As we wait for 45'

‘A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her.’

R.D Lang, The Divided Self

The quote above introduces my favourite book, Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan. It’s about an abusive relationship in which the girl rejects her self-respect for the favours of a somewhat attractive, tall, white man. An experience I myself can relate to. The story itself is fiction, but the epigraph might well be the blurb of my personal diary. There’s a little pencil engraving by yours truly under it, reading ‘escalating anxiety that she becomes the mother of the bomb herself, crafted from incessant and fantastical contemplations’. I look back at that now with disgust; the sentence is too long. I’ve been taught ‘shorter and shorter, tighter and tighter’ until my words resemble a Tesla robot.

What does it mean to have the Atom Bomb inside of you? Feeling the seconds pass by - aaand one, aaand two, aaand three, aaand four, aaand - the boom never comes.

‘How do you feel today?’

Her potted plants stare at me with the same quizzical, yet knowing look.

‘I feel anxious.’

‘Hmm. And what can we do about that?’

‘Breathe?’

She laughed.

‘No, no, no. We repeat our mantra. I am safe. I am loved. I am here.’

The next day, my dog died.

On the train home, I listen to my girl-pop anthems, strawberry laces and pink stilettos. They roar through my ears; I nod my head knowing every word. I think about my coursework, the boy I met last night, and the impending descent down to extinction.

J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’, referencing the detonation of the Atom Bomb over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Bomb exerted more than 15,000 tons of TNT, spreading across 1 mile, and culminating in a blinding firestorm. 70,000 people died instantly.

Living consciousness,

Bed of bones.

The bomb has been swirling inside me for many years now. I lie in wait, the click, click, click of the machine beneath.