Talk Vomit

By Kristina Kucinas

Last year, on an ordinary Friday afternoon in the middle of summer, the people around me  began to smell like faeces. That night I watched as the edges of my reality blurred like a window in  rain. 

In this newly revealed world, mirrors spoke cruel truths before melting into puddles of silver  glass, solidifying around my ankles. They held my feet, told me I wasn’t allowed to leave the house, that I’d gained an extraordinary amount of weight for someone so short, that my innate volucrine ugliness was the evil inside me trying to make its way out. 

My body became heavy, as though drugged. I was tired, so, so tired, from constantly trying to discern what was real. Yet, sleep evaded me, my eyes resting for only an hour or two a night, maybe even less. I called the doctor and after far too little convincing, procured sleeping pills. But the small pills filled my mouth with bitterness. Blood trickled down my throat, choking me. At work clients asked, aghast, if I was contagious. 

One day, I woke up to a small, foul-smelling mound next to my pillow. Had I thrown up whilst deeply unconscious? 

“Don’t worry,” my partner assured me, “that’s poo, not sick.” 

How could poo have ended up in a small pile next to my face? I’d no idea which worried me more. I took my chances without the pills and left them in the bowl on top of our microwave, alongside the garlic and yellowing limes. 

Throughout this time, I socialised, I watched TV, I went to the pub, laughed aggressively at bad jokes and feigned interest at parties. 

When I was six, a shadow figure appeared in my bedroom. This ghost moved with me into  every room, flat, and house I lived in. My mother took me to a psychiatrist who prescribed me a drug she said could make me fat. Silly psychiatrist, she should’ve known I wouldn’t take them after hearing that. 

I asked for one too many homework extensions and threw myself in front of traffic. I felt the sea was speaking to me, calling me to her depths. So, I tried again and spoke with a GP who turned  into three GPs who turned into a medical team who transformed into an arcane building with locked doors and screaming and pins with shreds of paper where posters should’ve been. 

When I returned, my mother engaged a family therapist, concerned for me, concerned for the family, as a preventative measure. 

According to this family therapist, everything I said and did was very, very significant. But the shadow man still watched me at night, and new visitors arrived. Men came in droves to take me in the bed I shared with my mother. It didn’t matter if the doctors thought I was merely imagining it. The men’s stale breath, which warmed my ears, felt real; the pain and bleeding felt real. The fear felt real. 

I moved out of home, away from the men, to chase a boy. I’d discovered love; lust or desperation were powerful driving forces for change. My reasoning was wrong, but the move was good for me and the men stopped visiting. I convinced the boy to break up with me and made new friends, and the fear and my visitors disappeared. Before I fell asleep each night, I thanked the stars and not God, who I was too ashamed to talk to, that despite it all, I did not take those fattening  pills.  

Mental health became a trending topic, therapy the new thigh-gap. My friends, who were now blonde and tattooed and into techno, exulted therapy to the high heavens. “It really helped with my anxiety,” said Blonde Friend 1, exhaling cigarette smoke. “Yeah, I mean it radicalised my productivity,” said Blonde Friend 2 ,exhaling sour apple flavoured vape smoke. 

“It helped me understand my trauma,” said Blonde Friend 3, taking a gulp from her white wine spritzer. 

I was an adult with a paycheck, I too could take up an expensive hobby. I started with a man who enjoyed interpreting my dreams, who called me intelligent, who crooned louder the more messed up my dreams became until his marriage broke down and his calls took on another meaning. He’d opened up this can of worms of what he’d called trauma and dysfunction and a complex or two and then left me to deal with them. Wasn’t it literally his job? I read forums, self-diagnosed and talked to my friends, as per the forum advice, but it soon transpired it wasn’t the type of mental health they understood. 

“But you’ve never been fired,” they said. 

“But we’ve never seen it,” they said. 

“But we don’t believe you,” is what I felt they meant. 

I changed houses, changed jobs, changed friends, changed boyfriend. I read The Secret and thought I’d cured myself. Take that pills! Take that, doctors! I wasn’t unwell, I was just poorly attuned to the universe. I wound myself tightly in this new ideology until the whole world began to smell like faeces. 

Panicked, I flew my partner to Florence for his birthday. It was a poor financial decision, but one I made out of guilt, believing I still carried the baggage I claimed I did not have.

The first night, I slept for twelve uninterrupted hours. We meandered through streets, allowing the buildings to swallow us. I changed my ordinary rules and only washed my hands in scalding water once instead of the five, seven, ten times I usually felt compelled to back home. It didn’t help me feel clean, but I felt slightly calmer. On my second long sleep in Florence, another visitor tormented me and I woke up with her shadow lingering on my skin. Neither a freezing cold nor a scalding hot shower felt sufficiently cleansing. 

I told my partner about my dream and he responded with all the correct words. Wow, I thought as I felt my love for him fiercely pulse through me, someone does love me for who I am. “Would you consider therapy again?” He asked. 

I nodded because I felt I should. I didn’t want to live like this, ditching old lives, finding  new ones, feeling the crushing defeat when I fell yet again into the same cess-pit of fear and unclear  reality. But I’d been equally disappointed by those who claimed they could help. Where were the  miracle workers? I certainly hadn’t found mine. So far, getting help had been only an expensive  exercise in destruction and distraction. 

Before I left for Florence, I’d opened up to a girl I considered a close friend, still following advice from that forum I once read and ignoring the voice of my ex boyfriend who told me “a problem shared is a problem doubled.” 

Bing! I lurched for my phone. She’d replied letting me know she’d slept with a guy who used to be bad in bed, but now he was fine in bed.  

“Thank god,” I replied, “I was so worried he was a lost cause.” Then I thought about how to cut her out of my life. 

From where I sat on the duvet after yet another let down, I could hear the clock ticking too quickly in the kitchen, the sound of it echoing over the tiled corridor which led to the bedroom. I told my partner I’d be right back and picked my face for an hour in the bathroom mirror. As blood decorated my face in bulbous drips, I thought of how the bathroom was decorated pink just like my grandmother’s. She had called me recently to tell me my mother wasn’t doing well. “She’s not herself,” she said. 

“She is precisely herself.” 

“She’s not well.” 

“She is no worse or better.” 

“I don’t think she’s well,” she said. 

I wondered, bitterly, how my ninety-six year old mocuite had only just noticed her own daughter’s unhappiness. Did she somehow miss how my mother was always crying and throwing lamps she’d gone alone to Paris specifically to buy because she said they made her happy? Did she  miss how my mother kicked through doors whilst screaming she loved us, she hated us? Did she miss how my mother kept changing our lives, kept discarding old jobs and friends and houses and finding new ones to bury herself in? Perhaps she’d missed it because she too was doing the same.  Perhaps I’d missed my grandmother’s distress because I too was too busy doing the same. 

After Florence, I spent a lot of time in the shower, a lot of it indulging in what I saw in  trigger warnings called “suicidal ideation.” Putting a name to it made me cringe so instead I thought  about all the tragic heroines who were lusted after for their madness – Effy, Ophelia, Sylvia Plath. I thought how desirable I’d been to men who’d mistaken my madness, my emptiness, for their lust.  How when they discovered me, as one of them said, they’d pulled away and wanted no part. I  thought about how I now pulled away before others could. Self-initiated loneliness was always  more righteous than the inflicted sort. Why did I feel like I couldn’t connect to anything, as though I was wrapped in clingfilm? And what gave me the right to feel this way when the world had given me so much? 

My thoughts were broken by my partner, who pulled me up from where I lay slumped in the shower.

“The water bill will become expensive,” he said gently as he guided me to my wardrobe and through the next five, seven, ten social engagements. He sat next to me as I repaired my damaged net of my mind, watched as the hole became smaller as I wove in new thread.  

Then, on an ordinary Monday on the bus on my way home from work, I was able to smell  Cheetos and air conditioning. A man in front of me shouted into his phone. The seats across from me were covered in crusty vomit, and I felt fine, just fine. I was ready to begin clambering through life again, hoping another hole wasn’t too close ahead. 

Now, as I wait patiently on a rather too long waiting list for a consultation with a verified  expert, I waver. Part of me still believes I can be fixed or cured or enlightened with a good talking  to. Perhaps that’s my problem, that I believed and that the people I surrounded myself with also believed, it would be a quick fix. That they’d say “get better, get it together,” and with a click of my fingers, I would. 

I was speaking to some friends I’ve recently become close with, told them I was worried about slipping again, that I’d be alone in a world where I wouldn’t be able to distinguish reality from fear. That I’d let people down, be a bad friend, a bad partner again. 

“We’ll watch bad Netflix rom-coms,” they said. 

“We’ll slurp noodles in silence,” they said. 

“We’ll be here,” they meant.