{"id":25263,"title":"That's Kind of What I Do","description":"Diane Oatley and Matteo Delred collaborate through the mediums of flash fiction and visual art.","content":"

Diane Oatley and Matteo Delred collaborate through the mediums of flash fiction and visual art.<\/span><\/p>

I<\/h2>

A Sunday afternoon in Oslo, midsummer 2010. I take the street car down to the fjord on the other side of the city, get off and walk home again, for the exercise, to have something to do. I pass overcrowded bars and caf\u00e9s and bars and caf\u00e9s, the sidewalk tables packed with young adults drinking beer, faces tilted upward, flaunting designer sunglasses against the rays of a fickle sun, full of complacent entitlement or sometimes bravado. As if in being there, in the mere act of convening, they had accomplished something exclusive, enviable even, which irritated me. Consumption is not an achievement, I thought. All the same, I felt excluded. As I walked amidst them, a dark and scowling shadow, it occurred to me that I was yearning for another kind of achievement. I was yearning for something as preposterous as another way of being a human being.<\/span><\/p>

\"l6iqxh9mlrmjfibu4ryf2iil7xdu9k1i6yucq9rvmvky96n3.png\"II<\/h2>

When I got home and lay down on my bed the cutting urge overcame me. I noticed it initially on the streetcar, and tried to ignore it, this fanged, feral creature pacing inside me and trying to scrape its way out. I haven\u2019t succumbed to its bidding in over thirty years though it could be argued that some of my love affairs have carried out its bidding.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

I watch it expand with an inner detachment, this pain disassociated from anything deemed real, as if it had subsumed all harm into itself and taken charge of its execution. I am forty-nine years old. The cutting urge is as much a part of me as my love for dancing and writing or a good book, my weakness for perfumes and scented lotions and creams and all related sensual pleasures, my addiction to wine and strong Spanish coffee. Yes, this feline wild thing inhabits me along with all that, just one of my many shameful secrets.<\/span><\/p>

The delicate scars on the sides of my wrists that I enacted in my twenties are still visible. I run my fingertips over them as if they were a cherished souvenir rather than evidence of self-destructive leanings. Well, maybe they\u2019re both. Yes. They are definitely both or they are also these things, depending on where you are standing. And I guess in my mind this is part of becoming a human being, this recognition and sought acceptance of all the ways my wires are crossed, illustrated by the latticework of spindly scars on my forearms.<\/span><\/p>

\"parcqkcrunjgfetvekfxkwpbajt1xqeoe452m2nq4hvzph86.jpeg\"III<\/h2>

I discovered a <\/span>lagartija<\/span><\/em> frozen against the bathroom wall of my apartment in Jerez, hiding in plain sight beside the mirror. It seemed fitting. I had to laugh at the universe\u2019s cunning. In Andalusia, <\/span>lagartijas<\/span><\/em> are considered omens of good fortune. They are also notoriously fragile. All my previous attempts to extract these creatures from my living quarters, a perilous undertaking by anybody\u2019s estimation, had ended badly for the <\/span>lagartija<\/span><\/em>, despite my best efforts. The first time it was a tiny baby, stranded on the wall above my bed and when I tried to brush it off the wall with the edge of a magazine, sort of grandly ushering it towards the window, I squashed it, irrevocably. I cried, I wailed, oh no, oh no, don\u2019t be dead, don\u2019t be dead and for weeks had recurring nightmares about its mother arriving to avenge the execution of her progeny by my careless hand. The next time I tried the spider technique, but when I lowered the glass over it, the <\/span>lagartija<\/span><\/em> twitched and the rim of the glass chopped off its tail. I lifted the glass in horror and the creature fled under a book case, leaving behind its dismembered yet still frantically wriggling tail. And the last time I tried, I successfully coaxed the creature onto a magazine and carried it carefully to the ledge of my open, second story window, whereupon as if it could no longer wait, it leapt out into space and I can only presume, to its death, on the marble floor of the patio below.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

For this reason, the <\/span>lagartija<\/span><\/em> in my bathroom mocked me. How to approach it? How to extract it from inside to outside without squashing or maiming it? I tried to remember a story, a half-story, a joke, an encounter, a clumsy conversation, an argument, a face, a body, a stranger, something someone to help me ground the experience, preferably by halves, an innuendo which would enable me to understand what I couldn\u2019t see, the simplest, safest, most suitable approach. I was stumped. I decided that rather than trying to devise yet another a slapdash strategy, I would leave the <\/span>lagartija<\/span><\/em> alone. It found its way in, though for the life of me, I couldn\u2019t see how. It would, presumably also find its way out.<\/span><\/p>

Every now and then I return to the bathroom to see if the <\/span>lagartija<\/span><\/em> is still there. It hasn\u2019t moved. This is simultaneously comforting and disturbing. But at least I am making a different kind of choice and it gives me something to do when I become stuck in other pursuits.<\/span><\/p>

\"h7whyfxhkurahpatlmyanqmvotgxyccmcggq7pliyt4uecmt.jpeg\"IV<\/h2>

A family dinner, during which my parents were ineptly trying to talk to me about my eating disorder. My father cleared his throat and pronounced: \u201cThe eating disorder is not the problem. It is a symptom of the problem. What do you think the problem is?\u201d<\/span><\/p>

The answer, like my body, was up for grabs. I had no words at this time for a rage I did not even recognize as rage. I had only shame and the big black hole of disappearance. You tell me, I thought. Explain to me please my story of engulfment in the family unit, the invisible crimes committed therein. Explain to me please why in becoming a woman, I have ceased to exist. Explain to me please why the wayward tangles of myself are causing me so much pain and are so distantly at large. Explain to me my castling like a sparrow on the tiny inner perch of myself, my limbs, my torso, my entire body otherwise wrapped in cotton batting, the thick fuzzy wads of insensate containment.<\/span><\/p>

\"purht0k3ujkhvrzq40lfp5roess4ocygsq6flvvmpw5yn2l5.jpg\"V<\/h3>

I\u2019m pretty exhausted, actually. This entire body business is a lot of work. All the effort of trying to anticipate the required mold. The inevitable jolt of a reflection in a department store mirror when I recognize that once again the body is still not quite right and the plummeting realization that this is true even though I have done absolutely everything right, and then some, even though I have applied the full scale of my intelligence and considerable resources. An entire lifetime of such rude awakenings adds up. Looking over my shoulder, I see them, a long, straggling line of tag-along selves extending all the way to the horizon and certainly beyond, each of them still clinging to a tangle of often conflicting imperatives about beauty and truth and morality and identity and independence and allure and intelligence and integrity. The implication of yet another responsibility which I have somehow, despite all my efforts, failed to adequately shoulder.<\/span><\/p>

I know that at the beginning this was about love. A love-worthy body. So, at the outset, a lot of pressure, which was then infused with other pressures, like the current trending body, the body of a thinking woman, the body of a woman who dared, the body of a woman who knew things, the body of a woman period. A scandal. A downright imposition. A provocation. Failure is built into the equation. I did repeatedly think the thought and even believe that it didn\u2019t matter so much, but such epiphanies prove fragile in the face of public opinion. So much shame, really, if you get right down to it. The body itself, wanting and yearning, and sweating and bleeding and ashamed of itself. Fully responsible, fully proactive, and yet inevitably, the body, my body comes up short.<\/span><\/p>

\"bu4uyslgdpg6lgrwiql2dfdntrz9uyr0jkdwdq0fbedmegqn.jpg\"VI<\/h2>

Tunisian folk dance. Draped in layers and layers of fabric, scarved and belted, my upper body floating above weighted hips, hands like birds swimming, summoning out of the air, my breath an admixture of spirits as the bag pipe wails a celebration lined with sparkling secrets, erupting around me with each breath. The drum is a heartbeat aching and wise, pounding into the depths of the solar plexus, commanding me to rise and attend to its telling, surrender to my body\u2019s recognition of itself in a mirror of rhythms. How am I both ancient and innocent? How am I both wise and a foolish lady-person, stumbling out of a stupor and finding her feet with surprising ease?<\/span><\/p>

\"vrg5pbyb9w2m3bebgg0pswksffw9pqfncopveijao5lauh1j.jpeg\"VII<\/h2>

Dancers are taught to counter dizziness when doing turns by spotting: fix your gaze firmly on a point in front of you, hold it, head turning right as your body turns left and at the very last split second, whip the head around as you turn and find that point anew.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Dervishes whirl without spotting. I taught myself to do this: Arms extended, right palm turned upward to the heavens, left palm facing downward to the earth, head tilted ever so slightly towards the incline of the right arm and rotating steadily, slowly at first, gradually increasing my momentum, until the dizziness rises up like floodwaters threatening to knock me over, spinning and spinning until those waters receded. A space settled, a field, for indefinite twirling, at least for as long as my knees would hold out. I would become magic, my body transformed, self-sufficiently twirled beyond recognition.<\/span><\/p>

It worked and it didn\u2019t work. I had visions, I found euphoria, momentarily spinning. I transcended limitations but when I stopped, when the spinning slowed, and the room settled into its former dimensions, I was still me. The bones of myself were surprisingly tenacious, yes, this was perhaps the biggest revelation, the extent to which my self resisted, insisted on remaining myself.<\/span><\/p>

\"mk4kfchcvu30kfodvaqxazchcg0daypdz866dmubsefcaxwh.jpeg\"VIII<\/h3>

\u201cSo he shows up out of nowhere, right, well, out of nowhere, not quite, that\u2019s not right, cause I predicted this, I saw it coming eight months ago and I warned him time and time again, I said you\u2019re gonna lose everything, you\u2019re gonna end up on the streets, I can\u2019t help you if you keep going like this, but he said he didn\u2019t care, said he\u2019d rather live this way with no thought for tomorrow, it was what he wanted. Fine, I said, your choice, I said, you even have the right to kill yourself if that\u2019s what you really want and frankly the way I see it that\u2019s what you\u2019re doing, in slow motion, black and white, but I\u2019m not hanging around for the play-by-play. I told him that, you can\u2019t have your cake and. Are you the cake, he asked, deflecting. I scowled. <\/span>Idiota<\/span><\/em>, I said. Anyway, that\u2019s what he always did, does, changing the subject the minute you start to make your point, but I know his games, his ins and outs, his thicks and thins, so he can\u2019t play me anymore.<\/span><\/p>

So I told him then, forget about it. No point trying to talk sense into you, people are gonna do what they\u2019re gonna do. He was unimpressed. Literally, that\u2019s his schtick, a cultivated demeanor of world-weary blas\u00e9. So, I just stopped answering his calls, stopped spending time with him, cause I knew when his sky comes crashing down, he\u2019s gonna be ringing my doorbell and asking for a hand-out, without asking, mind you, he never asks. He just applies pressure until you give him what he wants just to get him out of your business.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\"sgfv14kpx52hfll4mkngxmiwhyrdpmtwjkeedohl3oiberwx.jpeg\"IX<\/h2>

The waitress called out my name as I wandered into the bar to use the lavatory, and one glass of wine later, outside, in the calm semi-darkness of the <\/span>terraza,<\/span><\/em> seated at a table surrounded by other tables inhabited by patrons bundled up and huddling against the damp February chill and conversing about all manner of things not flamenco, I knew I had found the right site for my moveable feast. Emphasis on moveable, because the dancer, Roc\u00edo Molina, who had transported herself multiple times over in the course of the ninety-minute performance I had just witnessed, had awakened in me a need to be similarly transported, to lose my shit in a protracted and elaborate manner, a transport channeling all the shit being lost into suitably contained yet effusive streams. See them glitter and glow, amusing even as they roll up against the curb and lose their momentary velocity.<\/span><\/p>

Flamenco is designed for the losing of one\u2019s shit in a protracted and elaborate manner. It intrinsically acknowledges this as a fundamental human necessity, as in why fight it, let\u2019s make it into an art form.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

A lot of substance abuse also ensued.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Because being transported can also be excruciating, leaving the tiny box is as frightful as it is indemnifying. You will become a creature. All the many foibles you\u2019d swept aside will come to bear and have their way with you. No fools will be suffered, nor the lightly taking. This is serious business even as it is also absolutely hysterical, this shattering of the self you\u2019ve been courting, how it taunts, how it preens, and then how it delivers. A serious business outs the seriousness as beside the point when viewed in the sheen of the necessity of artful play.<\/span><\/p>

What for me as a child started out singing in the rain, tap dancing innocently, gleefully in mud puddles, in adulthood has gained a cutting edge. Through flamenco I have reached the end of something, which is also the beginning of something that I can see quite clearly now, and I am amazed to discover that it was the frolicking, the clowning, even with my heels stuck in muddy remorse, that found the way, staked out my course and sent me sailing, thinking why hold back? What are you waiting for?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

The right time, the right clothes, the right companion, the right ambient mood, the perfect convergence of random circumstances tunneling through the world, like a clandestine passageway tucked between buildings, until suddenly there you are, there it is and the many roughshod perceptions pool into patterns makeshift and peremptory, hands joining, and the waitress is sipping her own drink now, forgetful of her office.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

When she notices me looking, she brings the bottle. She pours a second glass more generous than the first and when she hesitates as if she wants to ask a question, I have it. Something shifts. I have extracted Roc\u00edo, she has settled inside me, bewitchery unfolding. The view has freed itself from the window.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u201cI\u2019ve been to the theatre,\u201d I say.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

The waitress smiles, politely. She couldn\u2019t care less.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u201cWould you like some olives?\u201d she says.<\/span><\/p>

\"dn9nen3oag42mgwhpdl9nz1bul6b8fg49wzzmadchpkpnwhp.jpg\"X<\/h2>

If you are having a hard time following, well, then you\u2019ve probably never had the pleasure of being the monkey in somebody else\u2019s sideshow. You have never been the one person at the party eternally having to explain yourself, to justify your existence. And as you may have already surmised, madness is not amusing, it is not the quirky flipside of creative genius or radical gesture, no matter how well you might dress it up to appear so. If you subscribe to that view, it proves that you don\u2019t know how excruciating it is to try and piece the days together and within each day, try to piece together the hours, the minutes when it all insists on falling apart, the pieces slipping between your fingers, out of your hands, shattering on the floor, one hour after the next, or some days, one five-minute segment after the next, moving slowly like an <\/span>anciano<\/span><\/em>, with excruciating, painstaking care and incapable of precision, only clumsy approximations amounting to \u2212 well, I showed up, I was in the room. I was there, breathing. Hands hurt, skin burns, bones ache, muscles sting \u2013 and even though you can see the opening, the door, the road, a single step in what seems like the right direction generates upheaval and waves of nausea, simmering migraine-like torpor.<\/span><\/p>


And some well-meaning fool tells you to rest, that all you need is some down time. I say <\/span>vete a carajo<\/span><\/em>, don\u2019t give me that accept your pain crap because for me what that boiled down to was an average of 5 days out of every week when I was doing nothing except rattling in circles around my own agony to see if maybe this day I would outwit it or catch it napping and slip past it into smooth sailing.<\/span><\/p>

\"qympcq1l90kcdupvhy0nhgspnwofejstq2sm7d1arfu6e37m.jpeg\"XI<\/h2>

For women like us, the stars are littered across the ground, the moon loops and slides gleefully on self-constructed white trails of light above us, within us, throughout the evening close and dense and watchful. Here I am here I go. A comet in the making: I thought, I will be light, I will be whiteness and the clear sizzling danger of a risk that has learned how to hedge its bets. I will slice with the fierce knowledge of a knife, newly whetted, keen for the biting, for the cutting away of chaff and into the deepest heart of each tender artichoke moment. My appetite soars and amplifies; in the act of eating, it is multiplied.<\/span><\/p>

\"zbkxiwqqr4t8e0m9hvl2y4dtyxsvbvmdvut3vz4fahergxym.jpg\"XII<\/h2>

The truth awaits you in the morning like guilt, telling you your mother\u2019s disappointed, your brother, your sister, too, let\u2019s not even get started with your father, you should have done better so you get out of bed and decide that you will do better. Today you will start that life of perfection that always seems with an uncanny facility to slip through your fingers, that life you\u2019ve been putting off forever, a way of keeping that fucking headache at bay and all the while the body, it\u2019s telling me no way, no how. Your head splitting, mind crashed and spinning. A pain-staking collision. No conspiracy here, not even a plan. Not even a plan! Do you hear me? Only rejection, out of hand, of panaceas, placebos, platitudes, left and right, an entire ocean of them, flying fish zooming in at you from all sides. Fuck their rules, their decisions, their putrid philosophies about art and reason, better known as be reasonable, in other words, make sense, be sens-i-ble. Be logical, explain yourself using phrases we can all understand.<\/span><\/p>

But then you forget or grow weary and you lie little and become adept at self-deception except for the irritating migraine\/knee injury\/cocaine habit \/wish to get drunk at 9 in the morning, anything to hold off that wall of monotonous, mind-numbing obsequiousness for a few hours. There are no team players here! Only confused individuals tuned to self-destruct and screaming their personal agonies into the voice of a long sad note. Who never knew how to be nice or pretty or sweet. Who never knew guilt, being the trashy left-for-dead-body that guilt forgot. Who failed to learn how to be afraid of their own best selves, poorly schooled in the art of how not to get your hands dirty. Toe the line, shoulders back, avert your gaze, mute your voice, dissuade, evade, slide away. Your face in the mirror shows no evidence of anything that is happening inside of you. What a good trick! And still you persist! When you have long since skidded off the runway and out onto the field, far afield, nobody saw, nobody noticed and you make no effort whatsoever to get back on track. Pretty Zen. Pretty mindful \u2013 qua \u2212 Paul Coehlo of you, all this it-was-meant-to-be business yet here we sit, here we remain, ranting and enraged.<\/span><\/p>

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