Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
It’s a typical Saturday afternoon. I’m squeezing in a cheeky writing class run by the academic crush of my early twenties. She just told me to peel the skin off my potato. Give me a couple of wines and I’ll turn this into erotic fiction, ‘she peeled my clothes off like she would a supple round Desiree’. Stop daydreaming and put pen to paper you idiot; it’s not that type of crush and you’re too unimaginative to write porn. Besides, potato and porn don’t mash.
And did she even say potato, or did I make that up? Am I the potato? I’d be better as a pear. No, I don’t have enough arse to be a pear. Bananas are too phallic. An Orange? Already been done. I’m being concrete again, clearly there’s no need for an actual named vegetable. It’s metaphor you fool; remember you’re with the Creatives today, play nicely. Start peeling.
Speaking of skin, academic crush-lady is far less intimidating in the flesh. All pulp and no peel. What a wonderful skill to have…to just be. Unfortunately, I’m built more along the lines of false front and hidden self. I’ll have to do something about that. She talks and shares and wells and meanders and the class can’t help but be carried away with her. I’m sitting watching her flight-of-fancy and then I realise, she’s gone and taken all our peels! We’re just sitting here in our mushed up warm pulpy flesh! Just her words, no peeler required.
I have to be more real.
It reminds me of the woman I treated in the Emergency Department last night. The blow delivered by her boyfriend had caused the skin over her cheek to split, revealing gouged wet flesh. I sutured her wound and brought the skin edges together while she cried out her raw heaving sorrow. I stitched and she talked and there was no rind, just two women with nothing in common but their presence in this moment.
In the last 24 hours, a beaten woman and my twenty-something hero have reminded me of what it is to be our true selves in a moment. The unedited uncut first draft, not buffed, polished, or laminated, just our raw bleeding, selves.