Sentimentalists

I often contemplate the irony of how a sentimentalist could exist in a hostel, a place where you are expected to connect and let go each day. I've always struggled to effectively manage the memories of those I've lost, but now I live in the wake of hundreds of such losses. The memories of departing guests and colleagues attach themselves to the physicality of this place, these rooms where memories are being written over each other, again and again.

The sentimentalists of the hostel fantasise about old guests returning. It happened to a colleague a few weeks ago as he dragged me to the reception computer and pointed at the screen: "She's coming, she's actually coming!" You felt and knew that relief in his cry could only be the result of months of pining and daydreaming. It's a sentiment that I could closely identify with, but I have to remind myself that the guest that I Iong for will never return, as much as I yearn for it endlessly.

One such guest returned. Not for me, not for anyone, specifically. He lived with us last winter and his hostel lover was once my colleague. She has long since left. As I sat at reception, I watched him look at the details of the corridor, the doorframes and the window sills. His reminiscence was largely silent. "Les fantômes restent ici..." I remarked. He didn't appear to be pained by it at all. He headed out with the new staff, unperturbed, dancing and drinking and then staggering back home to tell me all about it.

Others have returned. You take them in a sweeping hug and you asked them about life on the outside. Those who remain in London describe dodgy landlords and a leaking roof, mould and damp and flat mates from hell. Those who stay for a few hours tend to get sad at the changes, the unfamiliar staff and the rearranged furniture. Those who return and actually stay get easily entrenched in the microdynamics of the group. There are crushes and hookups and tensions that exist and disintegrate and the rest of the world falls away somehow.

When they leave, some say they will visit. Some say they will be in touch but it is never like it is when you simply exist together, living and talking and loving and laughing for hours upon hours each day. I write down the quotes that make me cackle maniacally, almost developing a moment by moment sense of sentimentality. We squeal at each other when we enter the room, scooping each other up, dazzled by this sense of gratitude that we actually exist together in this space and time.

When I long for him to be here, I have to remind myself: "He could have been here if he'd wanted to be..." It's a sentence that really touches upon what it means to be present with a person, to sit and to live and breathe with them without guilt or distraction. You can lose a life, squandering your love and energy on somebody who decided to be present with someone else. The challenge is to solely devote yourself to those who choose to be with you now, to reconcile yourself with the risk that despite your love, one day, you might lose them too.

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."

Lacrimosa

The proposition read as a perverse challenge to me: Sad music might actually evoke positive emotions, reveals a new study by Japanese researchers... The summary suggested that there is an odd ambivalence that comes from listening to sad music, suggesting that pleasant feelings derive from sad music because that it does not pose a real threat to personal safety. It was a vague proposition with little scientific certainty in its brief citation. In any case, I decided that I wanted to conduct my own uncontrolled study using myself, an old unfinished C60 cassette and the tape deck in my Volvo.

I tested the theory during a familiar late night drive, when time was indistinct and the streets were empty. I pushed in the tape and pressed rewind. The tape whirred, eventually clicking to start. The plane trees bowed ruefully over Orrong Road, the heavy branches clouded the flossy glow of the passing street lights. I was convinced that I could handle whatever associations it threw at me and I did. I remained stoic throughout the aggressive jangly semiquavers of Fonz. I felt fine through the scarcely discernible French ramblorings of Still Fond. Each lyrical proclamation left me unperturbed: One day, we're gonna live in Paris, I promise...

It was sad, but not in the Lacrimosa sense of the word. It was sad in that everything from its sequence to its sentiments felt so familiar to me, in spite of the fact that it had been so long since I'd listened to it. It felt like living: speeding through the darkness, being bombarded with scarcely-forgotten reminders, always battling to shut up.

Now homeward bound, the last song came on near where I spotted a Toorak fox, some nights before. I was bemused, having momentarily forgotten the song's inclusion on the tape. It was a lo-fi home-made demo with acoustic guitar and loud female backing vocals. I recalled its lyrics and sang along in a plaintive masochistic style, Why don't you call me? As the song went on to describe the devastating possibility of his crush running out of phone credit, I had to smile and acknowledge how dated and painful it all was. As much as I tried to guard the ongoing legacy of this thing, there was always the risk I'd trip over something like that. I'd come across a horrible reminder of how this is life, as it worked out.

I'll admit, I had some doubts about this scientific proposition. For one thing, I don't necessarily believe that music can be divided into the happy and the sad. There are associations, meanings and intentions, always contained and largely untapped. For me, both music and living is all about legacy management. I try to organise memories in the knowledge that time will never make the painful, painless. I appreciate that one point that study did make though: that music, like memory, poses no immediate threat to us in the present moment. Despite my initial reluctance to reacquaint myself with his songs, I will always be protected due to the nature of the past and its complete irrelevance. I am comforted in the idea that I'm strong enough to return as an unmoved silent tourist. I am safe, I will always be safe, so long as I am alone at some indistinct hour.

Locks

I cannot help but think that my tendency to mourn for conversations developed when I first started writing a diary. I was nine and it was around this time that my best friend left the country and I'd secretly write about how much I missed her and our conversations. She would write me letters with fat wads of pages, telling me about her new life in Texas. With her broad, bombastic print (with large circles over her i's), she'd always complain that I never wrote to her enough. It was true, she was always more vigilant with her letter-writing. However, when I was alone, I thought about the things we had talked about and the things we could have talked about, if only she had been here.

No one really understood the value I placed on that communication. I tried to explain it, that desire I had just to walk around the school oval and talk endlessly about everything and anything, but it didn't make sense in that era of four square and kiss chasey. I thought I was doomed to be the serious misfit until I saw her re-appear in the door way of our class room: She was back! With an American accent! I was thrilled and I shrieked, reacting in a way that again seemed disproportionate and inappropriate but I didn't really care what anyone else thought. I figured things would get back to the way they were, but for whatever reason, it just wasn't the same.

I guess she didn't really care anymore.

I feel that in my heart, I've harboured that same desire to walk around that oval for nearly two decades, laughing and shrieking and carrying on. I had never really thought about the significance of that desire until I acknowledged the sheer amount of time I spent alone: thinking, writing diaries and practising musical instruments. When I was ten, my parents finally took some preventative action, installing brass door locks for my room and the study. The lock to my room is now worn, badly scratched and dinted, from my brother's repeated attempts to break in with a screw driver. To me, those locks are worth more than anything in this whole house.

I had always advertised the abuse, unashamedly. I presented the facts, never considering how anyone else felt. I never understood my friends' stuttering speechlessness. I never understood my parents' desperate willingness to protect his reputation. I never understood my teachers' desire to delegate any kind of investigation. I presented everything, hoping this mythical conversation would come to pass. I never knew what I wanted anyone to say exactly, but I was so disappointed by their failure to say anything, to do anything. I was so disappointed by that suggestion that just hearing about it was so fucking hard.

I was twenty when it finally happened. I heard what I wanted to hear, after hours of sitting in my then-boyfriend's car outside my house. He had intended to leave many times over the course of those few hours, turning on the engine and nudging forward in two metre increments towards his 40km journey home. We had this habit of talking all night, we shared this same breed of passion, wit and musical taste. I loved him in a way that I knew I would never love anyone else more. He'll continue to own that part of me, in the same way he owns this particular time of the morning, where the world is shrouded in a momentary hue of slate grey. It's that time of day he always fled.

What he said was quite incidental to a break up which, in that instance, didn't take: "Whatever it is, wherever you are, whatever happens to us, call me and I'll save you." I cried hard (partly in relief, but mostly in irony). My yearning to connect hinged on that one idea, that I was worthy of protection. It's kind of stunning that someone like him could have stumbled upon that jackpot sentiment, but then perhaps that just adds to the mythic nature of it all. Thankfully, I never did call him under such circumstances. We do get in touch extremely infrequently though, with whimsical recommendations such as a themed-Tumblr of Morrissey posing with cats. It can't go much deeper than that because any actual detail of his life tends to make me go hysterical.

Today, I am happy and grateful. The vast majority of my conversations are full of revelation or hilarity. I spend my time with the most wonderful, kind and loving friends. I adore my family, who are among the funniest and most intelligent people I know. I haven't seen or spoken to my abusive brother in over three years. I don't intend to see him again. I don't think I would have been able to convince that lonely nine year old that it would ever be this good. Saying that, I still harbour that tendency to mourn for those conversations. There are so many people I wish I could talk to. I think about it constantly, remembering expressions like: "It makes me angry to think he was so careless with your heart." I wonder if I could have made it up. I wonder how much of that love ever existed outside of me.

gab on deviantart

Inventions

It was a cold brisk night and Noreen and I had just walked past the cemetery. She said: "Just because they don't write essays about it doesn't mean they don't care. It doesn't mean that they don't remember everything..." I could only laugh a little, what with my wheezing and shortness of breath. I responded quite flippantly in that trade mark sardonic tone. "What are you talking about, no one remembers anything! I'd be an idiot to convince myself otherwise."

I don't know when I started believing this, but at some point, I thought that comfort comes from invention. It comes from that ability to convince yourself that they do care or they do remember or they do regret. There's always that scope to do that, if you spend enough time alone with your thoughts. In the silence, you can construct an alternative reality, one that need not be true necessarily, but one that is not quite so painful to live with on a day-by-day basis.

Lately, I've been sceptical of this practice. That's not to say I don't think it's worthwhile, I believe it encourages the imagination to provide solace at a time when it is so inclined to do quite the opposite. Saying that, I've started to resent the idea of measuring requitedness. Trying to figure out what they think, what they feel. You can stand in front of a person and they can insist that they love you and you can insist that you love them, but ultimately, it means nothing if they go on to remorselessly squash your heart.

Are those moments meaningless? Are they void of sincerity if you can't reconcile words with actions? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps I've had too many conversations to know how easy it is for other people to shelve such incidents in the mind. They don't need to invent imaginary regret or regard, they just distract themselves and move on. There's no desire to glorify passing moments or conversations, they don't even need to wonder if I care because I advertise that I do, in the most vulgar way imaginable. I advertise that I care on here.

I've been experimenting with damnatio memoriae, the Roman practice of completely wiping out a person's image and memory. It's just like carrying on as if that person never existed. It's strange and it's powerful and it's completely at odds with who I am. Yet, I've taken to it, not because it is easy to do, but because it is much easier than having to understand why. No comfort can be derived from that old practice of invention, there's no way to imagine their care or regret because it is impossible. It just doesn't make any sense.

The irony of all this is that I've started to see value in the meanings I create. I've started to see beauty in my own inventions. What they think is almost irrelevant at this point, I create consequence. I will always create consequence. I love how empowering that notion is, how it is not at all reliant upon detecting any semblance of truth or sincerity. It's all about establishing a kind of ownership: it's not meaningful because they care, it's meaningful because I care... and I express it all in a way that other people might care too.

Viktor Tsoi in Igla: get stabbed, light cigarette, walk away...

Disorientation

I remember that moment of vague consciousness, when our bus steadily wound round the steep cliffs of Como. It was night and I could no longer see the lake or the mountains, only darkness and distant pin-pricks of light. We weren't saying anything to each other, we were just listening to random selections from the folder, Italo Disco.

I put on Lost in the Night by Costas Charitodiplomenos. I had been singing it constantly in Milan, especially, much like I had sung Roxette's Fading Like a Flower in Stockholm. He would never tell me to shut up, in fact he'd often join in, perhaps in an attempt to create some future musical association.

In spite of my singing its lyrics over and over, I had never paused to consider its poetics: lost in the night, walking alone, lost in the night, left on my own, lost in the night, looking for love, lost in the night, drifting I'm looking for your love...

All of a sudden, I became inexplicably captivated by the tragedy of Lost in the Night. I fell in love with the idea of wandering through a city's back streets, disorientated by grief. There was something beautiful about his desperate and relentless imaginings, hearing her voice, seeking her ghost.

I would soon drift off, but I would later revisit those lyrics, again and again. I doubt I can ever faithfully identify why I am so drawn to it, especially since it had taken so long to develop that personal resonance. It somehow means more now.

He is condemned, forever haunted. Never to find his way back.

Witty

Sentences

I once realised that you only need a sentence to survive. A succinct statement of the sadness and brutality, enough to push you forth into rational thought. It would always take several notebooks to work out its construction and strangely enough, I would always forget the exact articulation upon later reflection.

It's come far sooner than I ever thought it would. I didn't need to write reams of pages to work out the sentence I must live out, I managed to exhaust every word in excessive thought. It makes me idle with nauseousness: he convinced you of my meaninglessness, like he convinced me of your meaninglessness.

I think of it purposefully and wait for the arrival of indifference. It was meant to come much sooner than this.

Jiving at the Long Bar by Kevin Lear

Absolution

He would turn to me for absolution. He would email from internet cafés and text as soon as they'd get off stage. He would confess every debauched antic, temptation in Leeds, lust in Edinburgh. He admitted everything, even his fears that he would cheat on his girlfriend and ultimately transform into the rock star cliché he most vehemently detested.

I was in the studio when I received his text. He had just landed in London: "I'm in love and everything's totally seismic. I haven't told anyone else, I don't know what to do..." He was always terribly dramatic, but even then I wasn't aware of the gravity of the situation. I didn't respond with comfort, as I had done in the past, I responded with anger. He had never told me about her.

He largely withdrew from contact, knowing of my disapproval. He'd sometimes call when he got really desperate. He bemoaned endlessly about the implausibility of the affair, she lived in New York City with her husband and he lived in London with his girlfriend. I let him talk for as long as he needed to, but I still felt his detachment increase. When I suggested we meet in London, he said, "I'll only see you if it means more to me than it would to you."

Needless to say, we never met.

He messaged me to say that it was happening. She was to come over for the week. The affair was to start. My jealousy resulted in a long week of silence. His band had their first appearance on Jools Holland that Friday and on Sunday, they filmed a promo clip, wandering through high-rise commission flats. He looked weak and sallow, tired and despondent. I always felt like I knew why.

I received my last email from him when I was in Hull, explaining that I would never hear from him again. They were together at last and it was time to grow up, it was time to stop knocking about like a child and giving bits of himself to lots of different people. I grieved as I saw him perform, only metres away from me. He never would have recognised me.

He never bothered to know who I was.

Disappointed Love by Francis Danby

Aperture

It was one Wednesday morning in London town, when Sharron and I were sipping rose lemonade in a vintage camera coffee house. We took photographs of old cameras with new cameras and I took a photograph of myself (or "a naked selfie", as Andrew would call it). My complexion was pallid, my eyelids smeared with Kohl, my overgrown fringe slightly parted. The fatigue is clear, the resignation obvious, the grief apparent.

I didn't delete that photograph, as I should have. It didn't go with the rest of the online travel propaganda, all those check-ins and photographs which would suggest endless days of fun-filled adventure. Then again, perhaps that's why I kept it. Inasmuch as the photograph reveals something grim and truthful, I know its meaning will transform itself in time. One day, I'll look and I won't see his damage. I'll look and I'll see something else.

Thorns

I wish I hadn't been so aware of every moment, falling away, but you couldn't stop checking your phone. She was coming to get you and she was due at any moment. I was not in a place to say anything, I had neither your time or attention. What could I have said? You promised me this wouldn't happen, you promised me you wouldn't go back to her?

I accidentally touched the rough edge of the table with my right hand and I got a splinter in the side of my middle finger. You examined my hand closely and tried to squeeze out the tiny wooden shard. You couldn't and you didn't but for that moment, you weren't checking your phone, you weren't writing frantic text messages. You weren't even attributing all of this to my temper.

For just a second, you tried to get rid of my pain.

Interpretations

My days are filled with silence. It's strange, because on some level, they're filled with lyrics and conversation. They're filled with ink stains and cursive print. I deal with this silence constantly, but I never seem to cope with it adequately enough.

I fill the silence with irrational thought, mantras I know to be untrue. I think of the silence and its meanings and motivations. I pair everything up with a brutal explanation and a debilitating scenario. I imagine it will make me stronger.

I long for your voice, but I know it will be hollow and devoid of warmth. I hope that tomorrow I can convince myself of some kind of fundamental untruth. I hope I can convince myself that the silence ain't half bad.

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.

Serenades

While channel surfing last night, I came across the soul singer, Trey Songz performing an unplugged session to an intimate MTV audience. It surprised me to witness the heartfelt enthusiasm of his fans, the camera even managed to catch one girl wiping a tear away from her cheek. It was not long until Trey held out his hand to a young girl in the front row and led her to a barstool onstage. He traced his fingers across her back and kissed her forehead seductively: "Can I sing to you? Can I sing to her?" He encircled her as the introductory chords of Kings of Leon's Use Somebody rang out. He leaned in close to her, caressing her cheek and touching her hair, inching closer to her trembling lips. I watched, absolutely agape.

It could well have represented a lyrical manifestation of the song itself. This nameless girl with the long black hair and yellow top could have been the somebody Trey was referring to. After all, the song did not necessarily suggest that you had to know a person before you could use them. More than that, this demonstration played up that incredibly potent adolescent fantasy of the female fan kissing her musical idol. It was suggested that they would kiss, in the manner he held up her chin and gently pressed the tip of his nose to hers. In spite of her embarrassment, it was apparent that she so desperately wanted this dream to be realised. However, the promised kiss was left unshared. As the song ended, Trey asked her name and led her back to her seat in the front row.

In an interview immediately following the clip, Trey described an instance where he did actually kiss that one lucky girl, that one random fan pulled from the audience. It was in Los Angeles and Trey's drummer insisted that he needed more, whatever that means. He spoke of his routine coyly. There was this unspoken acknowledgement that it was very much a performance, a fantasy. While he managed to claim responsibility for the manner in which he exploited his sexual appeal in live performances, I couldn't help but feel a bit dirty about the whole encounter. It forced me to recall similar routines of rock and roll intimacy: a highly energetic girl leaping onto Morrissey, throwing her legs around his waist; Bruce Springteen inviting Courtney Cox on stage to dance; Bono leaping over barricades at Live Aid, rushing to embrace a crying fan.

Yet, in spite of Trey's admission, I still find myself reflecting upon the effect of that performance. How its appeal is grounded within the promise of an impossible interaction, the chance that in a sea of tens of thousands of fans, he could see something in me. In spite of the sensual nature of its choreography, I cannot help but think of it as a relatively non-confrontational gesture in the eyes of the sexually inexperienced adolescent female. It is almost as if the kiss were at the absolute periphery of physical interaction. On a subconscious level, she would neither be affronted with the fear, pressure or gravity of actually having sex. It would just be a moment of pure cinematic romance, the last few seconds of a film before it fades to black. Despite every aspect of its contrived choreography, every empty glance, every insincere touch, I cannot help but think: "My god, I would have died."

"Even if you changed everything, he would still recognise your chin..."

I recently went on a cybercrawl in search of matters to write about. I seemed to recall an article on a blog that discussed notions of femininity at length, particularly in respect of the appeal of the tiny waistline. I could scarcely recall the name of the blog, nor any coherent search terms associated with the post. But I did recall that the lady blogger featured a brilliant picture of Ceci n'est um pas pas, dbroon's brilliant reworking of Ceci n'est pas une pipe. By some interweb miracle, I found it. Gatochy's Blog. I don't think I have even found the original article yet, I am too mesmerized by the vast collection of pretty vintage illustrations, not to mention the varied and many posts that touch upon matters of taste, style and beauty, posed in a way that I had never really considered before.


Illustration by Almanaque Bertrand, circa 1934. Children on leashes, loveit.
Perhaps the most fascinating discovery of my cybercrawl was Mariana's reflections upon female gender-bending. Slightly subversive you would think, perhaps. But she managed to identify another reason why a woman would feel the need to adopt traditionally "masculine" characteristics. I thought it had nothing to do with me, but then I read the article.

I think people tend to see this kind of gender-bending playfulness as a PC wink to trans culture. [...] But I believe in some instances it may be not so much a men-hating based rejection of femininity, as an expression of feminine desire from a woman who is disappointed in herself.

[...]

The logic may be something along these lines: "I'll never get boys to notice me as a girl, because I can't compete with other women's feminine charms. The more feminine I try to be, the more I'll just be drawing attention to how lacking in the feminine department I truly am, like a monkey wearing makeup. Instead of trying in vain to emulate the kind of women I find attractive, I'll don the accoutrements of the kind of boys I find attractive. Wearing their skin feels more comfortable than wearing my own, and it puts my mind off the kind of women who only remind me of how unattractive I am in comparison.

I can't have my dream lover, but wearing his 'skin' is like incorporating him into my persona, grabbing possession of him. I'll be as close to him as it's likely I'll ever be. And who knows, maybe such a man may one day see me and interpret my 'look' as a message that I am from his 'tribe', that we are two of a feather, and he'll approach me, and say 'You are just like me, we belong with one another'."


Freddie Mercury by Mick Rock
Perhaps I'm terribly impressionable, but the first time I read that, I couldn't help but acknowledge that Mariana had described me with an eerie degree of accuracy. I don't consider myself a gender-bender, by any means. But long ago, I adopted all the stylistic hallmarks of a lover, who, for all intents and purposes, ruined me. Every misdeed and mistreatment has become ever so slightly blurred with the passing of time, but his uniform has influenced my personal style immeasurably. Everyone who knows me would recognise the boyish aesthetic: navy blue Bonds tshirt, black drainpipe jeans with a white belt, black leather boots and maybe even aviators, if I'm sitting in the sunshine. I wiped out any trace of femininity in my own personal iconography, simply because it's not what I perceive to be attractive. I never had the confidence to wear misshapen mustard-coloured vintage dresses made out of curtain material. It was his uniform that was attractive to me, because it was sexy and understated... and it somehow denoted the existence of a musical kindred spirit. The existence of someone who cares too much about that so-called "indie" musical subculture we've all sold our souls to.

In recent times, I have taken to wearing dresses and A-line skirts. They're usually hidden under trench coats, as I am too embarrassed to show my chest, hips, waist and/or arms. I am happier and more comfortable hiding in the cloak of the past, in the uniform of someone else. I have no doubts that such a stylistic appropriation is unhealthy, I would be the first to tell you that. I would also be the first to acknowledge my poor attitude and details of my self-loathing tendencies. No doubt it'd be packaged nicely, either in a leather bound journal or a PDF document. But, hell. I'm working on it. I'm working on seeing beyond the drainpipes and aviators and being happier and less hateful. I'm working upon developing something of my own, that doesn't embody the hateful figures of my past, but a hopeful representation of the person I want to become.