On Worlds and Words I think if you pulled back the first layer of my skin, the one before the raw pinky newness, you would find that I am filled with words. Not an even blanket of them cloaking my outsides from in, my insides from out but a fluctuating mantle of distilled characters and verbs that swells and recedes like waves in the tide. I feel them coming before I know what they are. The words like feathers that itch beneath the skin until a moment like a pinprick comes along, one that doesn’t necessarily hurt, but punctures. And through that tiny aperture something can emerge: some bile from beneath my brain where thoughts collected but never spilled; the blood I sometimes feel moving through every channel and artery, through every carved up wound; the build up of some substance inside that I can’t quite name. Or maybe I am wrong. Maybe not the self-generated substance I think it is so much as the residue of the outside world that enters my orifices, my skin (the thinnest membrane), through my porous heart. Maybe being a writer just means expelling in words the world which enters without your permission: subtly shaped by its time living inside you, wrapped in stray strands of DNA, tinged with the tint of subjective experience. I don’t know how plausible this theory is. I do know this process of taking in in in and reeling to let it out out out is necessary to my survival: primal and primary; monstrous and marvellous; so violent, so vital, so violating.
Issabella Orlando
10
