The Plague & The Cure

My Plague essays are something that linger in my imagination still, and although I haven't had the ability to publish them in recent times, I refer to old posts and I appreciate the beauty and the bravery, the vulnerability and the insight. Each one staggers toward some sort of clarity in way that scares everyone else, and I often remember the circumstances in which I wrote them. I typed Desire Lines into my phone whilst in the basement of the Parisian club, Les Bains. When I finished it, I looked up to find a new group of strangers, poised to make friends with me. I wonder how many more friends I could have made had I stopped to look up once in a while.

I have attention span problems now. I can really see it when I try to write anything. I can't go a few lines before grabbing for my phone and checking things, researching, generally figuring out what the rest of the world is up to. When I read, I feel bad for not writing and when I write, I feel bad for not reading. My mind is a like failing hard disc, my heart is a tangled mess of cords. I sometimes revisit conversations in the knowledge that it's all extremely fragmented, and I grieve, knowing that between the two of us, I am the only one who bothers to remember. As such, I redirect my attention and make synthpop at a frantic pace, all sugary and hectic. I love it completely. I do it for my younger self. 

I often think Plague essays are essential, and they would cure me, but I wonder if my heart or mind is really up to it. I think of how I'd still give anything for his name on a screen. It's a slogan for my ultimate fucking cure, and I wonder if I could commission someone to catfish me and lure me into a state of artificial peace. I long for this ineffectual casualness, a dialogue which discharges the connection of all its electricity. It needn't be so electrified in my heart anymore. I want to see a cad for a cad, and to relieve myself of some grief. I've earned myself some relief after all this time.

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.

Legacy

I had this dream last night, where we were in the dimly lit carpark of my local supermarket and you asked me whether I read those essays you wrote, those essays where you described the extent of my influence. I let out this momentary huff of scepticism: "No, I guess not."

If I sleep for long enough, I eventually see these people I've lost. I recently had another dream, this time involving someone else, where we decided to make a break for it. When you were caught, you held me and said: "There will be silence, but I'll remember all you said."

I wake up startled and disoriented, but surprisingly reassured in my blurry-eyed state. It's remarkable how the subconscious can manufacture these consequential moments. It can depict these vivid encounters and these words that, on some level, I want to hear.

When I am awake and lucid, I see there's no real desire to experience these consequential moments. There's nothing particularly unresolved in my heart or head, but I suppose I want a legacy, as stupid and selfish as that sounds. I want to know that I am remembered.

I know that it's never particularly congenial to be included in the official records. More often than not, I feel like an indiscretion that needs to be covered up. I always marvel at how well it is covered up, though. It's much easier to construct a life where I never actually existed.

Brian Cook

White Belt

It recently occurred to me that the day might come when I'll have to retire my white belt. After nine years, the canvas is beginning to fray a little and those various grey lines which correlate with the varying girth of my hips have faded. The white has gone a kind of polluted grey now, I can only assume from wearing it with skinny black jeans for so long. It's funny because the truth is I never even really wanted a white belt when Madam marched me off to NEXT in Hull to get one. The design was not exactly what I wanted, the buckle being two silver metal rings instead of a solid alligator-like claw contraption. After buying it, we stood in a busy arcade in the middle of Hull city centre, looking at my lower belly, attempting to work out how to thread up my belt. I'm sure it must've been a curious scene for anyone who was there to witness it.

I'm sure to anyone else, that greyed, frayed thing around my hips is hardly becoming but I suppose it's a relic of something that I once thought was quite sexy. Much like handling a black canvas rucksack, it wasn't a style that other girls appropriated and I appreciated that act of solidarity. It was a masculine token, in keeping with the stylish men I once associated with. Gav remarked upon the belt too, how it attracted him as he spied me dancing from across the room. I never had the tenacity to say: "You like it because it's you, it's your style." But saying that, I occasionally have daydreams of going back in time and mocking his breathtaking vanity, while at the same time congratulating myself for successfully appealing to the one thing he would find attractive: himself.

I look for new white belts from time to time, but nothing replicates the one I have. Not in style or in feeling. I suppose I will replace it when the time is right and this belt will become emblematic of another era in my life, as silly as that may sound. I was thinking the other day that in spite of all that has passed in the last nine years, I will always attribute its existence to Madam. The fact that we haven't seen each other in that time makes that loop around my hips so much more consequential. It's as if he's always here, clinging to me. I can hardly shake it and I don't really want to, either. Because although he doesn't remember venturing out to buy these things that I've kept for far too long now, I don't care to forget much. I don't care to forget his legacy and how, in spite of his absence, he's helped me to shape the person I am now.

Persuasion

There's this moment that keeps winding itself round my head and throat. A moment that occurred during that last conversation, where I had described the terms of disengagement. For a moment that keeps returning to me, I can't remember exactly what I said. Something like that he'd go back to her and our existence would be wiped. "And what are you supposed to do?" He'd ask me. "Accept it. What else can I do?"

I wonder if I ever could have exploited the luxury of persuasion, as she did. His question makes me wonder if I could have fought, if I could have won. Is it possible to make someone love you again? Is it really possible to win someone back in some grand cinematic gesture? It's a scenario I'd never really imagined for myself, but then I don't believe that I can convince anyone to love me.

I keep seeing all those successful romantic appeals, not in life but in art. There are painted murals, long-haul flights, declarations over the PA and grand-stand karaoke. It indulges that impossible fantasy that you can do something. It's another world where words have this peculiar currency. You can say something heartfelt and persuasive and it'd change the course of your entire life.

There is this hopelessness, living in the knowledge that there was nothing I could have said or done. I imagine that in this flippant question, there was this unexplored possibility and I could have had the life that I was promised. I tend to forget the persuasiveness of the words I had used. I tend to forget how it became apparent that he had never bothered to read any of those carefully crafted appeals.

Wax

I brought in the new year alone. I didn't intend it to be that way, but it felt appropriate somehow. As I stood by the upstairs window and watched the fireworks over Northcote, I don't think I could have had anyone else there.

With any other year, I'd take myself aside moments after midnight to read a letter I'd written a year before. There'd be lengthy summaries, paired with annoyingly simple and familiar moral overtures.

As I sat alone, I recalled those instances where I was forced to reveal the contents of my yearly letter, to Gav in a gutter in China Town and to Min in a kitchen in South Yarra. In both instances, I warned of its intensity but they insisted I proceed.

They were both disgusted, but for very different reasons. Gav came up with the infamously ironic (and the fucking stupid) statement: "you have ephemeral attitude towards love". Min, predictably, dismissed my candour and depressive tendencies.

I realised it quickly, after I managed to pull the pages apart that were stuck fast together with silver sealing wax. A year ago, I wrote with the same idiotic naïveté that I displayed in revealing my words to those I had loved so much.

I don't think I'd have ever realised, in my ten years of doing this, that perhaps these letters weren't about resolutions for the new year. They were about an ideal: someone interested enough to excuse themselves from a party, to follow me out to calmly listen to private thoughts.

Everything is different now, everything is more different than I could've ever imagined. I no longer hope for connection, I no longer hold that desire to glorify passing moments. I hope for nothing, except for the ability to quash that pathetic propensity to talk and to trust.

Disappointments Diary 2013

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."

Presence and Precedence

I harbour this unfortunate tendency to assume that I'm being victimised pretty much all of the time. I came up with this insight a week or so ago, in a conversation with someone who only knew me from my writing. It was unbearably succinct, in that it summed up my fears and anxieties, my personality and my past.

I only regret the way that I constructed that sentence. At that point in time, I jostled with the prospect that the paranoia was completely unjustified. The prospect of an aggressive confrontation was this allegedly mythical thing. But then, I was fortunate in that I had managed to whittle down my existence so I was safe from harm.

It only occurred to me this afternoon that I've spent so much of my life convincing people to be nice to me. I've never had such a vivid recollection of such a feeble and ineffectual desire, recurring over and over again. It seems stupid to convince someone to be nice to you when they've just stomped on your neck.

I suppose I'm lucky, in that I once thought the victimisation was justified. I'd string all the incidents together, as if they were in this absurd press kit with all these unlikely characters. I don't think that way anymore. I never deserved what happened. It's just unfortunate that things transpired as they did.

I developed this sensitivity and this consciousness. I was determined never to succumb to that dynamic, I was determined not to believe the hype, as I'd so often joke. Yet, as I write this, I know that I'm back there at this precise moment. Convincing him, unconvincingly, to try to be nice to me.

I've never been able to convince anyone, although. I suppose my arguments have never been that compelling...

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 Points of Our Boots

We stood, shivering, in the carpark of the Palace in St Kilda. We stood in a circle, so as to protect ourselves from the wind heaving and blowing our fringes out of place. We all looked down at our feet - myself, my boyfriend, his lover and her sister. "Look at our boots..." she cooed. The end of their boots were polished and pointed, so as to add a few extra centimetres to the end of their toes. The end of my boots were rough, square and scuffed. They were cheap and I wish I could have done something to hide them. I could have dropped my rucksack on the ground to obscure the faux-pas, but I didn't have the sense to think of it in time. I just had to stand there while they carried out their examination.

No one said anything about my shoes, but it was a dead giveaway. They must have known I was faking it.

All the Pennies in the Thames will not make it how it was

"I can't stay very long," he said to me. "I have to be back in Crouch End to move out of my flat, you see..." I nodded, silently. I was silent in a manner that suggested I understood, not silent in the manner that suggested I was offended. But I was offended, you see, for it was my first night back in London and I had wanted to see my old friend. I had wanted to talk about music.

He smiled and humoured me, suggesting that we walk along Southbank as the sun went down. I took note of the things I had missed, the OXO Tower glazed in a gooey sunset, the ruins of another nameless church and its pulpit, flooded with cigarette butts, but we promptly ignored the beauty and the ugliness of our surrounds and retreated to our own world of blazers, musical love and lyrical sincerity. I had waited years to see him again and just when I felt most grateful for all of it, he said he had to go.

I sat alone on a water-filled barricade at the door of the Houses of Parliament. I had treated myself to an 88p dinner, an imitation Red Bull and two bananas. The light grew dim, I could not use my phone camera in such low light. I could only watch strangers and chortling tourists pass me by. I attempted to get onto my brother Andrew, but he was raging at a party in Hackney and would not answer his phone. Neither would any of my other friends.

As I ambled slowly up the north bank of the Thames, I contemplated what it was to feel so ill at ease with my city. In the silence of my own company, I could only think of those I had lost due to carelessness and indifference. For all the beauty, adventure and promise of London town, it all seemed to mean very little if I could not have those lost friends alongside me.

I stopped when I came upon Somerset House. The cream-coloured Georgian bricks glowed in a sodium vapour hue and I smiled. Loud music echoed and bounced off the walls, I realised that it had been five years since my first love and I had been there. I cried at that concert, even with his arms tightly wound around my waist. It was not an emotional response to the music, as such. Three days before, a bandmember of the performing band told me that he wanted to end our friendship. He never wanted to speak to me ever again. At the time, I could scarcely describe that disappointment, not out loud anyway. Instead I took a photograph that said it all to me: the night was over, the courtyard was deserted, the spotlights stretched out to reveal bent cups and indistinguishable debris. Every foot of that opulent space had been desecrated and I felt so completely wretched.


I started to walk towards the Strand when a woman suddenly accosted me. She grabbed my wrist and explained breathlessly: "I have to go now, but here, have my pass. It'll get you in for nothing. Here, take it, take it." She desperately attempted to reattach a fluorescent pink paper bracelet around my wrist, then she ran to her partner who had already hailed a cab. Confused and uncertain, I walked to the security guard of Somerset House and showed him my wrist. He told me to have a good night.

It was Noah and the Whale. Everything happened as it meant to. The band performed, the audience sang and the lights glowed. Upon hearing the first few chords of Five Years Time, a baffling sense of serendipity crept over me, a true sense of wonderment. There was the promise of meeting soul mates that night, new friends who could understand my every feeling and intent. But as I stood there alone with my broken paper bracelet, I wanted everyone to leave the courtyard immediately. I wanted to be alone with that moment I had lost.

Almost immediately after I recreated that photograph, my phone shrilled and vibrated. It was Andrew, agreeing to come to the Strand and save me. I later told him of my riverside loneliness on the 2am busride back to Paddington. I told him in the knowledge that I did not know true loneliness. It was not possible to be acquainted with such a thing. I live in the certainty he will always be there for me, even when all the others have gone.

Isolation

It's curious how you can miss someone you've never met. You can mourn the memory of one who lived and died before your time. Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the day Mark Chapman shot and killed John Lennon. It's difficult to fully comprehend the horror of that day, outside the Dakota building. There is an indescribable injustice attached to it, a kind of tragedy that constricts the chest and twists the gut. For all his wit, his humanity and untouchable creativity, he did not deserve to die as he did.


We love John. We talk about him in the present tense, as if he were one of our old friends. We refer to his words with ease and due familiarity. We sing loudly to his songs. We grin, harmonise and implicitly agree that I shall always take the bottom part. His music has underscored the most compelling of friendships. It continues to be subjected to the most lovingly relentless analysis, I'm sure it forever will be. Even now, I cannot listen to Abbey Road without recalling our promises to cover I Want You (She's So Heavy). I cannot listen to Yellow Submarine without chortling at the thought of us howling, growling and barking to Hey Bulldog. I cannot listen to Rubber Soul without wanting to resume our discussion about Wait. It's been six years now and I'm still waiting.

Every song is a lost moment. Every melody is infused with a personal meaning, every rhythm a universal consequence. I'm so grateful to John for all of it. I know that with him, there is the possibility to fall in love with these songs, over and over again. There is the chance of finding a new interpretation, a dubious method to understand that little band that little better. I live with John in the present tense, both grammatically and temporarily, as I do with any friend I've ever lost. I know I am likely to think of him as he was in A Hard Day's Night, turning left at Greenland or else snorting a bottle of Coke. He lives in 1964, with his cap, tight grey suit and that moderately gleeful façade. He looks just like him, y'know?

In spite of all his presence, his relevance and resonance, it's impossible not to miss him.

I don't know how it's possible not to.

Damnatio Memoriae

"Alas, that the friend of my youth is gone! Alas, that I ever knew her! I might say to myself, "You are a dreamer to seek what is not to be found here below." But she has been mine. I have possessed that heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be."

The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe

I once wrote that my writings were never about one person in particular. They were ripped up photographs of those I once loved. Perhaps that is selfish or vague, but I wrote and published work in the hope that they would read it and understand that I still held them in high regard. I could never communicate with them, not in the way I would have wanted. In any case, it isn't healthy or socially acceptable to be on such intimate terms with the past. Perhaps with such persistent feelings of yearning, I only ever wanted access to the past. I wanted access to a temporal impossibility.

I did love them, in the most authentic sense of the word. I loved their conversation more than anything else. Sharing witticisms over mochas in Brunswick St. Sharing music over MSN, mixtapes and long car trips. Sharing lengthy musical diatribes to one another. I was addicted to their words, not their lips. It was the truest form of intimacy for me, it glorified the past and challenged the mind. Now we cannot talk, I can only pass the things they would have loved, the things we could have talked about. Who knows what could have been said, maybe they had lost interest altogether.

There is no way of knowing their thoughts. There may be an oblique reference to us in a lyric or a tweet, but I would only be entertaining my vanity to wonder such things. Do they ever feel the desire to talk? To discuss the things only we cared about? It is like a young teen, angsting over a non-responsive crushling. In such circumstances I can safely say that in the case of personal regard, if one has to wonder how much they cared, they didn't care enough. Clearly, the Dolly Magazine education has worked a treat.


However, therein lies the paradox. I found their regard to be the most empowering, intoxicating thing. Friends, lovers, whoever they were, I saw these people as incredibly clever and enlightened individuals. But then, they swore that they did see something in me too. They spent hours convincing me of my skill and potential but I was too proud to acknowledge or accept their kind encouragement. It was a feeling of mutual awe that I could never adequately deconstruct. It was the clarity and the requited nature of it all never really made sense to me.

I didn't understand it, but I became addicted to that breed of attention. Although I would come to meet more and more people with similar interests, I was always in a perpetual state of mourning. I became addicted to missing my past. I grieved for one in the presence of another. I grieved in the knowledge that, in time, they would come to hate me too. Brothers and friends warned that this would be my undoing, but I have only realised its net effect in recent times.

It is when I revisited Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, that I understood what it is to be in love with the past. I always knew, on some level, that access to the past was analogous to access to my creative self. It makes sense when I think about it now. I would only feel spurred to create if I had their input, their influence and encouragement. In their presence, I was more than I was, because I was all that I could be.

So now I sit with my notes on how to build the empire. I wince and procrastinate and complain and I sniffle endlessly - I long to talk to you. You would understand all this. But somehow, I've realised that you, or rather the idea of you is all but a mirage. For all the laughter and compassion that we shared, there is a completely logical explanation as to why we must never speak. My desire for long winded d&ms is fuelled by the impossible situation we find ourselves in. We simply cannot speak. If my creative output is dependent on your speaking to me, I shall never get anything done.

That is not to say that I don't still love you. Our friendship was not a contract, where all our feelings rescinded upon expiration of the term. I will be forever inspired by your wit and your kindness and good taste, but I do not need to talk to you to be inspired by all that you gave me.

I do not need to know whether you remember me or not. I remember you.

I Should Have Loved You More

I recently confronted a boy I once knew, my best friend. I went to his house, armed with a letter in anticipation that he would refuse to speak to me. The entire context seemed so odd, this boy knew me better than I knew myself. He loved and encouraged me, then it all fell apart somehow. He eventually fell in love with a more worthy girl, then I fell in love with someone I wasn't meant to. I don't know how it happened, but I know that he will never forgive me for my purported mistreatment. I know he will never forgive me for refusing to commit to him romantically. I know he will never forgive me for falling in love with someone so similar to him. With that being said, I know that I must forgive myself if I ever wish to move on.

That night, he did agree to speak to me. It was so strange. For that half an hour, standing in the starlit courtyard of his apartment, I felt so totally overwhelmed. I couldn't believe he was looking me in the eye for the first time in ten months. Every few moments, I kept on exclaiming how different it was, how strange it felt. It was a different person standing before me, this wasn't my best friend. His body had changed, his posture was different. I don't know what the hell happened to his speech patterns but suddenly he had a lisp. He said that he never thought of me, that I was simply a blank to him. I just didn't exist. I said I admired him for being so strong-willed, for I could never forget the past so easily.

I write all this here because I have been thinking of the evolution of identity. Can you ever truly let go of the person you were? Do the matters that once touched you in the past suddenly bear no meaning once you adopt a new identity? What happens if that new identity is so thoroughly exciting and convincing, so brimming with musical and emotional success? It reminds me of the last words of a lost musician I once knew:

"That person up on that stage isn't me. In some ways it never was. The projection that you might have about that personality is not in the member of the band you see up there. He's just a puppet. I've long since stopped inhabiting him. I don't belong in there and I never did really."

There will never be a satisfying conclusion to all this, I will never find the answers for which I seek. But I know that I desire that which seems to be impossible for my mood and temperament. I want to change myself as he has, to make myself an identity that is so thoroughly exciting and convincing, so brimming with musical and emotional success. I want to make it so exciting and convincing that nobody will ever care to remember what I was like. How wretched and depressed I once was. I want to be the intimidating one, fearless and without any past.

I want to forget you.