How To Be Honest

 by Carolyn Nash

Sometimes I say things to myself: That's the truth. Stop it stop it stop it. Or: You're alright. Or: Let it go. Things like that -- things that people are supposed to want to hear. I say them even though I am the only person in the room, even though they aren't things that I particularly want to hear.

If there are words in my mouth, I can't hear the ones in my head. That's the truth. So I say these things over and over again, as though they are prayers, as though the rhythm will mean something when the  words themselves fail. I have to move, I have to move, I have to move. I'll scream it out loud to an empty bedroom until my voice sounds like cardboard tearing.

Or if you're all tender warmth beside me in bed, I'll just say NO NO NO. It must be scary to hear that sudden scream, if you have been sleeping next to me, trying to love me. But you never try to decipher "no." It's one of those words you either believe or disbelieve. It's a word that ends itself, like a suicide.

The thing I say most, though, is I love you. When no one's around, when I'm laying in bed alone. When I'm not thinking of anyone at all. I love you! I'll say suddenly. And what it means is god please stop these thoughts, these terrible thoughts, please let these words that are supposed to change lives be enough to change mine.

There is a ghoul inside me, I told you once. I don't know if it will ever go away.

Now when I look at you in the half-dark and say I love you I don't know if I am saying it to you or saying it to strangle the ghoul, to stifle all those words in my head: the words that make me want to tear out my eyes just to set the voices free. I love you: maybe the sounds and shapes and depths are truly their own or maybe they are just a salve for the parts inside me that have ruptured. I don't know.

But when I told you about the ghoul, that was love.

That's the truth.

Carolyn Nash is fasting for Ramadan. Her belly feels seared and torn, like an exploded tire. Her last purchase was a box set of Roald Dahl's complete works, translated into Indonesian. She writes here and you can follow her on Twitter here @idontwashmyhair.

Clean

 by Carolyn Nash

Ginny says “sweet” is a word like a butter knife as she leans over and vomits again. She spits once and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, pauses with her face over the bucket. Then she leans back into the couch and explains: a butter knife doesn’t do a single thing that another knife can’t do just as well. Ginny’s face is white and damp, like a potato cut open.

The room smells like tomato paste and sour shit. Ginny pants a little as she stares up at the ceiling. Her profile is proud and elegant, the smooth lift of her nose, the doubled pink of her lips, the plunge where her sharp chin becomes her delicate throat. Looking at her, it’s hard not to think of all the ways you can hurt a person, all the things you can do to make a body fall apart, shock the blood against air.

The thing itself has already happened, I think. At least the throes of it are over, the part where Ginny’s wide open mouth let out such peels of maniacal panic I thought our neighbors would call the police. Sometimes she turned her face into the pillow and stifled the screams, but I was afraid if I forced her quiet she would suffocate. Or hit me. Through most of it, I just sat on the love seat and watched. Once she made me call the emergency number, but they said there was nothing to be done, as though she were a meteor crashing towards our earth, or an astronaut untethered, drifting away from us, beyond reclaim.

After Ginny falls asleep, I take the bucket into the bathroom and wash it. I scrub away the ring her puke has left in the toilet bowl: a small gesture, an act of necessity. When everything is clean and the smell is gone, it will be over for me. I feel how much worse it must be for her, to share this experience with someone who won’t even remember the person she was before. For a moment, I feel how alone she is, how alone I’ve let her be. I rush back to the living room to tell her I’ll remember, I’ll remember who she was, if this moment changes her forever, but when I see her sleeping, beautiful, stinking girl, my blood goes quiet, and the feeling is gone.

Carolyn Nash has a voracious appetite and intermittent insomnia. She dislikes water chestnuts and overcooked eggs. She likes Pegasus sneakers because they make her run fast. She writes here.