Scenarios

Arguably, the most exhilarating hangover from adolescence is Christmas Eve. Namely, the appearance of TAFKATC at Christmas Eve. He'd call my mother's best friend to say he was coming round for dinner and every even-numbered year, I would actually manage to see him and it would be the greatest thing, ever.

I would swoon quite visibly. I would blush quite consciously. Due to the infrequency of our encounters, I would stockpile musical anecdotes throughout the year for the Christmas Eve unwrapping. I had all year to imagine his responses to my stories, but my imaginings had the tendency to be fanciful and inaccurate.

There are things you'd always predict, the low-light and the panettone, the delicate glassware and the lengthy glances. There would always be a flirtatious wit and ambiguous regard. What I couldn't predict was his actual character, quite distinct from my whimsical daydream of a musical obsessive.

I know there's no need to wait for that one night to gush about music. Not any more, at least. Yet, he will always command an impossibly high level of consequence. In spite of my claims that his appeal exists solely in an imagining, his presence manages to indulge that perennial suspicion that something once existed... and it was real.

Aversions

The writing amnesty has come as a surprise. I figured I'd always write, whether it'd take the form of morning pages, essays, scripts, emails, tweets or text messages. Lately, I've refrained from words, from inkstained hands and repetitious thoughts. The amnesty has come as a surprise, because I had always believed that to write was to feel normal. Even the most meaningless, mindless, pointless thoughts - get it down and you will siphon your heart.

I daydream a lot, I nightwalk a lot, I process very little. My existence is vague but I never seem to shake that tyrannical sense of obligation, that feeling like I should be getting it all down. I should be committing to my past and my present, I should be writing to connect, to make sense of the love and the loss. I try to convince myself that the writing amnesty is some perverse therapy, that the undefined will obscure the grief.

I'll have to start again somehow, but I'm not exactly sure when it will happen. I'm still convinced that to write is to feel normal, but I'm not inclined to rush back to that sense of normality. I'll keep dwelling upon the reconstructive power of creative inaction. I would never recommend it to anyone, but I'll think of its function, during those daydreams and nightwalks. I'll marvel at how it can be so easy and so difficult, all at the same time.

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

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.

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

Handlers

I had hoped not to attract any attention. I skirted the trestle table and I watched him concentrate on examining records and patting turntables. He was my first boyfriend and he had broken my heart six months prior, when he sat on my bed and said he didn't miss me when I wasn't around. I grieved and recovered. With glazed eyes, I looked on blankly, recalling his insistence that one couldn't just learn how to mix beats.

He suddenly swept up beside me, leaving his decks unattended. "Can I talk to you?" I shrugged and he pulled my hand towards the dilapidated back stairs. We sat close together and he smelt of cloves, still. Dizzy, I paid little attention to his apology, ignoring the questionable levels of sincerity. I flipped my hand dismissively and reassured him that it was fine and I was fine and it was really all nothing.

I'm unsure whether it was the dismissive reassurances or my staring at his glowing straight teeth which made him ask: "Do you want to take me home?" I smiled, shook my head and took his hand, leading him to the side of the crumbling weatherboard house. "I only want you for a moment." They were soft and ineffectual kisses, yet nothing had ever made me feel more empowered. I commanded it, all of it. It would be the last time I would ever see him.

Missy Laur and I have always discussed the notion of confrontation or rather, how we can ever expect to cope with seeing those we've lost. I've have dealt with it to varying degrees: I've approached, I've ignored, I've been visibly upset, I've been visibly indifferent. I have dreams where I am composed and untouchable and I can handle everything, even the most meaningless of passing contact. I have dreams where I am woken up to the buzz of my phone and a lost name on screen.

"You'll always want more, you'll always want them to love you again." She warns me. I sip my mocha and dismissively flip my hand. "I think I can handle it."

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.

Itou Kittou

When I was young, I'd write stories in notebooks. I'd write even though I knew he'd seek out my writing and read it out loud, stopping to cackle loudly in my face. It was humiliating, but I would never stop. I never really could.

I would never finish a single story, but it never really mattered because all the stories were the same. Every story was about best friends running off to Europe together. They'd be so unspeakably gleeful - they would secretly gush to each other in French.

I dreamt of this mythical friendship endlessly. As a six year old, I'd look at my dual reflection in a pair of sunglasses and wish for another one of me. I'd pray for her arrival, next week, next term... but it never really eventuated.

I now find myself sitting across from my best friend, describing how we will fill our forthcoming days in Paris. We anticipate how we'll drink fishbowls of coffee and describe every detail in our notebooks. We share elaborate daydreams and use French slang to supplement our meanings.


It's weird to see how close it is to how dreamt it. For all my prayers and loneliness, I can't believe I've actually found her.