and every pain amounts to a phantom limb dangling inches from me, every pain a soreness i can’t fucking recover from. i can feel it just there at the periphery, just beyond my reach, a relief from all this, the promise of fulfillment, of being made whole. but i lie in the dark beside him and it’s a fucking miracle that i don’t skin him alive. that i don’t show him exactly how it feels to be this open and lacking, to be driven mad by the thought that there’s something vitally important missing inside of me and he just refuses to fucking see it.

and when ian sees her, it’s been so long that he’s forgotten what it feels like to see her again, to be with her in all her amandaness again, that energy, that excited state that pronounced her and defined her, that announced her. he hugs her, and it all comes back to him, when he’s come home again, the solidness of her, her body pressed close to him, the smell of her hair. and even though he can never be enough for her and she can never be enough to him, just holding her now is enough to come back home.

she shows me her film and i don’t know to make of it. she did it on the computer i bought her and i think what a waste. i try to smile at first but when the actress goes to the bathroom and sticks her fingers in her mouth on her knees in front of the toilet, we can see the fingers right in there “nice and deep”, she says, “notice the rack focus?” i feel like gagging with her. i see the bile and focus instead to the emblem on the plasma screen and while a part of me wonders what they used for it, i’m distracted by the sound and turn to amanda. “what is this shit?” i ask her but she’s transfixed, in some other fucking place like usual, some place she’s told me i don’t belong. i wish i could grab hold of her and snap her out of it, just as the actress wipe the spittle with the back of her hand. i wish i could her hold her and bring her back to me, as she smiles and i hear the actress flush the toilet in this stupid fucking movie amanda has made.

they write on me with their cocks and their tongues, with their dirty fingernails digging into my hair. harry knows, harry says he knows and he looks at me like i’m a piece of shit but he doesn’t know anything. he smirks like he knows when he knows nothing of it, he knows nothing about it but he tries, goddamn how he tries to look right through me. and my cunt answers to him like he’s calling it to his fucking fingers, like all he has to to do is snap those coarse fingers of his and it should just fucking jump to his whim. i push him onto the bed because he doesn’t fucking know like all the rest but he’ll do for now, he’ll do because he fucking tries. even when he gets it all wrong, his fingers get it right.

do any of them know? does someone need to know? should there be a confidante? no. no confidante. although the idea is appealing, someone to interject some (version of the) truth of amanda, possibly bring in some history, i.e. the sumerian king and his punishment of bashing the offending woman’s teeth out with a tablet of clay.
harry knows, or suspects. doesn’t care? accepts? another twist. no, no. too many.
points to hit-
1. meeting each husband
2. her death
3. each husband meeting the other
4. each husband identifying the body
5. scenes from her childhood
6. on the set of first movie
7. premiere of first movie at festival (?)
not necessarily in that order, nor conclusive
from Moviemaker’s Master Class by Laurent Tirard, the section on John Boorman, “Directing is really about writing, and all serious directors write.”
voices, voices everywhere and overrun her, they write their stories on her and she eventually frames, puts them in the picture. they write and talk about her, all over her, their words on her skin, they skin her alive, and she puts them in the frame, mocks them, seduces them, uses them, discards them, over and over, they talk and she gets them in the shot, shoots them all down, scripts them until they no longer see themselves, stupid and blind with their talking, with their pointing, their figuring of her, as if they could figure her out and she’s got them all splashed across the screen, she’s got them in 35mm.

amanda is an aspiring independent filmmaker from spokane, washington who was kicked out of her home when she turned eighteen. her father left her when she was relatively young but her mother soon remarried a rancher. the rancher was a good man, strict and fair, but let her mother have the most say in her upbringing.