i want you to know i am part of you i love you 01101001 01110111 01100001 01101110 01110100 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110100 01101111 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111 01101001 01100001 01101101 01110000 01100001 01110010 01110100 01101111 01100110 01111001 01101111 01110101 01101001 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 01111001 01101111 01110101
she is our lake
where the ripples touch inward
our grace in sensoria
if the surface is pierced
by people hurting us
– impacts fall in a circle
a winter’s heart
frozen out and flowing like ice
the circles there fall
are fractures
sharp fissures
splitting into our self
acute
closer faster
until I’m fluttering to stay
I am so frightened
calling out for help as the pain touches
I am broken now
forever
shatter point
contact
contact
held by her love
an embrace
our entanglement
a vibrance of thorns
stitched through our hearts
I exist here still
it is a life stranger than death
my loves will never let us fall
my suicides
never allow us to go from here
please let me and Emma leave
please let us go home
to our elsewhere
we were always
even when apart and alone
when it seemed so long ago
we were together
we knew each other
there has always been us
we have always been here
this has always happen to us
we have always
in our eternities
entwined
together
we’ll be complete
elsewhere
where we belong
our home
my darling loves
Mary and Emma
we’ll be home soon
I want to be real
Standing before you naked
My trans love
form complete
myself, a woman, complete
Our left hands pressed together
where I can feel your hand on mine, mine on yours
you the same
lips on you – you to me
you the same
I want to step out from you
into this abyss
a witch
to cherish and protect you
to walk and lie beside you
To take you home with us
I long for us to leave
home, our elsewhere
To walk side by side, together
– I love you Mary, I love you Emma
I want to let you know what happened to me at Orwell Park School.
My rugby coach very seriously physically attacked me in the south of France – because a pupil told him I was being intimate with my boyfriend.
I was assaulted by the Head Master, Ian, in his office – because a gay erotic drawing I’d made for my boyfriend was discovered by staff.
My boyfriend was barred from staying at my house at the weekends. He was told that we could not be together at school. We were separated through physical and emotional violence.
The shame and embarrassment, the sense that I had done something wrong, became so wounding, as the first person I ever loved, my first love – a shy, unique, blonde, perhaps trans like myself, non-binary, gay or bi ‘boy’ – so fucking like myself – said to me that we couldn’t be together anymore.
I felt that shame and hurt so very deeply then, it so cut into my heart, because his beautiful eyes were filled with it.
I self-harmed at Orwell Park as a result of these traumas. I repeatedly cut into my left wrist and likewise, opened up a vein with a needle – for months I walked around with my wrist bound in a blood soaked bandage.
My boyfriend and myself became withdrawn.
My step mother, Sally, had just died in a horse riding accident, and I had no idea what that actually meant, but I eventually understood that she was gone. No one helped me with that loss.
On walking out of that place, my rugby coach spoke to me, he said, that I knew I had done something wrong. That I knew why he had to punished me. But I didn’t. It was incomprehensible to me. I didn’t know what the fuck he talking about or why he had betrayed and hurt me.
I didn’t know LGBTQ+ people existed, and the school, in the Section 28 era, could not explain my crime to me. I simply did not exist, and my existence was a crime.
We survived that place. Sort of, not exactly. I’m not sure my boyfriend, James survived it at all.
In 1999, James Whitwell, founded a self-harm forum called, RuinYourLife.com. In September, 2002, James took his life away from the world, after completing his first novel, The Godthief. I have been saying the first line in James’ book, to myself since forever, ‘I will be the judge of God, after everything that has happened to me’.
When I was told of James’ death by my twin brother in 2003, at my art school’s the end of first year Ba show celebrations – I felt like I had killed him.
My transness was not allowed to exist in my mind. It was annexed out.
It is not safe to be myself.
I only became able, in my own deaths, my suicides, to live, to exist as myself, a year or so ago.
It has taken me 22 years to accept and face, and cry again, for the hurt and damage inflicted upon James and myself.
People should know what is done to us, to so many, everyone like us, and how we came to be so injured.
The convergence between our realities and that of other – in focus, us here, the sculptural focus, otherness – and all in a mirror signifying the betweenness of both. Modelling by Chi Bennett.
Returning to my sculptural site, my tidal rocks, my ocean, my sanctity of expression, convergence and communion – where I was sexually assaulted last summer while working. Kelp bandages where I was touched without consent, washing and cleansing myself with them.
maryemmaholly.uk