💀🍬 Deadweight
This text was written as a companion to The Sweetness of Damage. A condensed extract was submitted as part of a written portfolio application to the Royal College of Art. What follows is the original text from which that extract was drawn.
It looks sweet on the surface. Glossed, marbled, sugar-sick. The kind of thing that catches light and holds it, that invites the eye and flatters it, that gives back something warm and excessive and just slightly wrong in a way you cannot immediately name. You have seen it before, this particular quality of shine, the one that sits at the edge of appetising and begins to slide. A seaside sweet in the wrong season. A ring lolly left too long in the bag, still vivid, still glossy, but with something softened at the core that was not there when you first picked it up. You don’t throw it away. You turn it over in your fingers. You almost put it in your mouth.
That is where you live now. In the almost.
The surface is impeccable. You have made sure of it, tended it the way you tend anything that needs to be believed, with enough attention to pass and enough distance to avoid close inspection. You get dressed. You reply to things. You produce the correct expressions at the correct moments, the slight softening around the eyes when someone says something kind, the laugh that arrives on schedule, the nod that means yes, I am here, I am present, I am participating in the agreed performance of being a person who is managing. You have become very good at managing. You have become, in fact, a masterclass in it. A gloss finish over a foil core. Seductive, excessive, and beginning, very quietly, to blister.
Nobody sees the blistering. That is the point. The rot has manners. It has learned, over a long time and through a great deal of practice, to arrive without announcement and stay without detection, to make itself at home in the spaces between one breath and the next, to fold itself into the ordinary texture of a day so completely that you sometimes forget it is there and mistake the weight of it for just the weight of being. Everyone is tired. Everyone is carrying something. The rot has heard this and taken notes and uses it as cover, settling deeper each time you agree that yes, you are just tired, yes, it has been a long year, yes, things will be better when.
When. That word does a lot of work. You have been living inside it for longer than you can cleanly account for, in the provisional tense of a life that is always about to begin properly once the current circumstances resolve, once the geography changes, once the waiting ends, once the thing that is pressing against the inside of your chest with the patient, constant pressure of something that knows it has time, once that lifts. It will lift. You are sure of it. You tell yourself this with the bright, excessive confidence of something that has been told to you so many times it has taken on the quality of fact even though you have never once been able to point to the evidence.
Something’s clinging to your skin. Not memory, not grief, not the clean sharp ache of something lost that you can name and mourn and eventually carry without staggering. Something darker and less defined, the kind of thing that does not have a word because naming it would require acknowledging it, and acknowledging it would require you to stop performing, and stopping the performance would mean standing in the wreckage of everything you have decorated so carefully and explaining to yourself how long you have known.
Your shadow, folding in. It melts into you. Suffocates. You breathe it in and it wraps around your heart and pulls, not violently, not with the drama that would at least have the decency to be legible, but with the slow, patient traction of something that understands compounding interest. It is not in a hurry. It has watched you get dressed every morning for years. It knows your routine. It waits in the bathroom mirror while you arrange your face into the version that will get through the day, and it does not comment, it simply watches, because it does not need to rush you. It is already inside. The surface sparkles. Inside it festers.
You are surviving, sure. You are eating, showering, pretending, repeating. You are keeping the paperwork of a life in reasonable order, meeting the minimum requirements of being present in the world in ways that are visible to others, doing the things that prove you are fine so consistently and so convincingly that there are days when you almost prove it to yourself. You are not stuck. You are decaying. These are different things and it matters that you know the difference, even if the knowing changes nothing about the rate of it.
The rot feeds slowly. Quiet, patient, constant, the way damp works through plaster, the way something behind a wall makes itself known first through smell and then through surface and then through the soft collapse of what you thought was structural. It reaches places you did not know were hollow. You discover these hollows the way you discover structural damage, not by looking but by pressing against something that should hold and feeling it give, the sudden absence of resistance where resistance was assumed. Memories don’t fade here. They sharpen. They weaponise. They come back not softened by time but clarified by it, stripped of the ambient noise that made them bearable when they were happening and returned to you in high resolution, every detail intact, every implication legible in a way it wasn’t when you were inside it.
Even colour turns against you. The brightness that was once refusal, once riot, once the acidic excess of someone who had buried their instincts in a cupboard for a decade and dragged them back into the light, even that starts to feel like performance. You wear the colours. You put on the thing that should feel like joy and you stand in it and wait for the feeling to follow the form, the way you were told it would, the way they said it worked. Act as if. Dress the part. Decorate the damage until it is mistaken for delight. You have been decorating for so long that you have lost track of what was decoration and what was damage in the first place. The surface and the wound have been in conversation long enough to start sounding like each other.
Outside, the noise keeps rising. Content. Voices. Spectacle. Everyone performing their version of surviving with better lighting and a cleaner narrative arc, everyone packaging their collapse into something consumable, grief with good aesthetics, breakdown with a brand identity, rot that knows where to look when it cries. You watch this and you recognise it and you say nothing because you have been doing it yourself, because the performance of coping is not something you opted into consciously but something that accumulated, one managed interaction at a time, one correct expression at a time, until the performance became the only version of you that other people had access to and you could no longer remember with any confidence what had been underneath it.
Inside, it’s quieter. Just corrosion with manners. A stillness too heavy to carry, that you carry anyway, the way you carry everything that has no good alternative, with the mechanical competence of someone who learned early that falling apart is a luxury and that the bill for it always comes due eventually and that it is better to keep moving, to keep the surface intact, to keep the gloss from cracking for as long as possible because once it starts you will not be able to control where it goes.
The rot doesn’t want you dead. It wants you present. It wants you dressed up, functional, performing, decorated, because a decorated host is a better host than a collapsed one, because collapse draws attention and attention brings questions and questions require answers that the rot has not authorised you to give. It wants you to keep attending to the surface while it attends to the interior, quietly, without witnesses, without drama, in the patient way of something that has always known it would outlast the performance eventually and is content to wait.
It wants you to call it comfort.
To decorate your damage until it’s mistaken for delight.
— Written by the one who kept the gloss up longest.
