mildly free

So tonight and for many days now you have had to fend for yourself. You’ve had to find ways to stave off the demon of depression. Had to exercise some discipline and remember to take out the dishes.

For the last few days she’s been working full-time. Her little shop needs her to be an acting-manager for as long as it takes for the new manager to start. Maternity leave means that the last girl left and the new one won’t start until her last position has been filled, a full three weeks away.

So she has started working full-time. Only they don’t open on a Sunday or a Monday.

You work in retail, so for you there is no ‘weekend’ per say. So you get Sunday off and determine to set off on a little journey into town to get a coffee and write some. Because you haven’t written for so long you’re not sure you are a writer anymore.

Instead you get her in your ear, tugging your sleeve – asking for you to stay home until she is ready to leave for the coffee shop with you.

So dutifully you stay, like any guy with a girl like her would do, out of fear that she will bring this up when you’re with company and make you into the chauvinist monster. Make you into the monstrous man in the face of her feminine fragility.

So you both get to the café and some 30mins in she gets to texting and finding an escape. 5mins later she gets a reply and is invited to a Sunday roast.

Some 6 hours later you’re on your own at 7pm, long done with writing and thinking about what you might do this evening. Whether you might both cuddle up on the sofa, that maybe you should get a bottle of wine, make an effort, make something of a nothing night. These Sundays, which are less and less your days.

And then at 11pm you remember that she doesn’t work Mondays. And then somehow you know she isn’t coming home. You resign yourself to the fact that, whatever she does of a night away from you, she’ll be doing again tonight.

And in your mind she’s doing all the things that a grubby mind might imagine her doing.

She’s got a dick in her mouth. Far in, like she’s never done to you before. She’s making an effort with this other man. Or maybe it’s a woman and maybe she’s rutting against her with an enthusiasm she fakes when she’s with you.

In your mind she’s all you wish she was and are glad she isn’t.

So you sleep, knowing that sleeping alone is the saddest thing about it.

sans changer

Not much has changed really.

She is still as obscurely indifferent as ever.

I’ve gotten used to her leaving for a gig here and there and me being left in on my own.

She’s given me free reign to scoot off after whatever broad fits my fancy, but then I find women overly ridiculous at the moment and all the men I meet are too camp to be taken seriously.

So what else is there but to look to the past?

Tonight I got talking to an old flame who is reigniting my past life maxims.

I used to drink whenever I felt like it, eat when I felt I needed it and fuck pretty much all the time (because I felt like I should want it that frequently).

I look back on that time, the time when my major drive was simply desire, and I feel grief at the loss of it. I desired drink most of all and now that, thankfully is behind me.

But I have lost that attitude that saw me walk up to women in the street and tell them that I thought they were beautiful. Lost what it was in me that needed to conquer each woman, the more disinterested the better. Lost what it took to walk into a gay bar and take home a guy because I hadn’t tried it. I have lost the drive to fill my black book. Now it lays in the attic, like a telltale heart, each pulse bleeding out my courage.

I used to explain all that away as ‘research’. I used to write it all out of me, like I was absorbing each demon only to scribble it out of me again. Triple distilled? Not one bit. Hardly altered, it would be ink on page within the day.

Now I find myself as tame as a kitten.

What is it about these damned cat images?

new dates

Today I went on a date. I took off to Bristol and met up with a girl that I had promised to meet up with for a while.

Was it a ‘date’? or was it more of a Venture Go situation? I guess I just wanted something to do.

She was a ridiculous bore.

She was pretty, but vacuous.

I spent most of the day wishing I were sitting with the girl across from us. The girl that I eye-fucked into oblivion, and her me!

That night I was still in the mood for others, so I took off to a bar on my own – armed, as usual, with my notebook. I met up with Felicity, who informed me that massage is a good remedy for heartache. When I asked whether she would massage my heart all I got was a wry smile and a shake of the head. How could I turn that offer down? With a smile and an exchange of phone numbers and the excuse that I had to get home to feed the cat.

I don’t have one, but now I kinda wish I did. Just so that I could invite her around, confirm my lie was actually grounded in some threadbare truth and then get that massage. Oh well.


- Later that Night -


She stayed out all night again, but what did I expect? I’ve given her license now.

I think I’ll swap her for a cat. I want to call him (for it will be a him) Hart. After Hart Crane. I love the idea of a Hart wandering the night. I feel my own heart leaves me to wander the neighborhood quite often.

I just wonder where Calista goes… like all good cat owner’s do... a wonderment and fear rolled into one.

dawn porter, midnight waiter

We talked and she told me that she wants to stay with me, but wants me to branch out. All this after watching a TV show with Dawn Porter. It was shocking to hear her say, but she wants me to go out and meet other women. If Dawn Porter is around then she'll be up for meeting her too.

Is it wrong to think it’s rather convenient?

She starts talking about me dating freely after going AWOL so often without explanation?

So she wants me to date and go ‘enjoy’ myself, while what? While she just sits at home and paints her toenails?

No idea what it is all about, but will take advantage of the fact she is being this way as a selfish sort of spring-board into a new life.

forgo the french

Calista, Calista, Calista, I’m sure you are hating the fact that I am rather obsessed with her. What is one to do? Leave her?

Precisely.

I’m not being dramatic, I’m not being rash or inhuman. I just think that its time we stop hurting each other.

So what should I do?

I’ve been lying awake at night, with her soft-breathing and mute-dreaming, thinking about the end of us. Thinking about what will become of me.

I’ll be a new man.

I’ll be alone.

I’ll be sorry.

There is more to life than someone else’s.

So I have to end it… but how?

Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae

This evening Calista left me with the dreaded feeling of impending brokenheartedness. I caught a glimpse of an email that she has sent to someone locally who was advertising a spare room. It held more than empty wish-fullfilment, she made it clear that she thought it was 'time to move on.'

Quite who it was, I doubt I will descover. What I do know is that Calista is serious about leaving now. It hurts, but I think I serve her as a cheap room at the moment. She has no idea that I know. There is little chance that she will be able to afford anything, as she does very little in terms of work. Just a part-time job. It brought me a clear shot of the old clear blue though. I recognised my old willfulness in her, the dogged determination to dissolve into the world and emurge better off.

Years ago now, so I forget which charity she worked for, I met Nora. She came in to explain their charity's work, then became tongue-tied and I untangled her with light conversation and asked for her number. She was/is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen and I’m surprised even now that I managed to get my words out. We met up a few days later and soon I was besotted. I kept looking at her and imagining all the places I wanted to kiss her. It was honest immature infatuation. The sweetest kind of attraction.

It came to me that I needed to become more than I was. At the time I was on a friend's floor after leaving home in a bout of the same aforementioned willfullness - running from my family, rather than a lover. I felt I needed to become a man of substance. I started by flat hunting and ended up with a flat. Deposit down I was close to my aim. I focused on new clothes, the only thing she'd see of me, I thought. I didn't need to furnish my new home, as much as I needed jeans with 'fashionable' tears, rather than rips from knee to shin. Once completed I was the model of a fasionable gentleman. Yet one thing was missing. Her.

She'd ended up admitting to being in love with another man. I was drawn and quartered at the confession. So that was that, I was taken from ruin to kindom and back down to ruin again, but this time with a new location. I had my own home and enough focus to gain the things to set me right. So when I think of Calista's need to escape I can only admire that in her and though it is me that she will run from, I wont stop her if its what she wants. Why get in the way of a person when they will just find a way to sidestep you.

Calista is going to escape, and i'll miss her, but like Nora - i'll survive her. It was a time that brought me to clawing at fashionable tears, but it was a time that I outlived. Nora was a succubus; then again, if not for her infedelity - I wouldn't be here in my current position; which smacks of thankfulness and regret.

L’amour et l’amitié

Sitting inside a small café with a mug of coffee, steam lingering at the brim, I look at the stranger sitting across from me. The feeling of love hasn’t gone, just changed slightly. Instead of passion I feel a milder caring. I’ve never really had a friend that I felt that for, and I like the feeling intensely. Yet it also saddens me, that there is this hole where so much more feeling was before. It made me think that maybe friendship is something that would perhaps be the better option in this situation, but that can never be a substitute for love and infatuation.

I've given in to the resolution that comes of undefined emotion, I've given in to utter and remorseful numbness. Confusion just becomes this crushing weight that shuts off the feeling, like a limb that has been slept on. So that I'm left here trying my best to recall the feelings I had, not out of desperation... but out of a need to find my way back to a path I felt sure of, was steady on, was comfortable with.

I'm sure that love cannot outlast this numbness. I'm not sure I can ignore that there are now so many striking differences between us. Then, a child rolled past in a pram and all we saw was this child's bare feet. I tell her I've always felt compelled to tickle bare feet, like my mother used to do to me. She confided that she'd always felt like ‘chewing on them’.