November 28, 2008

Quick quick, before the woman with her scalding aluminium teacup returns. I have become, unwittingly, reluctantly, a mind-stalker, I will start with the top layer and work my way down. In other words, I do not remember who said this, I want to kiss your brain. (I have become, just as reluctantly, a word-stealer.)

I though of a very beautiful love story earlier, it involved someone finding your lost (last) crumb of sanity and slipping it into your pigeon hole. (You see umbrella flocks when it is not raining and press your nose into window panes. Only ever when there is someone sitting close on the other side staring into the milky depths of their cappuchinos, frappucinos, chai tea lattes.) I don’t get much further than this; someone always steals this crumb before you get to it.

I am not supposed to be here, I think.

Or this one where she is always there, you think maybe she lives there, in this cafe. Ha, you think, she sleeps under the table with the day’s papers scrunched beneath her head. And when she wakes she steals coffee beans and steams stolen milk. Only, again, I never get past the bit where you realise with a flash of lightening clarity that she must think the same of you, you always being there when she is. So next time you come wearing a false moustache and it is the moustache she starts talking to, and the disguise she falls in love with.

She is back, her footfalls shake my chair.

November 24, 2008

There is a monster in my bed. It talks about conceptual mice and carries my mushrooms in a brown paper bag.

I am told that nothing much has changed. On the ‘home front’, as they call it, without much trace of irony. The avocado tree is still standing, last year’s Christmas tree is three inches taller, and that is all. There is a me-shaped vacuum at the dinner table. Perhaps they throw wine glasses at lampshades still, I shall check for red wine stains when I get back. 

It is bitterly cold, so cold that when I wake I could dance before my steamed-up windows naked with the curtains pulled back and no-one woulkd see. If I wanted.

squirrels are people too November 22, 2008

Let’s get married today, when everyone else is doing the same and we have wedding dresses on our minds (she twisted her engagement ring around her finger, wrung her hands together without thinking much about how she sat or what she did with her furrowed brow, her scrunched up shoulders. As she talked about how easy it is to read the unconscious.)

Tomorrow we will have forgotten I got down on one knee and she didn’t have the heart to say no. And if we wake up remembering we’ll pretend we don’t. Remember what people have said. (Twenty four and it ruined her life. Or: How much more difficult it is to pretend twenty years later we never happened. The second time round there is no white dress.)

If we refuse eye contact it will be very easy to forget I got down on one knee and she said yes.

(Perhaps next week she will arrive wearing a veil and we still won’t ask, who’s the lucky guy.)

November 18, 2008

WORK. (goddamnit.)

The leaden circles dissolved in the air November 17, 2008

November 17th happens, my besocked feet foraying blindly where no shoeless foot has forayed before. And we write semi-colon poetry on library slips which say on the reverse side PLEASE LEAVE.

Every cigarette is a transitional object November 16, 2008

I have begun involuntarily psychoanalysing myself. I am sending home photocopies of good mess/bad mess theories and the depressive infantile position. And why it is detrimental the parent does not interfer.

Also I never want to see another carrot in cake form again. This is something I may not recover from.

Her voice a warm squeeze down the line. She is sending me her black dress, she says, which booshes out at the waist.

I stood outside a coffee shop today opposite Kings, and wondered what it would be like to be the sleek pinstripe woman with the plum hair sweeping through the gates. What does she eat for breakfast? Does she have blistered heels, a French accent an espresso machine a matching sleek pinstripe partner? Does she live in a varnished wooden attic space amongst white objects varying in degrees of matte?

My father asks, are you well? Remember. Three things. Dress warm, sleep well, eat. He sounds kind of tired. He tells me his synapses are fizzling out. I’m not entirely sure what he means by this, but remember what happened last time I put the words man flu out there.

toeing the line November 10, 2008

I lock myself out and hear voices in the stairwell, my own replicated down the line. Standing where I am and looking down into an angular spiral of cold brick corners there is nobody but the flitting shadow of the professor who lives one floor down with his suspiciously slim briefcase and grim post-box mouth. I say he looks like Wiesler from The Lives of Others, and A says maybe he has your room wired up.

Talking of margins, after scrubbing my sink I will mark mine out for you in black marker pen.

 

I would like to go home now and unsuspend people from their lemon jelly prisons.