Pitch

I first became subjected to this pressure to be breathlessly articulate ten years ago. When my counsellor urged me to only see her once I had specific questions to discuss, it broke my heart. It became apparent that I had to frequently launch into an elevator pitch, particularly when I was compelled to speak with an important type with an impatient manner. Their inattention would rattle me, my chest would constrict when I'd see their wandering eyes search for something else, anybody else they'd rather be talking to. It happens in these momentary interactions, in chance meetings with musical heroes, prospective employers and BBC journalists. I speak quickly. I make it brief.

When I heard a recent recording of his voice, competing for space and attention, I was reminded of how this dynamic plagued him in the days when I knew him. We never discussed it, but I always thought his fast-paced delivery reflected a feeling of creative powerlessness. He was eternally pitching to the eternally distracted. We hadn't spoken in five years but I still felt a level of gratitude towards him. In spite of his cruelty, he checked back frequently to read my Plague essays. Knowing of his silent readership prompted me to lovingly craft my words. I felt relieved at the thought that I still existed in his mind, yet I struggled to obscure the fact that I no longer held onto his memory as I once did. I still don't know if he ever knew that I had loved and lost another.

In a moment of madness, I crafted an email to him in reference to his forthcoming visit to London. It drew heavily on my ancient fear of being in London and being denied the possibility of seeing someone important. I wrote to offer the chance to meet as friends but I never honestly expected a response, because I know that even the caring don't tend to write. Yet, in this instance, he did reply. It was palpably abrupt, condescending and needlessly harsh. What I had intended as a kind gesture managed to shake all the kindness that I had once cultivated in my heart and my head. In that moment, I knew that he would never visit this site again. I had lost my muse... and there's no one around who could possibly understand what that means to me.

It's a loving thing to be generous with your time and space, but I need to reconcile with those suffocating moments where there's no interest, there's no love or warmth. It's best to return to those friends who choose to love and listen and be kind. I need to return to them.

Locks II

I lived in constant fear of him finding my diaries. It was a fear that only ever increased with age. I started filling notebooks as an 8 year old and by the age of 25, I was running out of places to hide them. At first, I insisted on diaries fitted with a cheap tin lock, convinced that this would successfully deter his obsessive attempts to violate my work. Once he tampered with them with manicure scissors, I realised that it was preferable just to ask my dad to lock up my writings in the filing cabinet. Those notebooks remained inaccessible to me and they are locked up still, with pages unfilled.

I would later type up stories, encrypted with passwords on Microsoft Word and Creative Writer. I once failed to do so and it resulted in him going through my piece, changing all the nouns to HAM. It was a reference to the name he obsessively called me, much to the amusement of my mother. Despite my efforts, that familiar scene materialised all too frequently: his standing over me with book wide open in hand, reading out loud, only stopping to obnoxiously cackle in my face. The memory of it is more painful than any other aspect of his systematic routine of verbal and physical abuse. Now I have been free of it for six years, I never stop asking myself why I wasn't protected, but he was.

I have been reminded of that aspect of my past in recent times, when friends ask me why I publish such personal details in essays online. I start to feel emotional and defensive, in much the same way I did then. It makes me suspect that I must have been encouraged to stop writing as a child, if only to stop that destructive routine that had emerged with my brother. I can't articulate why I still wrote obsessively, but I am moved by the thought that I persisted in light of such fear. The irony now is that the external publication of such work is my only hope of redress. Instead of the routine humiliation that once came with exposure, I am now comforted by the readership. It is my only sign that there might be a willingness to acknowledge the extent of my pain. There might be some unspoken remorse.

Metaphors

I remember a time when I wrote and he replied. I wrote to him during his work hours, delivering news of triggers and associations as if he were still here: reports of the fridge door having fallen off its hinges and a photo of "breadcake", a piece of white bread with some candles impaled in it. He wouldn't reply as often as he used to, but he would claim that he sent messages that I never received. When I did receive a reply, he was polite but distant, half-heartedly entertaining my stupid stories about a life which could only really be described as Fawlty Towers meets The Young Ones. I knew that he hated it here and I knew he would never return after he left.

I mourned his physical and emotional absence. His replies lacked the kind of warmth and personal interest I had grown accustomed to. I dreamt up this metaphor of being partially submerged in a raging river. I would cling onto a rock to save myself from being carried away in the torrent. He was like that rock, inadvertently shaped like a handle, not purposefully doing anything to encourage me to hold on, but still providing a means for me to cling and hope. The river represented other hostel encounters and the existence of other possibilities that I purposefully avoided. I held my head above water, still feeling that pressure to accept his choice, to let go and move on.

I dwelled on that scene, describing it to Don, a short-term guest who had the tendency to veer our every conversation into the realms of intense romantic trauma. Don had the noble intention to keep our conversation light, but we were genuinely incapable of small talk and so he still found himself there with me at reception, extolling brutal therapy til the early hours of the morning. I'll never forget how he described what was happening to me, he said it was akin to a kind of haemorrhage: "You are used to having this daily exchange and now it's like you are losing your life force. You are bleeding everywhere. You are getting nothing back anymore..."

To anybody who had any kind of distance from the situation, the sudden and complete lack of responsiveness was to be expected. I could never really accept it, however, relying upon prior assurances that we would always have access to one another. He would always respond to me. In light of that, we had always discussed concepts like legacy and consequence, perhaps as a subconscious attempt to help me manage those future triggers and associations that would plague me. I'm now left to consider the veracity of all these grandiose assurances and I don't know how to reconcile any of it: "I won't be able to listen to music without thinking of you..."

Notebooks need to be filled. Essays, songs and unsent letters need to be written. It will eventually manifest in kindness, clarity and indifference. Most importantly, I have to continuously remind myself that although there might be silence, but the dialogue which I share with Missy Laur provides the kind of space and patience necessary to wring out any plague. It was surreal to have her sit across from me in receptipm, as so many others had done before. I described Don's vivid metaphor to her. I added that her insight had always managed to make me feel so alive, so together. I felt so gratified that she knew it too: "Of course! I am your dialysis machine."

BFF

It's a phrase that's haunted me for some time: "But you were the best friend that I ever had..." It was one of the more sincere moments in a teary goodbye, where the motives for his invariable return to her remained unclear. I felt for him in that moment, because I realised that in spite of all that he had won, he would suffer a significant loss too. Our discussions about Brazilian garage music, 1980s Garfield cartoons and parental hoarding were these static artefacts now, to be wiped with the passage of time. For that reason, I did my best to record what I could, in the hopes that despite the silence, I would honour and preserve a connection that, for historical purposes, never existed.

I have been contemplating what it means to lose a male best friend, since I have recently had to endure the departure of a long-term guest at the hostel. It was a departure that we both anticipated, but I could never adequately prepare myself for the loss of that connection. It lasted ten months and during that time, I felt desperately gratified when he arrived each Sunday night for another week. We were always thrilled to reconvene, as we were forever poised to share twangy songs over our respective pints of milk. We were looking up opalised inlays on guitar frets when I first acknowledged how hard it would be to lose him: "Who else would possibly do this with me?" In spite of all of the months of emotional preparation, I knew that I would grieve badly (and he probably wouldn't...).

In any loss of a male best friend, I mourn for the conversations we could have shared, but more than anything, I miss the musical analysis. I never lose their taste and my mind is calibrated to identify every song that would have resonated with them. Such associations bombard me and depending on the situation, I rarely share such recommendations, interring such ideas into an imaginary vault. I used to reach out with such recommendations and my greatest ever loss used to do the same, when he would send me a link to a new Smiths boxset or a photograph of handcrafted Totoro profiteroles. I refrained from reaching out to him after a great many years, finally realising that when he told me anything about his life, it made me hysterical with grief. I never came to terms with the idea that these were the lives we had committed to.

I now wait for text messages from my hostel best friend, forever reconciling his stories that most of his text messages never get through due to a network fault. The messages that do arrive are cold, sparse and undetailed. He is busy. He is always busy. These messages never acknowledge any of the plans we dreamt up, going to the Grant Museum or Crystal Palace. Yet I still believe receiving a text will fill me and I wait for it like a drug addict vying for their next hit. I am heartbroken when the drug is heavily diluted with undistilled water. I look for signs of memory, I look for signs of a regard, but like before, I instinctively know that I have been wiped.

I am less inclined to contemplate the loss of a female best friend. I recall the severity of the pain I felt, when my primary school best friend of seven years no longer wanted to have anything to do with me. I grieved when my high school best friend closed off from me, devoting the sum of her energy to her first boyfriend. I struggled when my university best friend wrote a list of all the things she hated about me on her LiveJournal, effectively starting a discussion group with various contributors who all felt the same way. The source of the grief comes from the suggestion that female friends are designed to outlast their male counterparts, by virtue of the fact that a romantic relationship is a contract where feelings must rescind upon expiration of the term.

I feel more disappointed in the loss of those female friends, but I feel less inclined to honour the dimensions of that grief. There is no complexity in their dishonour, there is never any confusion in the sense that a choice needs to be made. I just have been left to decode the distance, forever always convincing myself that the weary excuses to reschedule are merely coincidental matters. I am still sore about the most recent loss and I often recall being locked out, sitting and crying on my front doorstep in the early hours of the evening. My mobile glowed hot on the side of my face as she admitted that she had been deliberately distant. Her guilt manifested itself when she looked across her bedroom and saw all the gifts I had bought for her. She said it reminded her of how much I knew her and how much I loved her.

When I asked why she became distant, she said she resented the fact that I didn't move to London to pursue my dreams. It was a slash across my gut: all those hours you spoke freely, you were actually being judged. I have never managed to adequately express how much it broke my heart but I live with the disappointment and irony of it each day that I am here. She promised to love and restore the friendship, to cultivate it back to its former glory. It's just the same as it ever was, really. The vagueness and the silence, her oblique tweets that I don't understand. I never reach out, I never ask why. I will do nothing to fix this thing she destroyed.

I sit with my friends now in the warm shade of Russell Square. We take photos of each other and say absurd, misheard things that rarely make sense. I say: "You will think of me when we are no longer friends, when you see those big fuffed up pigeons aggressively pursuing those lady pigeons..." My new male best friend is incensed: "How can you say that? That's a horrible thing to say..." But it seems like no amount of love can ever make up for the inevitability of loss. It might happen in the silence, it might happen in their limp regard, but you will feel it in any case... and you will long for that time when they cared.

Cyrillic

The days pass quickly when I listen to Кино́. I listen to songs repeatedly, carefully attempting to familiarise myself with Viktor Tsoi's growling Russian diphthongs. I get caught up in those prickly guitar lines and those melodic hooks which seem to always centre upon a B minor arpeggio. The production is shabby, the sound inexplicably panning from one speaker to another. There are noticeable mistakes, wrong notes and poor timing, but with each repeated listen I seem to love it more and more. I don't think of the mistakes, I think of other things. I think about Tsoi. I think about Leningrad in 1984. I think about a place where I can be alone.

I present Кино́ to others, but it is purely out of naive habit. I never seriously expect to get a glowing response, a requited sense of awe when I send over Последний Герой or Красно-желтые Дни. It never particularly disappoints me to hear their dismissal, but it only serves to reinforce the isolation in this practice. It's the same as my beloved night time isolation, that time when hours were vague and my existence was entirely unaccountable. Back then, I didn't care about what anyone else thought, but now, it's different. Approval culture is everywhere. From Likes to Followers, boyfriends and jobs, during the day, it's impossible to escape that desire to demonstrate personal value.

I listen to Восьмиклассница and I think of those ridiculous attempts to impress others during adolescence: You say you got a C in Geography and I don't give a damn, You tell me somebody got bruised over you, I say nothing and we walk on... It forces me to recall a time when I naively presumed that my elderly crush would be impressed with my happenings. It's all so laughable in retrospect, because such mindless gloating only really highlighted how young I was (and how inappropriate it was to be even interacting in such a way). I'm sure my news couldn't have impressed him, but then he allowed me to operate under this impression that I was ultimately worth something.

Now, I present to others, I present without thinking. I present without any genuine desire to connect. Yet I cannot help but get consumed by the purported regard of others. I am continuously preparing for that possibility that fondness could morph into annoyance, in much the same way love invariably morphs into indifference. Such thoughts leave me feeling so tired and wretched that nothing, not creative success, not tens of thousands of Likes, not even the assurance of family and friends can ever make me feel truly "liked". I cannot stop, so I try to make the days pass quickly, I listen to lots and lots of Кино́. I try to escape to a place where I cannot be found.

Rippers

I don't understand how, but I felt my feet bleed tonight. It was a sensation I am familiar with, the sting of a raw heel, the mesh of school tights stuck fast. But I haven't touched my feet in days, I promised myself I wouldn't. I convinced myself I could.

The truth is I really don't care to stop, I really don't want to. I'm comforted when I pick, rip and cut my feet. It isn't particularly painful, not like it was when I was much younger. I'd whince and hobble as I'd walk, but I would never say why. They knew why I'd walk like that and I knew I deserved no sympathy.

I'm unclear when the habit even started Maybe I was 12 or 13 or maybe even 11? I started ripping my toenails and over the course of many years, I lost my nails in their entirety. They don't even grow now, but I could hardly care less. I paint nail polish over the barren, uneven skin and no one seems to care.

It's neat to think up some super compelling, wildly cohesive explanation as to why I do this to myself. I could be destroying my feet in an attempt to attain a kind of smoothness, an unattainable raw perfection that could be confused with normality. Yeah. Whatever. Why should it matter? Why should I stop? Why should you care, anyway?

I will try for the week though, as I've promised myself that I'd refrain from this and other bad habits: excessive sleep, painful photographs, Mint Slices and Google Analytics. I'm not convinced that any of it will help with very much, but I'm willing to see what it might feel like to heal a little bit... if only it is for a few days.

Pennies

It was a bizarre ritual I had devised some years before. Often, while waiting to get into a club, I'd hand over one of the pennies that lined my rucksack. It seemed to be overflowing with pennies since my 2005 English adventure and although it was never a big deal to hand one over, I'd closely examine how they'd react. Some would be confused, unable to understand why I would hand over something so fiscally worthless. Others, namely the important one, the one who ruined me, seemed to get it. I was bemused to see him closely examining the brass coin, grinning. He would soon boast proudly that he affixed the penny to his wall in order to hold up a poster of Johnny Marr. He would later attempt to return the penny to me, at the end of one of our many epic break ups. I was just about to get out of his car when he slipped the penny into my hand and I wanted to die.

I had never really felt the need to articulate the consequence of the penny, especially since it had been so long since my rucksack had been lined with them. I found myself talking about it with you, for some reason. I had only just met you for the first time a few days before, but we felt content and comfortable enough to talk for hours and hours at Sousou. Even then, you marvelled at how alike we were, often proclaiming that we were separated at birth. I remember your retelling of G. K. Chesterton's short story, What I Found In My Pocket and I can only assume that it inspired me to tell you about the ritual I once practised. I came up with some very vague analysis, suggesting that it was a kind of innocuous test, something to do with the heart. I wanted to see how they would treat something with so little value.


Months later, we met upstairs at Bimbo's and you proudly boasted that you had a present for me. It was a book wrapped in crinkled and faded Florentia paper, allegedly found in an abandoned cupboard. I was thrilled to find it was an alarmingly new-looking copy of Anthony Thornton's Libertines book that you allegedly found in an op shop. More poignantly, you had attached a 10p coin to the back cover with masking tape. We never really spoke about what it all meant, in fact it was probably the first time that we had ever stopped talking for more than a few moments. I suppose when I think about it now, it was the first time that I ever felt like I was on the back foot. Where I had assumed that I was always in the position of the sincere and vulnerable, I was being asked if I was for real.

As it stands, I'm unsure whether I'd ever want to voluntarily hand over trust like a worthless penny. I once thought I was impervious to harm, after the damage sustained from the important one. I imagined I had perfected an almost undetectable level of detachment and that's the reason why I stopped myself from practising this ritual. I never trusted you with a penny, as such, but I made the mistake of handing over more trust than I ever would have consciously permitted. If only I had been smarter, if only I had been more stealthy, if only I had been more sensible, I would have known. I would have known not to bother.

The Hypocritical Headband

Missy Laur and I would often preface advice with the expression, "please excuse the hypocritical headband". It was a reference to the large 1960s headbands I used to wear. Like the headband, the hypocrisy of the scenario was so dramatic that it could never be avoided and instead of being sensible and attempting to take our own advice, we would use the hypocritical headband as a mechanism to deliver lectures, guidance and comfort.

We wore the headband in good faith, we did. We were deathly aware of our mutual propensity to obsess, in spite of our reassurances that there would come a time when we wouldn't. She told me repeatedly that things would get better and after a very long time, they actually did. I would reassure others too, sitting across from dear friends at Sousou. I would tell them that no matter how painful it is now, everything will eventually numb out in time.

Those reassurances now seem so wildly insincere, so desperately hypocritical. I can't believe I ever forgot how painful it could be, but then I find it hard to believe I ever managed to endure it all before. I know on some fundamental level that it will be their words, the words of Missy Laur and Louise Sucre that will ultimately cure me. I have no idea what words could make for any immediate cure but I will try and listen. I will try and get better.

Scissors

My hair was short when we were last friends. It was so short that the hairdresser had to shave the back of my head to mend the botchjob I had done to myself, one night when I had been left alone with the scissors.

It was a chic style, a 1920s bob, not unlike Louise Brooks or Edita Vilkevičiūtė as Chanel for Lagerfield. It was the closest I could ever get to shaving my head, the true cultural signifier of being hopelessly depressed.


As I was complimented for the boldness of the cut by strangers at parties, I could only think: "You don't know..." When I left his Jolimont apartment at 4 o'clock in the morning, I could only think: "You don't want to know..."

My dark hair now reaches far, far down my back, in thick cascades of incidental waves. I describe its length as cinematic and I revel in how it somehow illustrates that time has passed and things have changed.

But when he glances at me vacantly, with his new frames and unfamiliar beard, I know nothing of what he thinks. To ease the threat of self-reproach, I imagine he is looking at my hair.

I imagine he is looking, not only to survey its excessive length, but to recall its similarity to a style I once had. The style I had when we would hang out together and laugh endlessly... and I would actually be happy.