THE QUEER PRAYER BOOK

Tag: story

  • A NICOTINE PATCH ON A FIBROMYALGIA RASH

    Author Note: This is a hard story to tell. And the only reason I’d like to share it is that maybe it makes someone else feel less alone. This is a story about the height of my eating disorder in 2023. I would like to say that I’m doing much better now. The disease still exists of course- but I have learned to handle it a lot better and I’m in a much healthier place.

    I was heaving over the toilet bowl like a fiery skank. I was fingering my mouth to try and make myself throw up. There were shit stains and baby powder around the insides of the toilet. I gagged, twisting my fingers aggressively. Suddenly, I coughed out all the sick I could. Spit dribbled down my chin as I stood up, and the blood circulated back into my legs.

    The bath curtain had a brown mildew tint, and the bath itself was a duck yellow. I stripped off and stood in. The water was hard and unforgiving as it hit my back, and the tea-tree smell of the soap was making my eyes water. I rubbed the minty gel on my eyes to see if it would sting, but it must have been made with this in mind because it didn’t hurt at all. I splattered shave cream all over my body and hacked against my skin with a cheap razor. I bent over and made odd shapes trying to shave my hairy arse, but I ended up making it look all patchy and like a clown’s haircut. Afterwards, I dried myself down and dressed inside the toilet. This wasn’t my house after all.

     I had been living with a Venezuelan couple in their late 80s on Madison Street in Brooklyn. I moved to New York on a whim in late 2023 to try and find myself. Carlos was a pointy little man who put baby powder on his dick every night, explaining the dust on the toilet rim. I’d put money on the shit stains being his too. He whistled around the house like an openly gay prison warden looking for ass. He watched me cook and told me stories of when he was a gunner in the war. He said it was the perfect role because from all the way up in the sky, it was impossible to tell if he killed anyone or not. His eyes filled with blood as he held his hands together and rapped out ‘pew-pew-pew’.

    Maria, the poor woman who had to take care of this wiry little man, was a retired university professor who rarely stepped foot outside their room. She watched a lot of telenovelas on full volume, the sounds of overly acted arguments and cunty sad piano ballads always filling the house. When I did see her, she was always ill-stricken and looked very near death’s door. But truth be told, they looked after me, and we became a kind of fucked up family.

    New York was the height of my eating disorder, and it started to really take a toll on me physically. I had suffered the mental effects for a while before this, but the physical tiredness, my bones touching, my breath being short, and my stomach unable to break down food, meaning I ended up with chunks coming up as baby vomits, were all new additions.

    Early-stage eating disorders are hard to notice at first; you understand that something is wrong, but you don’t expect it to keep getting worse. At first, you just don’t eat as much as you did, but not enough for anyone to notice. You’ll stop having two biscuits with your tea and only have one. You know you’re making your stomach smaller, and that means you won’t be as hungry, and therefore you’ll get skinny. But it doesn’t feel like a bad thing until you notice it.

    But eventually, it catches up with you. I went days without eating a substantial meal, drinking black coffee whenever I could to fill me up. I lived off jelly sweets, pasta with no sauce, and a croissant. Eating disorders are funny because they allow you to feel okay with eating some things and make you feel sick to your stomach eating other things. I could eat sweets and pastries, and for some reason, it wouldn’t get to me, but I couldn’t stomach real food. People started to notice, and so I decided to tell people I was a vegetarian. That would buy me some time to keep it hidden. Meanwhile, my clothes started to hang loose off my body, and the bones of my ribcage started to pop out. I would eat meals and purge them back up, and I wasn’t getting better. Something had to change, and quickly. I was losing all my energy, and I desperately needed help.

    My sister and I were forced to drink health-kick smoothies every morning before school. Let’s be honest: that works great for two kids with early-stage eating disorders. I remember getting together as a family to watch VHS tapes of Billy Blanks’ revolutionary Tae-Bo workouts from the 90s. We would work out with my dad in the sitting room every day, and he would get us to do the splits against the corners of the room. He would push one of the dining room chairs up against my thighs and force the stretch as much as it could go.

             “Turn around, don’t let me see the tears,” he would yell.

    I faced the back wall, and I cried so much I wet the collar of my t-shirt. My sister was always stronger than me. I wiped the tears quickly with my sleeves, and I joined back in. My sister looked at the drips of tears in my eyes, and the wet of my collar. And I remember feeling like such a disappointment.

    My dad was hard on me, but he taught me how to be strong. At the time he didn’t know how badly I would need that strength, and how often my thick skin would come to save me. My dad made me a scrapper. He taught me how to bite, and how to draw blood.

             “Did you forget about me?,” my willy interrupts.

             “Not everything is about you,”I say.

    Everyone’s eating disorder can be different, but for me, I knew I was skinny, and being skinny made me feel desired, and it made me sexy. And to eat would be to lose all that magic. I was treating myself like an underage model in line to sleep with DiCaprio. He’d only have me if my belly looked like the curve of the letter C. Heave into me, Leo; you can take everything.

    My eating disorder made me feel like I was winning at something for once, and that was really fucking nice.

    In another life, my dad would have looked at me and said, ‘It’s okay to cry’ and maybe I would’ve told people sooner that I was sick. But he didn’t say that. I sometimes wonder if things would’ve been different. Or are our lives set out like storybooks, and either way, no matter what, even if the chapters are mixed up, eventually we end up on the same path, like that’s what’s meant to happen to us.

     I took the E train uptown to Queens. It was 11 pm, and the train car was loud and reminded me of a party bus. New Yorkers were always one inch away from getting into a fight. I was on my way to meet someone from a hook-up app. When I arrived at her place, it was dark, and the streets were busy. Food trucks were grilling burgers and dogs, and older women were dancing at the intersections. The energy was palpable and delicious. It made me perk up and want to join in with the festivities. That’s the beauty of New York; every day is a fireworks display of people who, despite their hardships, can’t help but smile and dance together. There’s a real sense of community, unlike anything I’ve known before.

    Her building was huge, and it reminded me of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. We climbed four flights of stairs, and she invited me inside. Her place was homely and cute, and she had a year-round Christmas tree in the corner of the living room.

             “We keep it up all year,” she pointed at it.

    She poured me a glass of water from her fancy Brita Filter, and I slugged it back, not knowing how thirsty I had gotten. She lured me into her room and showed me around. She had stuffed bears on the bed, and she made sure to tell me all of their names. She took off her top and leaned back against Henry the Teddy Bear’s head. She had pure white skin that seemed to almost sparkle in the bright light. She slipped off her pants, and she tugged at my neck and pushed me down, and between her knees. My heart started to race. Things were moving too fast, but I didn’t want to disappoint. I tried asking if we could slow down, but she just ignored me. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her hands were forcing heavily on the back of my head. I was. unable to move and my breath became short. I pushed against the weight of her fingers, and I sat on the edge of her bed in silence.

    She put her top back on and said that I should go and that she had work she had to do. I wanted to tell her how she made me feel and how she had forced me down on her. I put on my shoes, and I left without telling her any of that. On the train home, I cried, pushing my head between my knees so nobody would see.

    The nicotine patch that I had been holding down was peeling off, and underneath, my fibromyalgia rash was getting worse. I was covered in tears, and my belly was rumbling. So I did what any normal person would do in that situation. I walked for 4 hours on an empty stomach in the middle of a panic attack, and afterwards, I took a train home and forced myself to get sick into the toilet. I heaved out the acid lining of my emptied stomach. And look, it would be fun to lie, but this was my life, and it’s important that I tell ya that.

    Carlos insisted that he would cook a traditional Venezuelan feast tonight and that I had to join them! Their kids had travelled from Ohio, and he was excited to introduce me. I hadn’t had a real dinner with people like that in months, and so it made me nervous, but I said I would. Maybe it would be nice. He made Arepas, which were corn flour baps with ground beef and beans inside, but he made some with fish too, as he knew I didn’t eat meat. He made Guarapo, which was a sugarcane drink, which was very sweet but delicious. And we all sat down and said prayers and shared stories and food. It was nice, and for the first time in ages, I forgot about the eating disorder, and I just enjoyed the tastes of what I was eating. They all cheered for my success in the city and said that I would do great things, and I really felt welcomed and loved. Looking around the table that night, I realised how much I missed home, and I acknowledged that I had an illness that I needed to get on top of before it destroyed me.

    I took another bite of my food, knowing full well that I’d make myself get sick that evening.

    This is a picture of me from that time smiling enjoying my favourite coffee ever – Dunkin’. I miss it a lot and the one in London isn’t the same. Please look after yourself. Sending you all my love and hugs. It’s a tough world out there but it’s also the most magical and amazing gift of all- to be here and to be alive!

  • ALL WE DO IS CRY

    AUTHOR NOTE:

    I wrote this 4 years ago.I adapted this story into a TV pilot that BBC and LA Productions both really loved called ‘Children of Milk’. It’s something I’m very proud of, and a good introduction into the kinds of stuff I write. Maybe one day soon, you’ll see it on TV.

    There’s a petunia plant screaming in the middle of a rainforest and not one poor fuck knows where it is. I wonder if the plant cries when it’s alone, or does it just scream loudly like a toddler being pulled into a hurricane? The petunia is stuck in a pot of muck, destined to die, a poor dwindling mess.

    Aunt Maude (from the chip shop days: when you were little and used to squirt ketchup on your chips. You don’t like ketchup anymore) moves your hand from twelve to six and scowls at you. You try and concentrate on the road, but your eyes are so tired.

    You’ve been learning to drive for the past six years, but this is the first time you’ve properly said ‘I am getting that fucking license’, well this time and of course the first time when Philip Crusoe told you he’d wank you off if you had some wheels. But you were young then, and now you’re older.

    You swerve a left, perhaps too frivolously, but you stay sharp-eyed on the road. You say something like ‘I won’t do that on the test’ followed by one of those ‘obviously faces’ you always make followed by you saying ‘obviously’. You’re driving, and your hair furrows in the breeze of the open window, and Aunt Maude smiles.

    She looks proud of you, for once someone looks fucking proud of something that you’re doing. You think back to something someone once said about this feeling, but you can’t remember it word for word; it went something like, ‘Now I see you, well-done bitch, now keep driving’.

    The highroads are being painted, so you stay low on the ground-level roads. No high flying today. You stare up at the winding roads and at all the strange people painting the yellow lines on the black tar.

    Philip Crusoe was a good painter; he painted you naked one time. You were spread out on his single bed with coffee stains on the bed sheets. His eyes were potholes that you tripped in, and he watched your folds of fat swivel in a gay panic. You remember feeling free and also feeling trapped.

    “Pull over for gas maybe soon” she said.

    She gets out and sticks the pump in, and you wait, biting your fingernails. This aloneness feels like an old friend. You want to learn to drive, ‘Cus what else is there, like no jokes, no fucking about anymore, like seriously, what else is there?’ You wanted to be a fisherman when you were a kid, but you had never even gone fishing back then. You went with Uncle Tom last Summer, but he spent the whole time carving pinecones and telling you all about different sex positions you should be doing to lessen the chance of back pain.

    “You gotta try the Alternative Otter” he says.

    But, now that you are twenty-five, you just want to feel more normal, and the first step (you think) is learning how to drive. Imagine the possibilities, the freedoms, the open roads. You could go anywhere. Why the fuck are you still here, in this place, feeling like a sausage covered in mustard being thrown into a soggy bin bag. Does this ever get easier?

    Aunt Maude slurps at the bottom of her empty can of worms as you turn the gear into reverse. You want to say ‘I think it’s gone’ but you stay silent. You nail the parking, and she gives you that same look, she’s proud of you, parking is hard. You open your door, and you step out and she crosses over and gets into the driver’s seat.


    It’s silent for the drive home. She knows you don’t want to go back there, so she takes the long way. When she takes the third exit past the second butcher shop, you smile because she knows, and you know, and you both know. And it’s just so nice when you both know, you know? She pulls into your drive.


    “You did well today” she smiles wide.

    You want to tell her everything, like fucking everything, like pin me down to hell itself, because I’m gonna be here a while. You want to explode, like an atomic fucking thing. You want to tell her about your body and how it hurts when you look at it. How you have convinced yourself that your eyes are silly mirrors. You want to tell her that you have been hearing a voice inside of your body and that most people hear the voices in their heads- but not you.


    When you open the door, it’s super quiet, and you take a breath, as if to say, ‘This won’t last. ’ You creep up the stairs, and you collapse into your bed, and you pretend that you’re miles away from every little thing. This is the same room where you promised yourself you would be something. It was here on this bed that you would stay up all night and say ‘I’m gonna leave this town’ over and over in your head.

    One day, you will drive wherever you want to go, everything will be better, and you will finally be happy.

    But life feels like this: A milkman drops bottles outside your door, but they forget to ring the bell, so they curdle in the heat. And by the time you get to them, they are all sour and warm. You open one and you supple at the tip. It’s gloopy and roasting hot. But you drink the whole thing anyway, and afterward, you puke into the toilet bowl. You rinse your mouth and behold that same face in the mirror.

    “Why did you drink it?” she says

    You want to say ‘I drank it so I’d feel more alive than this dreaded nothingness I feel inside me twenty-four seven’, but you don’t say anything.

    The highroads are open today and you look at her old wrinkled face and you have that ‘well, like fuck, shall we? ‘look and she winks at you with her ‘Oh, so you think you’re ready?’ face.

    “All right, but be careful,” she says

    You start ascending. The breeze is churning through the open window, and it gets colder and colder. When you get to the top, you look down at the specks of cars. ‘That was once you‘, you think to yourself. You close your eyes, and you feel the skidding of the wheels. You take your hands off the wheel, and you feel like you’re flying. She leans over and squishes your foot on the accelerator.

    “What the fuck was that?”

    You don’t know what to say. Something felt right when you were propelling backward toward the edge. You have never had a suicidal thought before, and while you take the next turn and start your descent, you try and figure out if this counts or not.

    This time she takes a short way home, and when you open the door she pulls off coldly. You don’t blame her, you understand.

    Before the test starts, you wipe your eyebrow with your crinkled shirt sleeve. The instructor is a skinny thing with blue eyes and a melting nose. He looks at you, pale white skin, and he gestures with his index, and you start the engine. You try to calm your anxiety by thinking of anything but this. You clear your mind from any colour. It’s just you and the road. Red light: stop. Speed Limit: Maintain. Pedestrian: Smile and don’t knock over.

    He points up at the high road and grins. You take a breath, heavy and with restraint. You can do this. The car drags up the road, and when you’re at the top, he looks impressed. You try and ignore his note-taking; it’s probably just doodles of old-school crushes boobs. You focus on the road. Suddenly, and before you know it, you’re back in the testing facility. You’ve done it.

    The water’s burning your back. You squirt some shampoo on your dick and you start lathering. The bubbly foam seeps into the opening and your eyes burn like fucking hell on fire. This damned glory bursts your soul into new things – if you could see your insides now, you’d fucking bawl your little stupid eyes out. You turn and grab the shower head, forcing it against your slug penis.

    You piss into the toilet after the attempted shower. And the shampoo makes your pee look bubbly. And it stings. But you clench your teeth and thank the lord above that you’re here and feeling it. You think about the time he ripped the skin off your dick with his stud piercing. And how the pool of blood made you faint, and when you woke up, the doctor was laughing at you, and he said:


    “Cat bite your dick?”


    And you didn’t find his joke funny but you laughed anyway because this was the fool who had to put your peter-pan back together.

    You remember his huge hands and his odd ways. The way he would say ‘seriously’ like ‘sersly’ and the way he would grind his teeth at night, and the way his mam would always text you funny pictures, and his dad’s bowel cancer. You wonder if his dad survived. For a moment, you hope he didn’t, but then you feel bad, and you do that thing in your head where you say ‘I didn’t mean that, that was stupid’ and you don’t ever think of it again.

    How he grabbed your body and hurled you in circles like a sad ride with every seat empty. The way he pushed you up against the walls. The way he looked into your eyes was like he was peeking into the microwave to see if his hot pocket was done.

    And in the reflection of his eyes, you see your cracks and the open wounds. You squeezed his hand, and you laughed out of nervousness and because you needed the silence to stop, or maybe you just wanted to let him know that even though you were just two people after many glasses of wine, you liked him.

    So, with your mind like a fire and your chest full of scratches, you leaned closer to him- knowing too well that this wasn’t love. This was destruction. It’s all you ever knew..

    One day, I’ll go far from this place and never come back. I swear it.