It's a quote that's lived in me for years and years and for some reason it came back to me today. It was from this English rock star penpal who I talked to online when I was 20. He hated that "rock star" label so much, but I can say he was a musician from some emerging indie band that managed to infiltrate the mainstream. We met during a phone interview: he called from London and I spoke into a microphone from my little radio studio at RMIT. There was a minor confusion in the set up, did he mean the interview was this Thursday or the Thursday after? The conversation itself was long, relaxed and languid. We would go on to send super lengthy emails to one another. Soon it became frantic texts in the middle of the night and eventually, some real or imagined romantic dimension materialised.
In spite of its brevity, the communication was electrifying. In retrospect, I see that everything was closely tied to his narcissism. I had granted him this unlimited space to speak about himself and his band and girlfriend and music and neighbours and festivals... that he never really bothered to find out anything about me. It was just how I wanted it. Each email sent provided this incredible opportunity to blend my favourite things: therapy, music and analysis, all the while obscuring the pathetic truth of my existence as a failing law student. Despite all that, he managed to infuse so much romance into the dynamic, that we may as well have been dispatching ink-stained letters in the early 1800s. I died to see his name on a screen. It meant he was thinking of me.
The fall out was devastating. He returned home from a tour in Holland and texted me: "My world's seismic. I've fallen in love. I need to talk to you..." I momentarily thought that he was referring to us but he would swiftly disclose that he was agonising over some other girl. She was with someone else too but they had been talking intensely for some months now. Since it happened, all those years ago, I kept on screaming into the ether, "HOW ON EARTH DID YOU HAVE SPACE FOR THIS??" It's hilarious to say it now but at the time I was completely heartbroken. For years I pined for his poetic turn-of-phrase, his dramatic sensibility and his over-the-top insistence that I understood what it all meant.
The story is more nuanced and detailed than that, but that's why I've written so many essays about it over the years. All coded, disguising the identities of the victims. He was intensely quotable: when I asked him whether he wanted to see me in London, he said: "I'd only see you if it meant more to me than it would to you." It was romantic while at the same time there was an ambiguity that would confuse you. He doled out phrases that would hold you tight and squeeze you like a boa constrictor. My hostel lover was a bit like that, coming up with expressions like, "Just because I don't want to remember, doesn't mean I can forget..." and "Every time you've looked at me and felt I've wanted to kiss you, I've wanted to kiss you..." I mean, what does that even mean?
I don't believe either of them were really in love with me when they said these things, but there was something in their capacity to say such things so beautifully and spontaneously that led them into this very intense kind of euphoria, like a creative flow state. They fell in love with themselves and their own poetics. I'm not sad about it, they were powerful lines, any one of them could be shoehorned into a jagged post-punk anthem that we'd sing down at the indie clubs. I miss their poetic desperation. I would give anything now for their name to flash on my screen, despite the pain, despite the fallout.
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