kintsukuroi

In Japanese culture, when a piece of pottery breaks, they fuse it back together with a form of joinery known as kintsukuroi, which repairs the vessel by filling the cracks with gold lacquer and making it whole again. Rather than pretending the object was never broken in the first place, the flaw becomes a beautiful feature to be admired rather than something to hide and be ashamed of.

So here goes. I’ve had this memory scratching at my brain for weeks now, and I guess that means I need to get it out of my head in some way, which obviously means sharing it with the universe since that is what I do best. Either there’s strength to be gained from being vulnerable, or it’s a massive over share and no one will be able look me in the eye for the rest of my life. Guess I’ll take the risk, who needs eye contact anyway when you can have likes on Instagram.

The first time I smoked meth was at a party where I met this guy who was like hi, smoke this, and I did, obviously. Nothing eventful really happened except that I talked a lot more than normal and couldn’t sleep, and then the next day wanted to kill myself for no reason so obviously smoked some more so I stopped feeling like that, and that basically became the pattern for the next six months of my life because addiction. There was no particular reason at all that I decided to embark on this stupid and self destructive mission except that being stupid and self destructive was pretty much the theme for most of my twenties. This episode I’m sharing was probably the peak of my self destructive stupidity, unless I’m heading for a second bout in my thirties which I’m really hoping isn’t the case because I seriously value eating and sleeping these days and round two would really fuck up these enjoyable pastimes.

It was 2004. The year Britney Spears got married twice and wearing ugg boots with your denim mini skirt and smoking inside were activities I frequently indulged in. I had thrown away a university scholarship in lieu of the worst relationship of my life, both with the aforementioned substance and with a person, which I will recount with the usual vague attempt at humour so nobody’s day is completely ruined. There’s definitely a lot worse things that have happened to people, this is just an experience that I guess has affected me on some sub-conscious level or I wouldn’t even be writing about it or thinking about it at all. Nowadays I try to look at events as neither bad nor good, because as long as you learn from an experience then surely it has some form of merit, right? If I learnt anything from this situation it’s maybe to actually deal with things when they happen rather than soldiering the fuck on and letting them fester for a over a decade but hey, festering is great for blogs.

Anyway, basically the guy at the party lead to a connection with a group of like minded individuals who I spent the majority of my time with during this whole phase, one of whom became the person of significance that this story is mainly about. I won’t use his name, not because I particularly care about his right to anonymity, but because the point of my sharing this isn’t anything to do with anger or revenge, but mainly just to throw the memory as far from my brain as possible. So here, catch.

I’m not sure if he was my boyfriend or not but since the first night we slept together, when I said no and he pushed his half-soft dick into me anyway and crushed my vaguely protesting body into the deflated air mattress that he slept on in the spare room of his friend’s house, we’d been together, if that’s what you can call that sort of thing. I was so young that I didn't really understand this was a bit wrong, and kind of thought that it was all my fault anyway because what do you expect when you stay up all night at a guy you barely know’s house and take the drugs he offers you. I was drawn to him because he seemed dangerous, which to my stupid and self destructive brain was cool and exciting. He was older than me, had tattoos and talked about prison like he’d been there. He didn’t have a job besides stealing stereos out of cars, or a home unless you counted his mate’s spare room where he kept his air mattress, but somehow to me this made him super badass, rather than the obvious giant loser he is in retrospect. He was basically like a way crapper version of Ryan from The OC, except that Ryan wasn’t a meth head piece of shit and actually turned out to be a Good Guy because the Cohens adopted him, even though he was still super annoying.

I really can’t even explain to this day what was wrong with me that I got myself into this situation and obstinately stayed there. He was 100% a Bad Guy and treated me like a pet he didn’t really like, controlling who I saw and what I did, spending all my money on drugs and isolating me from the actual friends I had who genuinely cared about me and would have been there had I accepted their help. It was like I was drowning right next to the side of a swimming pool, the ladder within reach and hands ready to pull me back to the surface, whilst I stubbornly gulped down more water and fought them off, kicking determinedly for the bottom. It was seriously fucked how quickly I got myself into this colossal pile of shit, faster even than Britney got her first marriage annulled (see, there’s some humour…you’re welcome). Our relationship was a warped Groundhog Day of his jealous rages and me trying not to sob while he tried to fuck me, in between listening to the same song on repeat for hours, drawing sad little girls with big bleeding eyes and scrubbing the windowsills with bleach whilst watching the driveway intently to make sure no one stole my 1995 Nissan Presea.

One morning he decided he wanted me to shave his head and forcibly handed me an old pink plastic razor, the kind you buy when you’re too cheap to get the nice Venus ones with the gel strip and comfortable handle. I nervously said he should wait til someone that knew how to shave a person’s head could do it, but he grabbed my throat and pushed me up against the peeling wallpaper of the dark hallway, dim from the lack of lightbulb that had been put to another use. I said fucking do it bitch, he snarled as he turned on the shower, stripping off his clothes as he climbed into the bath. I did a rough as fuck job even though I was trying not to cut him, and his blood soon mixed with the bits of hair in the shallow water pooling in the bath and stuck to my bare legs as I bit my lip and tried not cry because he was muttering to himself and it scared me. The night before he’d told me how he’d seen a hedgehog in the driveway and set it on fire by turning a can of lighter fluid into a flame thrower. He nodded at the can I was inhaling from and smiled, recounting how it screamed like a person and he sat there and watched it burn. I wanted to tell him that he was fucked up, that it wasn’t OK to do shit like that, but there was this dark look in his eyes that made me look away, feeling sick and not just from the lighter fluid. The sick feeling lingered that morning as I stood behind him in the shower scraping his raw head with the blunt piece of metal and saying sorry honey as I accidentally cut him again. Do you think we’re together or something bitch, he laughed at my crumbling face as I stood there with the razor loose in my hand thinking how much I fucking hated him, but not as much as I hated myself.