Today’s the most content I have felt for a long time, sitting on a comfortable chair listening to the rain come down, Teacup sitting next to me, all curled up, her little pretty face made sweeter with her dreaming smile.
I can hear her tiny cat snores whimpering against the sound of the afternoon rain.
I feel safe and cosy, so relieved that I don’t have to venture into the outside world. I haven’t got dressed today, nor will I.
I don’t feel well, in fact I’m in pain. I can feel the pain without even thinking about it. I have no idea what the pain is, it’s like a cheese grater being rubbed against my bones, my spine, hips and ribs, then there’s the biro being plunged into my ghost appendix. Sometimes I realise that my entire face is contoured and my eyebrows are touching.
I’ve had three scans in the last three days. Kidneys, liver, torso and spine. I’m waiting for the results but I know exactly what they will be.
A tragic case of the over-sensitive soul combined with extreme psychosomatic tendencies.
I hope my consultant will sit me down and say, “I’m afraid you feel too much, too much of everything”. As I strut my way down Harley Street, I shall think: Wow! I feel everything.
I go into my studio knowing I have too much inside me and like a whirling dervish spinning with paint I’d release it all. All the bound-up fear, the screams and tears, the blood and pain. I’d smear it all across the canvas like a giant super tidal wave.
I’m afraid because I’m happy. Every time in my life I have felt this true emotion of joy, my world has come crashing down, like a bridge collapsing over the Niagara Falls.
I went to the Niagara Falls once. It was in January 1997, part of an art field trip when I was showing in Toronto. I was suffering with the most incredible broken heart. It was minus 20F, the falls were almost frozen, Huge giant grey jagged slabs of ice congealed and slowly rolled over the top. Everything was in slow motion and all I could imagine was jumping off and falling like a darkened speck, tumbling and crashing with the ice. A red bloody streak followed me by the time my body reached the bottom.
Choosing our own death is, or could be considered, a luxury that not many of us have.
When I was a child, I’d fantasise about spontaneous combustion, at the age of 10, it seemed the most ideal way to go.
There’s a museum at Niagara Falls. In this museum there are a family of mummified ancient Egyptians. Mother, father, two children and two cats. The Mother mummy sits slightly upright, her mouth in a wide-open scream, her face contorted. The wall text said, after her husband had died of natural causes, she would be forced to poison her children, her cats and finally herself. This tiny shrunken dried-out family thousands of years old, displayed as a novelty a million miles from home.
The Barrel Rollers were wild celebrities back at Niagara in the 1900s — reaching rock bottom, their last hope was to put themselves in a barrel and roll down Niagara Falls. Those who lived to tell the tale were festooned with riches and treated like gods.
Their photos line the walls of the museum, yards away from the mummified family and their cats.
I’ve been sitting here for hours trying to write a few simple lines but I can’t, I just keep seeing myself, 26 years old, standing on Waterloo Bridge staring into the abyss as sheets of rain came pouring down. I’d had an abortion that had gone terribly wrong. I felt so desperately alone.
Everything was telling me to jump. The guilt, the anger, the confusion, the loss, the grief and an insanity that overrode every single part of my mind.
I was so alone. I was screaming inside my head. I’d seen myself a million times, throwing my bike into the river and then throwing myself in after it.
I held onto the handlebars and raising my bike above my head I sobbed and screamed. I knew this was my rock bottom, this was my lowest of my low, this was my hell.
I walked home pushing my bike and I cried and cried and the rain came down like tears.
Tracey Emin is an artist.
