Author Archives: Beige_Girl_Interrupted

About Beige_Girl_Interrupted

Writer, philosopher, originator of urban myths and deliverer of ghetto fables. 
I discovered early on in life that I was a magnet for the surreal and wonderful. It's my duty to share it with you in the vain hope you will either learn from my example, or feel less alone in a crazy world. 
Life is a marathon and I run funny.  Watch me go. 

For editorial pieces, copy or collaborations contact me at beigegurl4@gmail.com 
Check out my editorial portfolio: www.runslikeabeigegirl.com/portfolio

You can also see my copy projects at: www.cargocollective.com/seemaiyer


Electric Feels

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All’s fair in love and magic tricks. Especially when your louse of a magician boyfriend is planning to leave you.

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Destiny caught a glimpse of her worried reflection in the mirror as she applied mascara to her long lashes. Her large, blue eyes nervously darted back to the space between her toothbrush, an emaciated tube of toothpaste and a hair-clogged razor. Don’t panic, Destiny, she thought. Just because his toothbrush is gone, it doesn’t mean he’s leaving you. 

In isolation, her reaction to the missing toothbrush may have seemed melodramatic. Five years as a magician’s assistant had taught her that things were never really gone. Normally, they were hidden in a secret compartment, squirrelled away in a hidden pocket, or they were never there in the first place. The old sleight of hand. However, after ransacking the apartment, checking all his pockets and ruining the lining of his best jacket, Destiny had a sinking feeling. This had all the signs of a poorly executed disappearing act. 

“Pass me the razor, babe.”

Marvin’s wet arm emerged from the shower, and his fingers waggled, dripping water all over the floor. After years of being sawn in half, pecked by agitated doves and flapping about in water tanks she deserved an explanation.

“Marvin… Where’s your toothbrush?”

The water stopped running. Destiny folded her arms, narrowed her eyes and tried to look tough. Unfortunately, that was hard to do in a dolphin costume. Marvin threw back the shower curtain in exasperation, and gestured towards the brightly coloured zunga he was wearing. 

“I’ve got an hour to get ready and an undercarriage that would frighten a yeti! Why does it matter where my toothbrush is?” 

Deflated, she unfolded her arms and shuffled over to hand him the razor before he swept the shower curtain closed. 

Marvin had convinced Water World Tours, to let him perform his  electrifying show on their glass bottom boat cruise. He would be secured in a strait-jacket and lowered inside a diving cage into the water where swarm of electric eels would then be released. Then he would race against the clock to escape. The expedition had sold out. The promise of a man being shocked by eels before dinner was an enticing lure. Marvin argued that it had never been done before. Destiny wondered if this was because electric eels weren’t really that dangerous and hardly attacked humans. Sharks would draw a bigger crowd. But Marvin wasn’t having any of it.

“Eels are just as entertaining!” he’d insisted. 

Destiny had accepted that, but she didn’t understand why she had to be dressed like a dolphin.

“It’s misdirection!” Marvin coaxed. It sounded more like Epiphany, an annoyingly attractive member of the diving crew. She always seemed to miss the top button on her shirt, yet astonishingly never missed their rehearsals. Marvin had taken to discussing the act with her and she was brimming with great ideas, like the zunga. All of a sudden Marvin was wearing cologne. Dressing smarter. Manscaping. Something fishy was going on.

When they arrived at the boat, Destiny was feeling less anxious. She was being paranoid. Marvin was about to pull off the greatest trick of his career and the person he wanted by his side was-  

“Babe! Sorry I’m late. I just wanted to make sure I looked the part.”

Epiphany floated onboard in a floor length green and blue sequinned dress. Her vanilla blonde hair was scooped up on top of her head and a Stepford wife smile was plastered on her face. 

Destiny had her fingers crossed inside her flippers in the hope Epiphany was here on a date.

“Marvin asked if I could assist him.” 

Destiny’s temples throbbed. “I need an aspirin.” 

Epiphany swung her bag towards her. “There’s some in there somewhere… Maybe take two. You look terrible.” 

Destiny fumbled through the bag. It was packed to the brim with holiday stuff; clothes, passports, toothbrushes… Destiny’s heart sank.

“Did you find it?” Epiphany tilted her head to the side and pouted sympathetically. She had her hand on Marvin’s arm. Destiny’s nodded and waddled over to unpack Marvin’s case.

She refused to cry, choosing to angrily check the equipment. Locks? Check. Straight jacket? Check. Keys? 

“Destiny! All ready?” 

She smiled at Marvin and held up the spare key “Just about to put it in the side pocket. Oh, and thanks, Epiphany.” Destiny threw the aspirin back towards her and pat the straight jacket happily. “All ready for you.”

The boat buzzed with excitement. Destiny had kids poking at her, pulling her dorsal fin and screaming Baby Shark at her, but she couldn’t help but smile. Epiphany appeared on screens as she secured Marvin into his straight jacket on the deck. They exchanged a knowing look as her hand rested on the inconspicuous little bump on his side. A little girl tugged on the Destiny’s flipper. “Is that a mermaid?”

She bent down and whispered “Mermaids were actually sea cows. So your question should be: is that a sea cow?” The little girl screwed up her face and turned to the blue flashes of electricity beneath her instead. A mechanical whirr could be heard as the cage was slowly lowered into the water. Marvin began to wrestle with the straight jacket and the audience held its breath. Eventually one arm emerged and a collective sigh was released.

“Mommy, are the electric snakes going to bite the man?” 

“No, sweetie, he’s going to get away. See that thing in his hand? That’s a key.”

“Actually, it’s not,” said Destiny smiling. “This is a key.” She held out the spare key for the diving cage then gestured at Marvin who was waving an unidentified object in front of him and flailing his legs about, as a swarm of curious eels drew closer. 

“That is a toothbrush.” 

A crackle filled the air followed by a hiss as the pinched faces of the crowd were washed in blue. Huh, thought Destiny. Marv was right, eels are just as entertaining.

Connection

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It’s easy to be anonymous in London. It’s one of the things I like about large cities. I gravitate towards places where I can hide in plain sight. It creates the illusion of belonging without actually having to interact. The tube is an extension of this anonymity.

People cram into carriages, eyes straight ahead, glued onto the paper or their phone. The only goal is to make it to the final destination without hearing the words, incident on the tracks or signal failure. Commuters don’t really pay much attention to each other, unless it’s to deliver a withering look to someone who stole the seat they had their eye on.

So it shouldn’t have been surprising to me that no one had noticed the woman in front of me was crying. I’d had to double-take to be sure. Her mascara was running, she sniffed and shook emotionally. I felt a twinge in my chest and it grew when I realised the rest of the carriage was oblivious to her.

Most people are generally too busy with their own drama to notice anyone else’s. I don’t think it’s a London thing, just a human thing. I guess getting involved in someone’s sadness is messier than jumping onto the happy bandwagon. Sadness is awkward.

I’ve been on anti-depressants for nine months and am currently weaning myself off them. Having suffered from chronic depression as long as I can remember, I’ve always been strangely proud of the fact I’ve avoided medication for decades. But there comes a point when you can’t get out of bed, or get a job and you decide to take the help. It’s an act of kindness. Maybe that’s why I offered the woman the tissues.

I didn’t want to pry or give her a pep talk. I just wanted to be nice to her. To empathise. I’d been in tears on the tube days before and managed to pass under everyone’s radar, much to my own relief. We’re not meant to be unhappy in public. It’s something kept behind closed doors and smiling faces.

There’s a shame in being sad for some reason. I saw it when she took the tissues and tried to compose herself. I felt it every time I turned down medication. It’s like an admission of failure: I just couldn’t stay happy.

People distance themselves from sadness like it’s contagious. I’ve noticed it with my own depression. It feels like I have a shitty superpower that makes me invisible when I’m down. People want to laugh and get their endorphin high. So I spent years hiding it and trying to fit in with the rest of the tube.

I told the woman to keep the tissues. This led to a random stranger offering me several packs of Kleenex. It felt like a thank you for my intervention, and a little like handing over a joint to the nearest person in the circle when you can see the 4 0 coming. He didn’t want to be caught holding in the face of a crying woman.

Yeah, sadness is awkward.

 

Paper

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The answers to the questions were within and scattered around him. They hid on scraps of paper, in notebooks and pads. He scribbled them down in earnest, never to be read again. Or worse to be read again through the tired eyes of one who had forgotten. One who no longer recognised them.

He wrote his name down on a piece of paper each day and hid it within saffron pages. The answer would always be in the books. He had only to select an edition to find himself again. But soon it was not only his name, but places, people, poems, verse, prose. Scraps became sheets, essays, novellas. Folded pieces of paper within pages, a vellum city, which he tiptoed around at night, as the towers swayed in his presence.

In autumn light, he would shuffle from room to room, his hands filled with lined sheets, folded notes, envelopes stuffed with precious words that he struggled up foot stools and ladders to preserve. Sometimes he unwittingly returned quotes to the very books they originated from. He nestled his thoughts and rumination between the very pages that had inspired them almost instinctively. Inside them he preserved the part of himself he wished to keep immortal.

There had been a time when their wisdom had been entrusted to his memory. The wisdom of his books would be effortlessly shared over wine. He would amaze friends and guests with his ability to orienteer himself around the dizzying collection that enshrined them, even in a haze of alcohol. He knew where each word lay.

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Lovers teased him for living like an old man before his time. Friends patiently navigated tomes and limited editions like weary parents who had asked a child to clear away his play things for the last time. Family urged him to assemble shelves, offered Swedish names and their able hands to help contain the chaos he was constructing. He would laugh and refuse. It would not be the same, neatly filed onto shelves. He took comfort in the rustling of loose leaves, felt at peace in the nest of knowledge he had constructed for himself.

As time passed the laughter, visits faded like pencil on paper. He struggled to remember the words he treasured so much, tracing sentences with his fingers, mouthing words like desperate prayers to his mind. The edges of his memory yellowed and became brittle. Fragile. The comfort once offered by the origami city he had constructed turned into a torment. A monument to a fading glory.  He gave up the spoken word for written ones hoping to seal them what remained inside him and preserve what remained in the books that he loved.

His mind was treacherous. It tottered and wobbled, escaped him when he most needed it. Made him look like a fool. Books wouldn’t betray him. But even after each memory had been filed away and his untrustworthy synapses had been replaced with rice paper, he would waver like the towers around him.  His handwriting became unfamiliar. The words foreign in his mouth. He became lost for them and in the ensuing panic would scribble and squirrel away prose within the pages of once majestic pine. Then he would pine for the thoughts he had misplaced.

His mind housed ghostly voices that drowned his own, too scared and unsure of himself to decide whether to believe one or the other. His faith in himself was unshakeable, until shaken. His mind an Oak, admired for its strength and presence, now it trembled with a breeze, falling memories pooled around him, leaving him feeling old and bare. Which book now housed his childhood? What edition had he selected for his lost love stories? 

His name was on the tip of his tongue, but never to leave his lips and he looked around in a panic, at the silent books that towered around him. Bullies keeping his most precious possessions from him. Playing keep away with memories he had treasured. Or at least this was the story he had told himself, feverishly written down and drunkenly espoused to strangers, who politely nodded before helping him home to sit in the shadow of his fading thoughts.

One morning he awoke and nothing was left inside. Empty of words, empty of thoughts, He fell to the ground like a useless draft, balled up and carelessly tossed across a room. The books towered over him. Solemn. Pitying. His sobs shook the room. A collection by Rumi was the first to fall, tumbling carelessly between wavering stacks. They rocked and swayed nudging each other until like dominoes they toppled. His anguished moan was greeted with a confetti of quotes, poems and nostalgia.  As they thundered down he remained prostrated at the feet of his once immense knowledge. His name was restored to the world, blanketed in books. His last breath raised the first quote that he’d ever memorised before it came to rest on his lips.

” Life is a balance between holding on and letting go.”

 

Main image by
Aaron Burden

Waking Sleep

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I’ve started sleeping where and when I can.
I sleep with my keys between my knuckles, jaw clenched. My dentist says I’m grinding my teeth. He gave me a retainer. Putting in a retainer on public transport and passing out like a narcoleptic is not a wise move at the best of times. It’s not going to end well where I live. Gurning, on the other hand, implies instability. It wards off potential perverts, thieves and weirdos. But it concerns my dentist.
You can’t keep everyone happy.
I’ve started sleeping on TfL. Unreliable, but I’m an insomniac so I’m used to unreliable. I plan my journeys as I lie awake in bed. Acton to Clapham. Willesden to Camden. Ealing to Mile End. Leave an hour earlier. Find a seat in the middle so I don’t feel bad when I open my eyes to a pregnant lady being ignored by the entire carriage. Clutch my bag, take my keys out, and breathe deeply. Metal groans and gasps lure me to sleep. I can the feel eyes every time the doors kiss their teeth at me. I rest my head on a stranger. They recoil and I jerk awake to see a Greek chorus of sombre faces floating in front of me like defective holograms, flickering in and out of the light.
I’m staring with my mouth open.
I let the creaks and whines pull me back to sleep as we go underground.

Light hits my face and I immediately wake, check my phone. I’ve got 20 minutes to kill. There’s a park near the next stop. Sleeping in public places provokes the unnecessary concern of mums, fearful pensioners and the unwanted attention of the police. I think I was once moved along by an officer on horseback. But it may have been a dream. I can still hear the hoof beats trailing me as I walked away.

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Shit. I zoned out and missed my stop.

I check my watch: five minutes. I get off at the next stop and cross the platform to get the next train back. ‘Parallel Jalebi’ plays in my head as brightly coloured saris, excited children and annoyed commuters move along in synch with the music. An impromptu MTV moment brought to me by chance. I move through the crowd like water, slowly, clumsily, eager to get out.

I’m late. They haven’t arrived yet. I watch couples wander off hand in hand down Roman Road. Tourists stand in front of me like I was a lamppost and work out how to walk to Shorditch. Uni students marvel at the man in Hammer pants and a gold flat cap pushing a scooter past the pub where they are drinking. A hand rests on my shoulder.

I talk too much. It has been a while since I had a face-to-face conversation with someone. A real conversation, not an argument, or a sales call. I remind myself to shut up. Silence often scares me. I enjoy moments of quiet, but then I feel afloat in space and I worry I’ll disconnect from reality completely. Tom blames social media.

I blame social awkwardness.

Easier to work out what Disney character I am than contemplate the fact that I’ve been alone for over 5 days, and haven’t spoken to a person IRL for weeks. A huge chunk of my life is virtual.

I’m seeing friends, something that’s become harder and harder to want to do. Being around people. Seeing people, physically seeing people, messes with the illusion I’m asleep. I can trick myself into thinking it’s all a dream. Just bursts of noise, or colour, weaving in and out of silence that I can watch like a painting or ‘Gogglebox.’ But right now I’m confused. I don’t know if it’s real or not real. I zone out, smile, look vacant. I drift in and out of conversations that I’m certain I’ve already had with people who felt the same but dressed differently. Indifferent. I’m bored. It feels like I’m trapped inside my body and someone is punching me repeatedly. I excuse myself to hyperventilate in the bathroom. I fall asleep.
I sleep soundly on the tube. I think in part it’s because I’m surrounded by people. I’ve never liked sleeping alone.
The banging wakes me up. I exit the bathroom ignoring the pissed, pissed off overweight woman dying for a slash. Everyone’s left. The tightness in my chest disappears.

Adrenaline stops me from sleeping on the journey home. I feel awake. Everyone on the tube has a greenish hue. The lighting on the tube does that. I catch the person in front of me staring and I stare back. Embarrassed, he plays with his phone. He glances to see if I’ve stopped looking. I’m still staring. He gets off at the next stop.

I like watching people. Looking at their faces as they read the paper, hold their children, hold hands, doze off drunkenly. The sun is setting. As we leave the tunnel, faces go from green to gold. Eyes squint. The train feels silent as I get off at my stop.

When I get home I lie on the wooden floor in the living room and stare at the strange shapes on the ceiling. The wallpaper is peeling. I drift off to a conversation I’d had with a man I’d loved, in a place I’d seen in a painting once. The intimacy makes me sob myself awake.

It’s 4.06.

I plan my journey into work.

Pretty is as Pretty Does

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It’s no secret that I’m a sucker for pretty. Ever since I fell in love with Morten Harket at the tender age of 7 because of his velociraptor like cheekbones and piercing eyes (sigh), I have battled becoming an idiot every time an attractive person said hello to me.

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Somebody loves themselves…

Thankfully for me this wasn’t often.
My adolescent years were spent in hoodies, playing Sega and training for that inevitable moment when a cyborg incapacitated me and I’d need to use all my upper body strength to escape. I was the go-to-girl for other nerds who wanted to find out about my attractive and more female looking friends.
The most attention I got was being stalked from the library a few times and a couple of weird calls from an asthmatic who couldn’t even bring himself to say anything. That’ll teach me to be vocal on the yearbook committee.

I levelled up my dating game in Mexico, a place where most women are dolled up to the nines, caked in makeup and curling their eyelashes with a spoon the second a traffic light goes red. The minute I succumbed to some of those beauty standards, handsome men dropped their cloaking devices and I was dating a much more objectively attractive category of man.

I’m cute, but I also come covered in food and with a finger puppet obsession. Not really the girlfriend of choice for underwear models. But in the disguise of a dress and some lipstick, said models were piggybacking me home at the end of the night.

For a while I was living the ‘date sexy’ dream. The thing is more often than not these guys were nothing special. They were painfully average. Sometimes even below average. I once dated a guy who thought the expression was ‘escape goats’. The same guy thought he was entitled to preferential treatment everywhere he went because, you know, his face. I guess when you’re treated like royalty because you lucked out in the gene pool stakes you start believing the hype.

The thing about the handsome bubble is that it couldn’t exist if it wasn’t facilitated and enabled by people outside the bubble. It’s a wonder these already inflated egos haven’t exploded with all the ego pumping going on. Mediocre writers being encouraged to start lifestyle blogs, monosyllabic banter boys being encouraged to become motivational speakers.

Why are we enabling these people? My friend Diana (gorgeous both inside and out) once said to me that she didn’t really give attractive people much time, they had to prove there was more to them than genetics. I’m inclined to agree.

The halo effect has us giving kudos, opportunity and even money to people with no real skill other than the fact their chromosomes lined up real nice. On the flip side, less attractive people are actually more likely to be attributed negative qualities, and considered to be ‘inherently bad‘. It’s a crazy world.

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A few years back an older, cooler and stunning friend told me she’d met Morten Harket at the height of his fame (and hotness). She’d approached him for an autograph and without even looking at her he scribbled his name on a napkin and handed it over without pausing his conversation. She took one look at it and dropped it on the floor before heading over to talk to Simon le Bon. He was really lovely apparently.

Pretty is as pretty does I guess.

The Trust Paradox

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It’s recently dawned on me that I can’t get that trust balance right. I want to be trusting, but I think the worst. I can ask a stranger to watch my things while I go to the bathroom, but I guarantee that seconds later I’m envisioning my identity being stolen, my laptop being trashed and someone trying to insert their genitals into the USB port in some bizarre sex hate crime. It’s an emotional razor edge.

Apparently, the people closest to you set the benchmark when it comes to our ability to trust. My family were the litmus test for the rest of society. Unfortunately for me, they were also people who lied for sport and couldn’t be trusted as far as you could collectively throw them.

My dad used my trust as the set up to his jokes. Like the time he bought me a bucket and spade before taking me to a pebble beach. Or the time he made us watch Aliens promising us that a clown was about to pop out of  John Hurt’s stomach. Our tears gave him more than our trust ever could. In return we got nightmares.

My sister learnt from the best and continued my dad’s experiments. Each lie was a toe in the pool of my credulity to see how deep it went. Could she convince me to slide down a bannister to jab me in the arse with a pin? Could she hang me from a curtain rail by telling me she wanted to see how long my hair was? Yes, yes she could. I deserved to lose that hair.

Even my mum had her moments. She wasn’t mean, just out of her depth and filled with wives tales. My favourite being that I needed to cover myself in turmeric if I wanted to get rid of unwanted hair. Some fun facts about turmeric: it has no depilatory qualities and stains skin bright yellow. It was like highlighting the hair.  

Trust works paradoxically. You only figure out that you can’t trust someone by trusting them. By then you’re locked under the stairs, looking like a hairy Lego and clutching a bucket and spade.

Even so, I continue to put my faith in people. It’s easier than burying my stuff in the sand like a Samiad, or having a catheter put in. Most of the time I’m pleasantly surprised. When you were imagining someone spitting in your coffee, the only way to go is up.

 

Herd Mentality

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I’ve been binge watching Planet Earth. So far I’ve seen a wolf kill an ox, a shark kill a seal, a seal kill a penguin and global warming kill a polar bear. With the exception of the polar bear all the other animals were picked off from their herd, which got me thinking about our herds.

As much as we try to separate ourselves from animals, we have a lot in common. Being part of a group is one of them. We may no longer need a tribe to hunt, or protect ourselves from wild animals, but having a tribe makes an uncertain world seem less scary. It’s also a seal of approval on who we are and how we live our lives.

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Remember High School?

Even though we don’t depend on the squad for survival in the same way musk ox might, our herd is important to us. Penguins work as a team to survive harsh weather. Lions hunt in prides to take down bigger prey. We lean on our inner circle for support, advice and companionship. But where animals are unified by species and survival, our groups are selected from who’s closest.

Though our main social groups are comprised of whomever we interact with most frequently, there are people that we pick out and maintain friendships with over distance and time. We like to think it’s because there’s something special about them. The reality is a tad more narcissistic. Studies show that friends who support our sense of identity are more likely to be kept around. If you see yourself as a high school prom queen, chances are you’ve surrounded yourself with people who see you the same way.

Our herd reflects who we are, or at least the version of you that you identify most with. If you’ve changed and evolved as a person, it stands to reason that your herd has too. One way or another.

It’s because your herd matters. The right friends can help you to  grow as a person and achieve your potential. Similarly, hanging out with the wrong crowd can limiting. The need for approval and fear of being cast out is powerful. You can get stuck in old patterns and trapped in a version of yourself that isn’t true to who you are. If you’ve ever tried to break up with a friend, you’ll know it can be just as hard as a romantic break up.

If you’re in the right herd you all grow and evolve together. If not then it can be bittersweet. It’s all part of being human. It beats being taken out by a shark, I suppose.

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