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Slate
by Keely Boyle
Our kitchen had this bench with pointy corners and sharp cupboard handles. I remember because of all the times I caught my hips on the edges.
In our study we had a linen cupboard. It was covered in photos of me, photos of family, birthday cards, and Christmas cards. When I had friends over, I’d get embarrassed about the baby photos on the cupboard doors.
My siblings and I gave our parents a lot of shit for the way the house looked. We teased them relentlessly about the yellow ceiling and the shoddy paint job.
And year by year, these parts of the house began to disappear. My parents renovated the kitchen and bathrooms. They painted all the walls and ceilings white. They took all the photos down to paint the linen cupboard doors too. The photos never went back up.
The walls became blank and empty. Now no one hits their hips on the bench corners or its cupboard handles.
Cool, minimalistic white–– impossible to make fun of because there shouldn’t be anything embarrassing about a blank slate.
Walls have always been built to keep people and things out or in.
But they’ve also always been decorative. We decorate the things we use to keep people out. We cover our barriers of protection with things. We seal things in.
My walls now are anything but blank.
My walls are covered in postcards, posters, CDs, and record covers.
My walls are so covered that in some places, there are only small slithers of the eggshell coloured paint beneath visible.
But whenever I show new people my room, I kind of feel like the room belongs to someone who isn’t me:
Someone who’s a Clairo and Girl in Red fan.
Someone who watches a lot of TV.
Someone whose favourite show is The Umbrella Academy or Merlin.
Someone who spends a lot of time on Pinterest.
Someone who’s a fangirl.
Someone who’s a girl.
I bought the Clairo and Girl in Red posters from Redbubble back when I first realised I was a lesbian. I only knew a few songs from either of them at the time. I barely even listen to the songs I do know anymore.
I wanted to cover up the blank stretches of white with something that made me something. Now, taking those posters down would feel like a waste of money. So, I’ve moved them to one house and two different bedrooms. When they fall, I redress the walls so I don’t have to choose what should go there instead.
I have four walls now. One is long and interrupted. One has a tall window. One has a built-in robe running almost its full length. One has a door. An old friend gifted me the Umbrella Academy poster. I keep it on my door because I ran out of room for it everywhere else. But I don’t like the show anymore.
And I don’t talk to that friend anymore.
And I still leave it up.
Each summer, the heat takes the posters down for me.
The Blu-Tack holding everything up melts, and the postcards and photos begin to peel from the walls. The sticky command hooks buckle and pictures fall. They fall when I’m sleeping, and I get woken up by the sounds. For weeks, for months, I let the debris build. I let cards get wedged between the walls and the floorboards. I let decorations disappear under my bed. I’ll stack the fallen items until the pile starts to tilt.
And then I’ll buy new command hooks and dig up an old ball of Blu-Tack to try again. I put everything back up: the Clairo and Girl in Red posters, the postcards, the Umbrella Academy poster. Everything.
Even the decorative plate, the one that I’ve sliced my hand on – that’s been chipped from falling – still sits over a vent, just a little too high up. It hangs lopsided and awkwardly from an old black necklace I carelessly secured to it as a makeshift hook. A lot of things have been put up that way. I let things slant diagonally in my frenzy to cover up. I never step back or take the time to make sure things are in line. Over and over, I do this. I can’t seem to let things go– even things that aren’t important anymore. Even things that don’t want to stay where they are.
I know how to make a room look pleasing. I know where to drape things and which things to cover. I know which shapes go together. Just like I know which things will cover my hips and show off my chest. I know how to dress an outfit up with jewellery or shoes. I know how to receive compliments about my taste in fashion or, my body, or my eyeshadow.
But every four years or so, I stop wearing dresses. I’ve repeated this cycle for as long as I can remember. Slowly, I start wearing pants and masculine clothes, and then, all at once, I snap myself out of it. I put everything back where I feel it’s supposed to be.
Long skirts are the key to being comfortable but still girlish. The forgiving waistline, the skin they cover, the shape. You can’t see what’s going on under there. You can’t see my ass or my hips. You can’t see how soft and fleshy and pale my thighs are.
Soft is a word I get called a lot. Soft lips, soft skin, soft touch, soft tits. I’ve never cared for this softness.
I want to be hard. I want to be firm. I don’t want my skin to have any give. I want people’s hands to come up against me flat. I want to be a wall. I want things to fall off me. I don’t want things to stick or get lost in crevices.
My best friend likes to frame things:
‘Everything looks better in frames,’ she always tells me.
She cares.
She cares about the little things.
She cares enough to display the things she likes properly.
I keep a little container with all the drawings my friends and I made on a school camp when we were seven.
I have a box with all the letters and cards and photos from friends I don’t or can’t speak to anymore.
I have a folder with all the awards and certificates from school that I’ve ever gotten. I have a little paper ring that one of my old coworkers made me when we were bored at work. I have old headbands and hairclips and ribbons and bows that I wouldn’t be caught dead in. I have jewellery I’ve never even worn. Jewellery that doesn’t even mean anything to me. I still have old, lacey push-up bras I know I’ll never wear again.
I’m stumbling through my life. I don’t care about anything. I’ve never seen the use of putting anything in a frame. I’ve never even put a nail in a wall to hang something up properly.
Always temporary stickiness.
Woollies command hooks, tape, and Blu-Tack.
Nothing permanent.
Cover up the blank. Cover up the blank or people will see the blank. Don’t let people see the blank. Cover it cover it cover it cover it
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I’m scared of the bits of paint that will come off when I finally peel things off the plaster. I’m scared of ripping the blank off, along with what I used to make things stick to it. The parts of me I’ll lose or tear
I want to get rid of the things
Hanging from
my
chest
But
What’s
under
what’s underneath?
There's a nail in my floor. I don't know why it's there. It doesn't do anything, but it always ends up poking out of the floorboards.
I stub my toes on it.
I rip my socks on it.
My sister always told me to just hammer it down. I always told her I couldn't find my hammer.
But also, I knew how to live with it––to walk around it, to strategically place furniture over it.
She got me a toolbox and a hammer for my twenty-third birthday.
Now you can deal with that stupid nail.
So I hammered it down. I pushed it down and down until the floor was smooth. And a year later it poked up again.
So I hammered it down, again.
And it's back. It always comes back.
And the solution isn't a solution anymore. Like, if instead of getting rid of the posters I didn't like, I just put new ones over them. It would look bulky and strange, and I'd always know what was underneath, even if no one else did.
If I pulled the nail out, then it would be gone. There'd be no bulk. No lump. Nothing hidden underneath.
I don’t really mind the nail as much as I mind things getting caught on it. Like clothes and eyes.
I don’t mind looking at my chest when I’m naked. It’s just there the way it’s there.
I don’t even mind side boob or a bit of separated boob. When they’re cleaved apart.
It’s when there are thingsontopofthem that I hate. When they’re all squishedtogetherand
up.
propped
I can’t wear a shirt without them being there. So, I wear old, too-small sports bras or binders. It helps; it does, but the bulk is still there.
I need to pull them off so they’re gone.
Like I need to pull that nail out of my floor.
Otherwise, I’ll have to keep shoving them down and layering things over them. Hammering that nail in like I’m begging:
please please I’m not that I’m not that I’m not that. Iammnotthat.
Flesh, too much flesh. There's too much flesh. There should be less flesh here. Shouldn't there be less of it?
I hate the chaffing, bleeding, itchy nipples.
The rashes that form in the underboob after I’ve been sweaty and feverish. Shirts that would fit if it weren’t for my chest.
The growing pains that make me think I’m having a heart attack.
And what scares me is the process.
The time and money it takes to redecorate.
The awkward phase in the middle where the room will look blank and boring or wrong. Not quite one thing, not quite the other.
Blu-Tak and dust left on the wall.
Scars and lines of what used to be there.
What scares me is that I can’t just click my fingers and see it done.
But maybe I’ll always be adding. Taking things down and putting things up.
Historically, walls have never actually been successful in keeping people out. People find ways to get over the top or to tunnel through or they just find a way around.
People taught me how to be warm. People cared before I did.
When I was twenty-one, I had no car. I would finish work late, and it would take me an hour and a half to get home. It was the first time I’d really felt how cold a Melbourne winter could be.
Coworkers offered me lifts home. One of them told me to get a nice warm scarf, so I did. Others layered up with fingerless gloves and beanies, and I copied them. My old manager used to bring me dinner, so I’d eat it.
I never thought to do any of that myself. I rarely brought snacks or enough food to get through my shifts, and if I did, it was never homemade.
Do whatever is easy.
Any pronouns. Whatever. Whatever works for everyone else. Whatever will stop me from having to correct people. Whatever will stop me from being inconvenienced. If I don’t care how people refer to me, I don’t have to care when they get it wrong.
And they get it wrong.
They get it wrong.
They get it wrong.
When I first wore a tie to a party, I immediately got asked what my pronouns were by the first person I saw. And when I wore a tie again to a party all my friends were at, people started treating me like I was a fourteen-year-old boy who had just figured out how to get dressed by himself.
What are you?
It’s not easy anymore. I can’t pretend I don’t care anymore. The posters are falling, and I don’t want to put them back where they were.
Sometimes in winter, when it’s cold and I’m running late, I’ll stop to grab a scarf and beanie.
Sometimes, I do my shoelaces up slowly to take it easy on my icy fingers, even though I’m in a rush.
I used to think my body was my body and that it was wrong to change it or to even want to change it.
I used to think the answer to the weird feeling I got when looking at my body and its shape was self-love and covering up and ignoring it.
I thought there was no point in redecorating. That everything would always fall down anyway, or that I’d have to always move again, or that it wouldn’t make me feel any better. I thought to change what I am physically would be to become someone else––that I’d be solving a shallow personal issue I shouldn’t have had to begin with. I thought maybe one day I would outgrow all these insecurities and become okay with my body.
But that’s a little stupid; a wall is still a wall if you take everything on it down. A room is still a room when you move your furniture around, when you add carpet or remove the carpet, and when you paint and repaint and repaint. I could make my bedroom into an office or a gym or a kitchen or whatever the fuck I’d like. It’s my room. Mine.
I want to live somewhere with warm lighting and candles and incense. I want a view, not of the city, but of trees and grass. I want it to rain outside but also still be kind of sunny so that the leaves glow. I want to keep the one floorboard in my room that creaks whenever I step on it, the one that makes me worry I’ll wake my housemates up when I get home late. I want quiet music in the background and the sound of my friends’ laughter through the walls. I want the oven preheated before I get home and to hear the sound of the dishwasher already running so I can press my hand to it and feel the heat.
I want the things on my walls to be framed, and I want them to be nailed into the plaster. I want them to never fall.
About the Author
My name is Keely Boyle. I am a 24-year-old transmasc and I specialise in works about friendship, gender, sexuality, and my childhood in Melbourne. Slate is a first-person narrative essay that explores why we hold onto things that no longer serve us and why we present ourselves in ways that are uncomfortable.