Around ten days after I cut from the frozen UK soil and came somewhere more liquid, my eyes began to swell. I woke up on the morning of a twelve-hour drive red-rimmed and bleary, the peak of my lip jutting upwards, looking like an overfilled LA mob wife. Pains and dislocations; being away had worked itself into my system. 

I am in a car, with a man, who I both know and do not know in a way that is throbbing with the potential for pain; fingers perched upon a needle, the promise of a pinprick, making hoisted sails of the skin. These are familiar fatalities. We are driving back to his childhood home across the country, a home I have seen once before and expected to see perhaps once in total, until my sense of where I was in the world was mangled, magnetised by something rougher than myself: by this man, my man, in all but name.

It had been several weeks with this man, who had already taken pig-iron to my sense of direction. I took his ideas and mulled them in my mouth- dry wine; tasting tannin, inferring submission. Nothing he said made sense and I hung on it, this giant muscular child, this untrustable man, wearing himself on his skin. 

You are told that when you meet the one it will feel like coming up against a rock face, cool red sandstone, scalable and solid and structured. The one will not come to you on a bad chemical trip, he will not live inside his father’s fist, he will not have seemingly not existed before the age of twenty-one, emerging like a glitch, like mercury from an eggshell. The one will not make you wonder if you had banged your head very hard on something because nothing any longer makes sense and you are questioning evolution and other inherited truths such as the aircon doesn’t work and never has and no don’t worry about that alarm it is probably the baboons again I will have to go and shoot them, let’s make a weekend of it. The one will be modern, measurable in something other than kilos, he will have at least heard of the Rolling Stones. He will not adopt your languages, your mannerisms, or want to be the president of a country. You will not worry when you wake up and he is not beside you that he is somewhere outside naked pissing into his mother’s flower bed, or staring naked at the sky, and you know he will be doing one and you do not know which is worse. Primary colours. Strange forms.

When we arrive, his mother is at the computer, aging. She is printing out her first Facebook posts of the day. We offer limp flowers, sodden with their own decay, and get wine in return, sweet with rot. And there he is- The Patri, bronzed skin, bloody hands, making oxtail, dogs at his feet. His stucco bungalow gleams.

It is 40 degrees. At lunch, I drink the wrong thing, eat the right one. I am asked about my father’s education, my mother’s microwave meals. There is still meat on the bone, I chew around it. Once, I was paraded around a ninetieth birthday party by a great aunt of a first love who told people my parents didn’t keep onions in the house. I remember tasting old wine on my tongue and finally understanding what was meant by class. I think I tell this story by way of explanation, brandy in hand, wrists thin, tugging on the threads of my past, I am real, I came from here, this is who I was. New people with shallow histories and here I am from the old world telling them how my mother used to cook in the microwave; white goods from Good Homes where the TV is never turned up past eleven and the slinking dread of a Sunday evening settles like a fog even though you don’t have school in the morning. It is the fresh weed that forms the deepest roots.

I look at my man, his face set like his father’s, silent now. I have never seen him quiet, but now he is a nesting doll. Pretty and mute and gone from me now, using a language I do not yet understand to become a slightly different person, slightly further away. His father blinks, he folds. He will always be the appendage, the tick fatted with the blood of his daddy; children in economies such as these are a sunk cost. But I have never lost a game. I will make virtues of his miseries, see the unseen. I am a camera. I know it. 

Stop- look at where you are. 

I am under his father’s vinegar gaze; I find myself bending, sheet metal up against a flame. My hips press up against the kitchen counter like a Coca-Cola bottle up against a shelf. Burgeoning out, swelling like a bruise under glass. A rehearsal. 

In the 1960s in Haight Ashbury, people who were hip to everything were hip to something they called the Woman’s Trip. 

Barbara is on what is called the woman’s trip to the exclusion of almost everything else… Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. “Doing something that shows your love that way,” she says, “is just about the most beautiful thing I know.” Whenever I hear about the woman’s trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin’-says-lovin’-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.”

The woman’s trip was caught up in hallucinogen. It was a trip because it seemingly only played at domestic womanhood, with its play-set kitchen stove and plastic food, everything either a little too big or too small to be real, to be out the other side of irony. To engage in housewifery, tradwifing, domestic work in Haight Ashbury in the 60s, among the addicts and the runaways, was an acting out of the uncanny, a process by which the playing of a role was delivered first as theatre, second as memory. Memory of their mothers harried back in Idaho, memory of their fathers’ boots at the door sodden with mud and chalk, memory of the Sunday evening dinners suspended in a turgid silence. These women, many of them girls, found that in running away from their mothers, they had become them. We love to live in memory. We love the lightness with which we can slip into who we were. We love to cross our fingers as we do so- sike! I’m just playin! 

When you have traditionally rejected the maternal, the domestic, then to fully experience it is to tune in and drop out; you are Alice in Wonderland with her tiny cakes. You are hopped up on angel dust. You do not work; you care. But we have no word for care, we have no way to express that impulse, we push it further and further down until it surges up as fetish or as porn. We refuse to talk about the maternal drive. It is another problem that it is easier to pretend we can deconstruct. We have relinquished it to the eugenicists on Ballerina Farm. They are not taking very good care of it. 

I find myself watching videos of bread being made. I find myself thinking about linen, about cheesecloth. I am down another rabbit hole on unmedicated home births. The mother is thirty-eight years old and lives in Clapton. I have no language to express this. I put down my phone. 

I found myself, when away, living in the uncanny; could see myself through the eyes of my culture, my conditioning, my friends. I had gone from one world to another and found comfort in the rhythms of domesticity I found there. It felt like being dipped in milk. Bleached of urgency. I saw God staring out the window at the empty drive. I would stand on the porch in the gauzy heat of a January evening with a cigarette and any life in which I had decisions to make felt so far away as to be part of a spectral realm. I felt everything in me loosen and could feel the way in which my body changed the frequencies in a room. I was soft where before I might have been acrid: alkaline, butter, water. All the time with my eyes swelled shut- see no evil! hear no evil! And I could smirk as I played at it all I liked, corpsing on stage. I still found myself holding my breasts, early-rising for Christmas dinner cooking, practicing my language with the babies, my hair held in high pony-tails. 

I step off the plane to see a friend and find myself divested of my past few months, I cannot stop talking. It feels like I am tripping, I tell her at the time, my sense of reality is scrubbed clean, nothing makes sense anymore. I am breathless with desire. Context-heavy.  

When I think of my time there now I remember several things: the feeling of my feet upon tiled floor, the heat of a disapproving look, how his father looked across the room at me in someone else’s kitchen- because it always is someone else’s kitchen- surrounded by sclerotic old men and drew his hand across his throat to get me to shut the fuck up- and I felt like someone’s daughter, young and essential. I said yes pa and no pa because there is no distinction in that language between your father and your partner’s; he is the eternal Pa whilst everyone else is your uncle. There, I vested power into men who were not trying to extract sex from me but merely compliance and after years of degradation that felt like respect.

These moments will eventually become part of a meditation on submission. Lauding submission in small bursts, only as play, as theatre. The scaffolding of the domestic, so easily climbed, perched atop an aerial tower, a weather vane, of someone else’s making. In the moment, they do not feel like submission but belonging. 

How to say that once back in the UK, once I had left my bubble of captivity, I had a man put his hand around my throat and squeeze until I tasted real fear? How to acknowledge the man who would exact rituals of manipulation upon me so tight, so good, you’d wonder where he could be had he cast these powers somewhere other than on girls he wanted to fuck. My submission was bought in these moments just as it had been bought elsewhere. Give me the exchange rates; I want the price in every currency. 

I say to my men, I have always said to my men: 

You make me feel safe. 

Of course I say it. We all say it. I do not want to be the sole custodian of my body. I have failed before. I worry I will fail again. I am not the frontier; please do not make me be the frontier. But my problem is his problem now, because he fills the shoes that other men have stretched into terrible shapes. I say I am yours and he says he is mine and we try to find a way to make that feel less like ownership when perhaps to love anyone is a process of owning a part of them. Or them a part of you. 

It is January. My eyes are still swollen. They will be swollen for another three weeks and I will take to casting them sideways. And I will enjoy something of it, I will like the hue that my face takes on when it is facing the wall. I will have become disembodied, split from my language and culture and everyone who knows me, a piece of flotsam. Kicking in water. 

I try to remember the mountains, dancing in bars, the passenger seat of his car. Sunlight on his face. I think about sitting by the ocean, high off dislocation. But also about the suburbs, home alone, Jack Russells barking, strange men ringing the bell. About drug runs in desert towns, empty Italian restaurants and Diet Cokes and the dark, and the dark, and the dark. Always someone
else’s kitchen.

It is January. My stomach has started to swell, as if my body is trying to mark its own existence through water weight, trying to ensure its imprint on the sand, I am real, I came from here, this is who I was. Every part of me feels full and I know it is constipation but I drink black coffee and litres of water and it is like it disappears into a black hole. And looking back, I realise, it is these times- my stomach round, my hair lank, my eyes swelled shut- that I begin to want a baby. To really, truly want it. To want it in a way I never could elsewhere- prize, precaution, indemnity.

So, this is the dream: to want what doesn’t hurt, and call it peace. I will take the One who is not the One, who cannot be the One, I will make him the One. I will cut myself a piece of his rib. I will see myself in his unmooring and him in mine, I will see myself in his shadow in the hallway, I will feel him kicking in the spaces I once thought empty. I will lose him in the swell. And I’ll say, God, please deliver me with softness, I am sick of being born. And He will offer me His milk.