivel until they snapped and aortic wells poured and shouted, ‘For god’s sake woman, can you just write these feelings down so we can have a break?’ And so I did. For years in silence and secrecy. I wrote these poems and letters to my past self and in every sort of melodramatic, romantic, ridiculous way, these are what saved me. Saved me from an intensity I was afraid to share until I morphed them into something to share with you now. Some of these were written at sixteen, others at twenty-two; they were all written growing and lost and sad sunk, but they were also all written with eventual hope. A hope that I clung to in the most intense way that only a girl desperate to take a peek at womanhood, battling a wealthy portfolio of mental health issues nervously, could. Finding strength in the contention of such frustrated confusion, in odd and debilitating sadness, in jubilant first kisses and clangs of clarity – in the words of our lord saviour Britney Spears, ‘I’m not a girl – not yet a woman’. And there is something truly quite almighty in that in-between … either that or, I must truly just be mad.
she must be in love
love part 1
Nobody ever tells you that there’ll be comedians and poets, actors and academics, college students and forty-year-old men to fall in love with.
That you will fall in love with them all.
Their charm and their poise, their anecdotes and foreign phrases, even the stray scratchy hairs on their cheeks and chins that will tickle like an acrylic yarn against your youth.
They first come soft. Soft and slow and ethereal, these perfumed clouds of promise that smell new but hang old, and then before a single tendril has had time to make itself at home on your collar, they exit loud and angry and too early.
They will always exit too early.
Little-to-no explanation, a hole so deep you lose your feet to the black and bleak of self-assumed guilt, he flings the door on its hinges for another man to oil and mend.
You’ll re-imagine hope until he leaves too, tarnishing his very own handiwork.
Nobody ever tells you of these good-looking silhouettes because they have stood in their cast before. They relished in the same way you will but they cowered in the flood.
They sunk with weakened limbs until they no longer knew of that initial burst and lay themselves down to surrender. You, however, will not allow yourself to be a casualty to love. You will grow stronger in it, if you try.
It’s six minutes past midnight, Facebook has updated Messenger, video now available, you have no one to call.
Soon, it’s twenty-one minutes past twelve and an unfamiliar noise rings through the hard plastic of your first laptop, it starts to screech. You look up and to the side, a rerun of the news now only important to your periphery.
A boy. It’s a boy.
A boy you’ve never met but whose life you know the lengths of. Holidays, parties, girlfriends, new friends, birthdays, likes, lunches – all arranged int
o bite-sized books you’ve read and torn pages from time and time again. The boy. The boy from the holidays and the parties, with the girlfriends and the new friends, he’s calling you.
You answer.
Spanking new anticipation twirling twines that tie knots in your chest, frayed ends tickling your stomach to stir hot queasy butterfly soup.
‘Hello.’ He says, monotone. Northern.
Eyes thinning to an embarrassed sleepy squint.
‘Hey?’ You say, a question. Southern.
Smile curving to bunch the bags from under your eyes to pillows.
‘Just wondered what your voice sounded like.’ He says, he smiles back.
‘Same. Now we know.’
Lights dim in both screens, you dissolve into the silence of each other’s nights, minds reaching out to touch the other, tousle hair, feel skin. Talk. Talk. Laugh. Smile.
Embarrassment has gone.
It’s five thirty-six in the morning four years later. Lights still dim, faces still rounded in the glow of the laptop. Girlfriends once stalked are now ex-girlfriends discussed. Holidays, planned as fleeting dreams of train journeys across the country to finally meet. Likes, shared. Sometimes agreed.
‘Do we know, or at least think, that if you lived down the road from me we’d be in love?’ He wrote.
‘Yes.’ You reply.
A life starts to lead along a parallel secret line, a life that’s yours and a line of fibre optics. Two years pass. You meet in a newsagent at a train station. He’s smaller than you thought. You’re fatter than he’d seen. Geography offers different greetings. Kiss, hug, release. You share pancakes but struggle to look at each other. You walk across Battersea Bridge, he lights a spliff, you sit facing away from each other and imagine you’re still just on the phone. Better.
Three years later and it has never happened again. You never found out if he became the poster boy for postmen in Salford. You never got to tell him of the new bosses and the trips to America. You never got to tell him all the things he was right about. You never got to tell him how your heart held out, how it still occasionally chooses to hold out. How in a life lived on a parallel secret line you never unplugged the receiver. But now you do. Now you get to tell him somewhere he might find it and can only hope he does, before he finds someone else.
to you
This feels silly to write
For in doing so
The sentiment fractures
And goes back full circle
But I’ve kissed plenty of boys
Most of them charming
I’ve kissed plenty of boys
And I’ve been on plenty of arms and
I’ve loved plenty of boys
And they’ve made me feel soft
And I’ve seen plenty of boys
And plenty I’ve lost
I’ve had plenty of evenings
In dimly lit bars
And I’ve had plenty of fumbles
I’ve written plenty of letters
And received plenty of emails
I’ve kissed plenty of boys
And one or two females
I’ve traced plenty of hips
With eager touch
And I’ve kissed plenty of lips
That made me feel too much
And in the plenty I’ve gathered
I’ve garnered plenty of words
But once put all together
They don’t sound like firsts
They all sort of sound similar
As though each man wasn’t new
Which is why it’s important to say
Not everything I write is about you.
she moves in her own way
It was sticky in your apartment
I stuck my eyes to every corner
Where you’d stuck up old postcards
An entire museum of your life and more a
Window
Framed the shrilling stuck-up summer silhouettes in the pub down below
You stuck a scratched record on
That played the once smooth staccato
You poured me a glass of wine
That slipped sticky to my sides
That slipped your fingers across my thighs
I felt stuck
This time I promised myself I wasn’t giving up
You said stick around
And I cleared off the dark sediment red wine muck
From my lips
And kissed you in a way
That begged to reverse ownership
But instead it sellotaped my wrists
Together tight around your hips
Whilst my internal monologue screamed:
You’re hopeless at this
You don’t want to do this
You always do this
You don’t have to be this
Person
You don’t have to quench your thirst on
Him
Tell your body its anxiety isn’t a passion to burst on
Him
Don’t try and fill the void with empty consumption
This moment in time that you’ll lie and say was sweet seduction
Was another episode of you orchestrating a personality reduction
Into a girl you have no business being
No pleasing being
Stop teasing feeling
From an inner drought
That only dried to be that way
Because you gave all your kindness out
Instead of spending it on yourself.
I stop as your eyes unstuck from mine
You swig from the bottle of wine
And I muster up the courage to say
I don’t want to be just tonight
I’ve said it before and let it be denied
And you laugh with a cocksure sigh
And hit me with another line like
Why can’t you just be a girl for a good time?
And it’s the just that juts
And ricochets
And it slaps stuck
To my ongoing conflict with myself
I reach for a souvenir placed on your shelf
Throw it between my palms
Imagine what false comfort I’d find within your arms
And put it back
I give learning from lessons a crack
I stop myself from telling you that you’re such a twat
When you text me the next morning
To say my excuse as a woman is appalling
For leaving in a rush
It was sticky in your apartment
And it was there that I realised
I was bored of being stuck
As a girl whose muchness amounted to just
The night.
mourning routine
He is unsmoked cigarettes
And lukewarm tea
A morning routine
(He’s) not consumed by me
A craving that will fade
Left unfinished in the sink
Until my wine-stained lips
Call the next round of drinks
I’ll wake up in the morning
Next to someone new
But I still fell asleep
Hoping that someone would be you.
mesh of kisses
Find the contented without the contention of giving away half of yourself
And see that letting go isn’t giving in
But a spiritual commodity of wealth
My best teachers were disguised as lovers
Unmasked when I untangled their mesh of kisses
And smothered myself instead with the notion that they were knowledgeable near misses
And Mr Brave
The future without the listless lustful nights
Replaced with a silhouette of love
That was bred from moulding a mistreated wrong into its rightful right.
anatomical astrologist
Your body became so fam
iliar
I touched your skin the same way I’d fumble down the side of the TV in the dark and know the difference between the
<off switch> and the <volume button>
Each line and freckle a constellation on your torso
I could read backwards like an anatomical astrologist.
We intertwine and I sigh softly
a shared unspoken bedtime language that
screamed
to the gods for just
five
more
minutes
Time stopped to matter and the matter of us across your old mattress pulled apart until your stars dimmed down to flickering filaments and I chose to switch them off.
otters
It is what it is until it isn’t
Quite it anymore
Makes perfect logical sense, sure
But in eleven short words I don’t think you swirl the score
Of what I’m on about
I could mutter an uttering of offers
Words that cling to syllables as tightly as otters
In love
Did you know they never let go once they’ve found a mate?
Did you know that my slithering of truth wasn’t yours to emanate
Dissipate, dissolve upon your lips
As my truth became a movement and your hands became my hips
In a haze of a few Sundays
Of what I thought was it
But didn’t know that it could be something just one of us could quit
And that’s quite exactly it
It was what it wasn’t
Instead of a smattering of emails that will one day be forgotten
Instead of a flattering string of inhales that sung kindly until coughed out rotten.
Again these are all just words
Silly sold sentiments aren’t that tough
I could rhyme anything together and it’d still be enough
For you to know what I’m wittering on about is love
It is what it is until it isn’t
Quite it anymore
It’s tracing your finger on a back
That will soon traipse out the door
It’s wine on a Saturday and lies that you learn as foreplay
It’s lust in its golden hour
It’s kissing goosebumped in the shower
It’s handing over innocence to a dastardly power
Of frightening fragile fragments that someone can stack in their own tower