The places we are born come back. They disguise themselves as migraines, stomach aches, insomnia. They are the way we sometimes wake falling, fumbling for the bed-side lamp, certain everything we've built has gone in the night. We become strangers to the places we are born. They would not recognise us but we will always recognise them. They are marrow to us; they are bred into us. If we were turned inside out there would be maps cut into the wrong side of our skin. Just so we could find our way back. Except, cut wrong side into my skin are not canals and train tracks and a boat, but always: you.
[....] But the telling is involuntary and won't stop even when I slip sleeping tablets into your tea or try and distract you with old black and white films on my laptop or talk to you about the history of lexicography or spread jigsaws on the floor for you. Your mouth gapes open and they repeat and repeat.
[....] The places we are born come back to us. They disguise themselves as words, memory loss, nightmares. They are the way we sometimes wake with a pressure on our chests that is animal-like or turn on a light and see some-one we'd thought was long gone standing there looking at us.
A retelling of Oedipus which begins with an onslaught of visceral imagery and later calms down into evocative text, engaging and more comprehensible by virtue of its becoming less emotionally exhausting. An attempt to reconstruct lives half-remembered, which death and dementia and everyday life make difficult to piece together when words that were once contained spill out vociferously.