Gabriella Boyd: Beloved Axis

It got to the point where I almost wanted it to happen. The apartment was riddled with these little holes, sometimes I thought that if it wasn’t for the furniture, Jesus, I’d have nothing to hold onto.

Before that November, I hadn’t seen my neighbour in months. Shameful. I took on the caring responsibilities because her family had left her high and dry. The building was near the river. I’d take my time washing her hair, massaging her scalp, running the tips of my fingers to the back of her head. One day, on the street not far from our place, I saw a man holding what I first thought was a torn latex glove. The kind you’d get in a hospital. He was waving it around in the air, and then I saw that it wasn’t a glove at all. You could see the bones in his arm.

My neighbour has this way of making everyone else in a room feel her mood. I think it’s something she does with her breathing. She slows it down, puts the whole of herself into it. I can’t help but feel what she’s feeling. I tidied up the place, threw away the old post, got someone in for the woodworm but there was nothing to be done about the floorboards. Structurally unsound. My neighbour got worse and I braced myself for what I might wake up to.

When me and my sister were girls, we’d share a bunk bed, and because she was older she’d have the top. I’d look up at the wooden slats and think about her body there, growing, having its own thoughts. Little holes in the wood, or maybe I’m misremembering. In any case, I used to think about what it would be like if it snapped, if she fell right on top of me.

There were long stretches of time when I felt like I was the only person in the apartment. I’d sit in my neighbour’s armchair and I’d forget that it didn’t belong to me. She got worse, became harder to read. This was around the time we started sleeping in the same room. I’d listen to her breathing and match it with my own. I found an empty chrysalis on her windowsill. Finespun and see-through. There was a storm and it blew down a tree. After that, I spent whole days in her armchair, the nights alone in her bed. I didn’t like moving between one and the other, the floorboards would creak more and more and I knew it was only a matter of time before the whole place would fall apart.

In her bed, I’d look up at the ceiling and focus on my breathing. Something was growing. I’d try not to think about bad things. Instead, I’d concentrate on whatever emotion was in the room. One of us was living inside the other. Perhaps it was both of us, living inside the other.

There wasn’t much I could say, it was going to happen one way or another.

- Woodworm, Thomas McMullan