Bright Burning Things by Lisa Harding

Author:Lisa Harding [Harding, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781526624468
Google: EYL8DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 152662446X
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

25

I have always hated things ending. Every play that ever ended was experienced as a sort of intense grief. Only seven more nights to go, six, five, four, three, two, one. Blast off, Yaya! And then I’d be left alone, without the bright lights to blind me to myself and the clapping that would allow me climb back inside myself, even for a brief, fleeting moment.

Much as I have spent most of the three months resisting my time here, willing it to end, I now find myself clinging to the familiar surroundings, experiencing a surge of maudlin emotion towards my fellow ‘inmates’, particularly Jimmy. Even though I’d like to convince myself we’ll stay in each other’s lives after, I know we probably won’t. We only fit in this set of circumstances, like a holiday romance who turns up in real life on your doorstep, all false intimacy and amore, in the exposing light of daytime.

The closer Sunday creeps, the more terrifying the prospect of leaving becomes. Everything about this place takes on a kind of sepia-toned hue, steeped in longing, a view already filtered through a lens of nostalgia. I want to hold tight to every person I encounter. The bitten inside of my cheek has become a gaping hole, my tongue incessantly prodding and stretching its limits. Every relationship that ever ended, even those I didn’t feel meant anything at the time, comes flooding back. Even though it was me that was doing the pushing away, it was rarely what I wanted.

I’m swinging with delirious daydreams of my reunion with Tommy and Herbie one moment, and then smacked in the face with reality – who can even tell me where our beloved Herbie is? I find myself following Sister Anne about, then trying to conceal this fact. The nun regards me with a new level of unease and wariness, or so I think. I think I feel things, then feel things I can’t conceive of – I try to hide them in a box and tie them neatly with a ribbon, but the ribbon is satin-slippery, and unravels, and the box opens. Although I don’t want to admit it to myself, the cravings have started up again, the whisperings. The closer it comes to leaving, the more my mind fills with an image of my old pal, my soother, my true-blue cure. I really want to knock myself out.

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