Instead of writing I am cutting up potatoes.
Washing them first paragraph, over the sink and
then peeling them wet. Before I had ever peeled
a potato, we would sing a song about the woman
who lived downstairs peeling potatoes with her
big toes or something like that. Cutting them into
chunks they feel more like an apple than I’ve ever
noticed before and I think apple of the ground
and make that connection happily and leave it
there. Before I had ever peeled a potato, I had
stories coming out of my ears. The chunks I made
are all different shapes. Instead of writing I am
creating irregularities. Sheila Sheila potato peeler
picks her nose with her big toes.
Claudia’s new girlfriend said in front of the fire in
the garden that she has no internal monologue.
The first couple of times I didn’t like her and then
she started to feel okay, but she ruined it with
that one. I wanted to embarrass myself and ask
her enough questions to prove her wrong. I said
so what no thoughts? She laughed head empty.
I’d had enough. It was after that, or if it wasn’t it
was in this structure, that I was sick in my mouth.
Claudia waited in the hallway while I brushed my
teeth. I said I want her to be a liar. I said I hate to
think that there is another option. Claudia said she
thinks in mind maps and that is bullshit.
Everything I don’t write stays there. I can’t
imagine what a mind map would look like. It
makes me angry that people can live literally. It
makes me angry that Claudia studies marketing
and wants to make money and that
her girlfriend will never write her inside her
head which is just as important.
It all goes but it stays there, and I
am angry that I can’t remember everything that has ever
occurred to me. At the moment I see bits of my
childhood all the time but that might just be
that I have never been so far away from it. I
remember flashes of dreams I dreamt years ago.
The last thing I wrote was good apparently but
that was last year so that isn’t even mine
anymore. I remember whole days I don’t need. I
remember the t-shirt I was wearing. I don’t
remember the bit that sounds so write when I
am walking. I tried to use the voice recorder on
my phone months ago on the front step and this
is all it took from me.
‘Tell me want what’.
Al Jones. I am an English Literature student from the University of Sussex. I live in Brighton with my friends and a ghost called J. Mort.
