After Lyonesse

Back in the apartment and remembering a lot of bad choices. Holy ground, where different versions of the same person, or the same problem, walked in bare feet, late at night, early in the morning. I wonder if their skin cells are still there, settled in hard-to-reach corners. 

During the pandemic I woke up and realised that time had passed. It was startling. I did not like it. All of the stories I had embarked on seemed very embarrassing. And I had told people about them, people knew. That was really embarrassing. 

If the brain “in love” is similar to the brain on heroin, then what is my brain like when it’s procrastinating? I did not make those choices out of a need for love or as an attempt to feel like I was complete. I made them to keep myself away from my responsibility to myself, from the blank page or the blinking cursor. I did it to fill up the empty space looking back at me with other people’s tedium. Choose someone extra-ordinary and build flimsy expectations around them like a cowboy contractor and before you know it, you’ll have wasted so much of your finite energy on being annoyed with them, there’ll simply be nothing left to put into worrying about what you should really be doing. Easy. 

I woke this morning from a dream about my ex.

When I’m stressed, I dream about planes, being in a car I can’t drive, or my ex. I have more than one ex, but when I dream about “my ex”, it’s always this particular one. 

The dream is always a deviation on a theme. I suddenly realise we’re still together. Usually I’m back in the apartment, wondering how I got there, hadn’t I moved out years ago? I’m always deeply disappointed and very frustrated.

In the dream, he was in bed with me, lying over me, looking down at me. I was aware of his size, his mass, he was very real. He went under the duvet to go down on me, something he never did in reality, and I felt totally underwhelmed. 

Why bother? It’s not going to feel like anything. 

I signalled to him with a “tsh, tsh” to 

get back up here, my mother’s in the house! 

He resurfaced and I turned him over to lie on me on his back, and put my arms around him to secure him there. I rubbed his hair like you would a dog, to let him know there was only civility between us, not heat. I hadn’t been at all worried about whether my vagina was palatable, acceptable, ugly, sterilised enough for him. Another detail completely different to reality.

How had he washed up on my timeline like this again, after all these years?

I lay there thinking 

I cannot wait, but I cannot wait to be single again!

I needed to come up with something fast to get rid of him, but what? My dreaming brain was not cooperating. I looked over at my phone on the nightstand. Who could I text? Which of my friends would understand my predicament? I had to tell someone, text someone the words, as if by articulating them I would increase the likelihood that he would simply get up and go of his own accord. There was Lily, but at most she would simply notice that her phone had vibrated at the other end of the room and go back to whatever she had been doing. Paula would only annoy me, being too positive, asking whether I couldn’t make the most of it. Joanne would be passive aggressive - Oh Lyo, always making a mountain out of a molehill! I lay there with this man’s back pressing down on me and thought about how I really needed to stop being shocked by repeated behaviour. Maybe the dream was really about the state of my friendships. 

Day 23, only 5 days left in this self-imposed 28 days of posting challenge, and I’m flagging. There’s a heavy tiredness on me, like iron filings in my veins, making it hard to move or think. The last few days I’ve left it too late to write and post. Various Addictions and Horror & Fantasy were a real slog to smash out and shape up into something presentable. I quite liked Horror & Fantasy but felt nervous posting it. Porn is a subject that really divides opinion, and I didn’t want to give the impression I’m some kind of puritan evangelist. 

What shall I write about today? The writing process, maybe? This challenge/experiment has been energising for the most part. It’s made a number of ideas much clearer and brought me closer to developing them with the detail they deserve. There have been plenty of moments of doubt along the way, too, especially after repeated re-reads (I haven’t forgotten about Francine Prose and Reading Like A Writer), which have left me questioning the fluency of my expression. So why post writing I’m not 100% happy with on the internet? As an attempt to move past restrictive perfectionism, to train my editing muscles and to impose the obligation of a schedule on myself, rather than being happy to dream about such and such a cool story I’ll write some day in the indistinct future. The benefits have so far outnumbered the growing pains. 

The first time I saw porn was at college. A friend of mine was proudly obsessed with it, and had an entire drive called Porn Land. One evening, when I was over at his house, he showed me one of his favourite scenes. It was a flatly lit bukkake, filmed on an early digital camera, with a girl whose make up caked on her bad skin. At the end she winced as she swallowed the fluids like they were glue and lemon juice. It was so ugly and so gross that it didn’t embarrass me, cotton-wool-wrapped virgin though I was. Instead, I was fascinated by how hideous it was, far more so than any horror film I’d ever seen. There was no eroticism whatsoever in this sneering, frat-boy gross-out-fest, only an unmistakable feeling of contempt.

A few years later I went out with a guy who used porn regularly. One afternoon when I was tidying up the apartment we shared I happened upon his stash, a handful of DVDs scattered in a cupboard. He hadn’t exactly gone to great lengths to hide them. The cover designs were strikingly ugly and reminded me of the scenes my college friend had shown me, with their distinct sense of ridicule. My boyfriend was out for the afternoon, so I stuck one of the DVDs in the player to see if there was anything different about it. It was a production by a very well known producer-actor, full of young East European women spieling off tired porno lines in broken English and looking as bored during the sex as when they delivered their dialogue. The faces of the male actors distorted into sneers as they penetrated the dissociating actresses. It was as though sex didn’t need to be sensual or intimate or psychological, the important thing was the element of humiliation. 

When my boyfriend came home, I narrowed my eyes mock-provocatively and repeated some of the choicer lines from the DVD I had watched, and he cracked up laughing. But there was something awfully cynical about it all. Watching the ugly, poorly-produced scenes on those DVDs I’d felt a mix of bewildered horror and vague amusement, and an unconscious awareness that this material gave him more of an arena of fantasy and expression than I did, or could hope to.

Julian is typing. 

I haven’t felt this way in such a long time.

It can’t have been that long since he felt “this way”. I turn it over in my head, and it’s not attractive, this blowing hot and cold. He’s too old to say things like that, all that awful, untrue gush. But there must be something in all of this for me, this preoccupation with another person’s behaviour.

A week later, I’ve given up suggesting we meet. He’s refused twice in a row and suggested no alternatives. I feel lighter at the thought of not seeing him again. I’m lying in bed texting some other guy.

Andrew is typing. 

I haven’t yet realised that it may not be a healthy sign, to get this much enjoyment out of spending the evening alone in my room, texting a guy I’m essentially making up, a character in a story. I lie looking at the ceiling, forcing myself to wait for five minutes before responding. My phone goes. Getting keen, Andrew, double texting me? But it’s not Andrew. 

Hey gorgeous, what you doing?

Julian.

It’s unbearably predictable. When I was making an effort, it was no-go. I shut down, and here he is. I’m writing a story about a new character now. But soon enough familiarity tugs. I dig my heels for half an hour. 

Hey, what’s up?

Straight away, Julian is typing.

Nothing. Was just watching porn. 

Oh what the fuck is that supposed to mean? Some kind of weird provocation, an attempt to assert power? As though I’m already in the bag, conquered, familiar and boring, he’s not even bothering to pretend. I don’ t have the patience for this.

I let the line go cold. 

A week passes, and he messages again. Tentative plans to move away have become an itinerary. I only feel a vague excitement at the prospect of total freedom again. I see him twice more. We don’t kiss, we don’t touch, we just sleep in the same bed, this strange sexless dynamic I don’t question. On the last morning, he kisses me, and it’s tepid, unsatisfying, salival. The burst of wanting is there, but not the skill to carry it off. Then he’s gone, and I’m relieved. 

It’s one of my biggest regrets. If only I had known as a teen that hardly anyone who starts a band has a clue what they’re doing, and very often lacks any real musical skill (at least in the beginning). If I could go back, I’d set aside all my unsatisfied, unacknowledged longing, my burnt-out admiration and I’d start a band, or just do it all myself. 

As a teen I dreamed up names for my imaginary band. Holy Sepulchre would be cool, a nod to my first big love, Sepultura. While we were still finding our feet, people who knew us well could call us Holy Shit.

I’d get really lean and muscular. I’d wear long sleeve shirts and leather pants, the suggestion of abdominal muscles and discipline under forbidding, perpetual black, covering everything but clinging close to flat torso and long limbs. I’d sound like Jarboe by way of Killjoy from Necrophagia, with a Khanate flash of Alan Dubin. I’d be weird and creepy and hard to put your finger on, not quite female but certainly not male.  I always thought I’d make a great front woman. 

I resumed this blog nineteen days ago with the post Marduk, Oblivious, and then decided to see if I could commit to posting every day for twenty eight days. Writing on the internet for no one in particular is a strange one. Who exactly is my ideal reader? I really don’t know. 

Rather than set myself specific criteria, I decided to show up at the keyboard every day and post whatever I came up with. The point of this challenge is to step away from perfectionism and the idea of what my writing should look like, to remove the obstacle and the safety net of excuses. Although this idea might be anathema to a lot of writers, quickly pulling together and firing off writing that’s been mentally tucked away in a drawer is shaking up and increasing my creative flow. It provides an opportunity to examine the importance of writing. Do I need to take myself so seriously that I only post once a month, spending hours on content that hardly anyone will read anyway?

While doing this challenge, I’ve been reading Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer. I’m not sure it makes a 28 day writing challenge any easier, but then a challenge isn’t supposed to be easy. Prose advises writers to read their own work and that of writers they admire aloud, in order to engage in a close reading of the text. Reading the book and then examining what I come up with each day can be intimidating, but also rewarding, digging down into patterns of expression and the significance and effect of word choice. 

The light through the curtains is bright enough to let your brain know the sun’s up, but flat enough to be gentle on a hangover. I’ve been awake for a few minutes, looking at the back of the blonde head, the thick shoulders of the man on the other side of the bed. His breath changes and he stirs, turns around and sees me, and remembers the evening before. I say “the evening before”, because “the night before” reads with something of a raised eyebrow. He smiles and closes his eyes again, exhaling as he closes the gap between us. His bare chest is soft and sticks a little bit with the heat of sleep. He has the kind of body that makes me comfortable, the extra padding under the pecs and around the gut. Manly but not preoccupied. I can relax about anything outside the lines. 

He lies beside me, his big frame curled into my flank. I can only see his hair, soft and dark blonde, grown out a bit from the close shaved scrub, softening his thick, boyish features. Again he exhales and a broad hand pulls the sheet away from my torso. He moves his hand down it in a sweeping stroke, then brings it back to my arm and curls in closer to me. 

How’s your head?

I don’t have a hangover, but I think I can still feel a vague giddy charge from a few hours ago. 

Fine. 

I’m Older, and my voice is different, and this in-between of softness and authority probably has some kind of maternal appeal. I am just different enough to allow for an intense, fleeting fascination, to make him think that someone else might be more interesting than him, just for a short while. I am familiar enough to be no loss when we part ways. Maybe now, as he lies with his full cheek glued to my rib cage, I am all the things he liked about a first girlfriend, or some other archetype in his mythology, and when I disagree, contradict or inconvenience him, he’ll see all the things that made him drop her. But before that, before he annoys me with his younger-than-me youth, I lie here and push my fingers into the wiry blonde hair. OK, illusion, I see you. So we both know where we stand. I push down to my palm, and the hair is like moss, and for now, this will suffice. 

We need to get up. 

It’s past ten o’clock. He has somewhere to be at midday, a meeting to attend. I still can’t see his face, the round blonde head turned away, but I feel the pull on my flank as he shakes his head. 

Not going. 

Lying here like the Pieta, this is the part where I’m supposed to be flattered that he wants to cancel his professional plans to spend the day with me. I know I’m expected to go along with the twelve-hour love story as though we were beginning a life together, and I guess it’s his party and he’s picking up the tab so, why not? Let him act it out, then. It’s Sunday and I have nowhere else to be. 

I rub the top of his head with my knuckles. 

What d’you mean, you’re not going? You have to go!

Another shake of the head tugs at my still-firm, still-young skin.

Uh-uh. 

He leaps up, his face unsticking from me with an almost audible tear. 

Champagne. 

He crosses the room in his underwear that cost more than everything I had on last night, the extra softness spilling over the waist, and I wonder why I find this attractive. Traces from an early love that got into my wiring? In the stilted intonation of his native tongue he orders breakfast and champagne to be brought to the room. I don’t know his language, but I can tell he is being very polite to the receptionist. He puts down the phone, another big sigh, and stands at the other end of the room looking at me, legs long, one crossed over the other, torso, chest, shoulders bare, hair loose, still warm from sleep. I see me as he sees me. No wonder people become addicted to this, though the chemical hit is not as potent now as it once was. What a relief, to be thrown back to yourself as someone’s infatuation. I am skinnier, my legs are longer, my lines are more defined, my skin is flawless in this love-heart-eyes-emoji moment. The black in some of his tattoos is greying slightly, but his skin is still new enough to get away with them, the random collection of drawings on the pasty, undisciplined, but still somehow alluring body. Attraction is so strange. 

He tilts his head back and looks down at me through a smirk. 

The shape of his face, slightly feminine, very symmetrical. The black hair framing it just so. Slim, in good shape, but not exaggerated, not over developed. I’m not a fan of pecs, of too much muscle. The black tank top cut down low over the flanks, the skin lit up with health. Peter Steele was every goth girl’s dream lover, but I’m more of a Kenny Hickey girl. Black-booted, in those black jeans that aren’t skinny but aren’t boot cut, that a lot of musicians in the metal scene wore in the nineties, he flips his hair forward over his face and back over his shoulders and it falls easily into a soft mass. Back and forth across the stage, the guitar on his shoulders light as a piece of cardboard, hands forming the well-practised shape around the neck. A fluency of movement, a mastery of both body and object I’ve often envied, since at sixteen I decided I’d never be able to play guitar. 

(The nineties seem to be the sweet spot in Metal Cool. I remember a boyfriend of mine getting really into the 00′s emo look, skinny jeans, black hair plastered over one side of his face. It really was the least edgy of all the alternative looks though bested now by hipsters with their perma-beanies and rolled up jeans.) 

Anatoly’s kiss is perfect. It’s a twelve out of ten, gorgeous, amazing. The kiss is the thing, the kiss is the thing. If you don’t have the kiss, you don’t have anything. It’s been half an hour since we’ve kissed, and so I stop in the street and pull his big frame to me to kiss him. Months from now, a friend will laugh as I try to describe Anatoly’s kiss, and all I’ll be able to say is: 

It was that pink iced birthday cake I had as a child, it was bubble gum after mass on a Sunday. 

It’s light, it’s soft, it’s all the things a kiss should be, not a tepid tentacle jabbed in my mouth as though to claim it, like a flag atop a mountain. I’ve had great kisses ruined at the last moment by an inexplicable stab in the mouth, bringing the experience of the other person’s tongue back to what the kiss is supposed to transcend, to make you forget, a protruding clump of cells, flesh and bacteria, far from perfect. But Anatoly never lets me down like that. Kissing him is always Cupid and Psyche, glorious, indescribable. Anatoly is It, he is The One. 

I’m not in love with him, and I’m almost sure he isn’t in love with me, but we have a strong attraction and a lot of curiosity about one another, being from such different worlds. He is a beautiful cat, blinking awake in the late morning, too tall for my single bed. He’s a tough mother, too, and he doesn’t hesitate to let it be known. Walking through some busy square late at night, a man makes a remark, and Anatoly changes immediately, with no effort at all, his whole frame tense, he’s ready. I feel very safe with him. 

The kiss is the thing. We don’t sleep together, only beside one another because

You don’t use condoms?

We can use them if you want. 

So you don’t usually?

But he doesn’t try to convince me to let him away without a condom. The kiss is perfect enough on its own, anyway, so I’m content with that. He closes his big silver eyes and sleeps, and he is still beautiful in the morning when I let him out the big sash window so my tedious, jealous housemates will know I don’t want them to know, and will want to know even more. 

I like your lines. 

You mean my cat’s eyes?

He smiles, lets out a little low laugh. 

Your lines, your lines, shape of the face. Like a girl from my country. Very beautiful. 

I take this as a massive compliment, to be compared to the women of his native land.

One night, Anatoly says something that annoys me so much, I walk off, intending to go home alone, but when I get to the station, I have to admit that this is not much fun. I call him.

Where are you?

I’m with Igor, at the bar. 

Ok. Do you want to come with me?

Yeah. 

Five minutes later, he is there. The next day, I see Igor, and he shakes his head. 

Unbelievable. 

Eh?

How do you do it? I was at the bar with Toly and you called and he just left. 

I tell my mother that I got into a huff and stormed off and he came when I called him. 

But did you respect him after?

Actually, I respected him more.  

Anatoly turns the all-consuming love story on its head. We don’t sleep together, we never talk exclusivity, but by pure chance we happen upon something really wonderful. Years later, when the memory of Big Loves will only make me feel regret, embarrassment, I’ll remember Anatoly and be glad to have known him. There is something deeply restorative about being with him. I am at no risk of pregnancy or disease or jealousy. He responds to text messages, he gets in touch to make plans, he never hesitates to pay for his round or for the taxi home. He is big and strong and safe and as beautiful as a Greek statue. He is deserving of love poetry, whole volumes of it, not all that heart rending, takes-a-year-to-get-over, contributes-to-unhealthy-patterns bullshit. 

Seventeen and newly single, having cast off a dragging teenage romance, I was curious to explore the reach of my influence as a Good Looking Young Woman. I’d had Witty Banter with a few guys from my extended social circle at college, had a few new numbers in my Nokia and a-never-to-be-clearly-articulated mutual attraction with Michael, who was Older, and looked every inch the Serious Writer, but no one put the hook in me til I met Mark. It was pleasant to collect attractions, to see if I had been right, if such and such a guy was actually interested in me, but upon confirmation, my interest soon fizzled. Mark, however, was different, even to Michael, his peer. Mark was a Full Grown Man. 

Mark looked very different to my ex boyfriend, to the series of young men my own age I’d texted back and forth with a few times. He had that look that some men get in their early twenties, of grit, as if they’d feel like sand paper if you touched them. Grit and granite. A rough surface, grazing skin on contact. 

Mark was a Big Strong Man who knew about things that mattered, and that mattered to me. An irresistible blend of butch and fop. If he had asked me to go with him that night after the poetry soc reading (where his total and unapologetic lack of interest had completely thrown off the other members) I’d have gone. What would have happened? If I’d been lucky, he’d have ignored me in favour of some more socially relevant Third Year who bought all her books as individual editions and would never have dreamed of reading the Complete Works of anyone. But I might just as easily have been very unlucky, and he might have been the one to proposition me on the steps of the building I lived in one night instead of Michael, so much easier to wisely turn down.  

Poetry soc readings were small and intimate, and I don’t remember any of us having real plans to be published. But it gave structure to the week, the Wednesday night gathering, and there was familiarity and safety in it, because it was usually just a few members, sitting in a circle in one of the lecture rooms. We did not critique one another’s work, we just listened and admired, and if we didn’t really admire, we pretended to. You showed up with something you were very pleased with and read it proudly to a safe audience, as though part of some exclusive literary gathering at Oxford where all the members had titles. The other societies sneered at us for how satisfied we were with our humble set up. 

Look at those emo losers, reading poetry to one another! 

I wonder why it never occurred to me to point out that people who belonged to societies whose sole purpose was to play Magic: The Gathering couldn’t afford to throw stones? 

Mark was not a member, so what was he doing there? He was there because of me. Kind of.  I was to blame for Maria’s disgruntled delivery of her poetry that evening. 

Mark was friends with a guy I had struck up an unspoken attraction with, Michael. Michael’s charms lay in the fact of his being older and in his final year and how writerly he looked, his hair in his eyes, his glasses, his fondness for blazers. I imagine hypothetical readers shaking heads, rolling eyes, remembering their own experience of such types at college. (Do you feel a sense of futility, because there is nothing new under the sun, or a closeness to people you’ve never met?) 

Michael and I did not text one another all day and all night, didn’t meet regularly to drink cheap red from bottles, or if we did, I don’t remember. But I do remember how serious he looked whenever I read, fixing his gaze on the floor as though taking part in some ritual where it would be indiscreet to look while the scroll was being read. He was older than me, belonged to a far more sophisticated set than me, but he never sneered at me, never brandished his status. 

He just wanted to bang you!

At least he was going the right way about it. 

Mark, however, was a very different character. He was a friend of Michael’s that I had met at some social event in the students’ bar, or during some bumping-into on the way to lectures. I’ve forgotten the details. Though I still remember my first impression of him, tall, high up like some object I was reaching for and couldn’t quite get to. Smiling, a knowing smile, big strong hands balled into fists in the pocket of his grey hoodie, the thick tweed trench hanging from the granite frame. 

Typical female! 

(That’s my projection of my hypothetical reader, who is, inexplicably, an incel.)

Typical woman! Falling for the bastard who’ll treat her badly!

(This assessment is not quite accurate, though I see where you’re coming from.)

I can’t remember why Mark was there that night. Had I asked Michael to bring him? He certainly wouldn’t have been there just to see me, inconsequential, overly-enthusiastic little First Year. He’d have had some event to attend with Michael after, and maybe his ego needed some inflating. That was something I could provide. He sat there on the college-standard plastic chair, one big leg folded over the other, and took no trouble to stop his thoughts showing on his face as regular members read their work. After the reading, Maria scuttled off quickly, indignant. She knew it was my fault he was there.

One by one the others said goodbye, til it was only Michael and Mark and I. Mark began talking excitedly to Michael about the event they were going to, opened a bottle of beer and pulled a gold cravat from his satchel. Michael nodded and said little, sensing Mark taking up my attention - typical, the fucking bastard, typical! Though I’d be willing to bet there was never any mention of this after, never any dispute. 

The cravat was the wrong colour, it clashed with his deep red hair, but it was so ridiculous it only heightened the effect of his huge, exaggerated confidence. After he’d arranged it just so, I seem to remember him reaching out a hand to me, a big broad hand, his right hand. I can’t place this image in its original context, can’t remember why he did it, but it contains clues about both of us.  A tall Devil, offering temptation in an open palm. 

He leaned forward, a thick elbow on a thick knee, the thick jaw pressing down on a thick palm, the plastic chair insufficient beneath him. He had good skin, that neither a razor nor embarrassment could redden. He leaned forward, his thick frame slumped, wearing his Patient Listening face though neither patient nor listening, waiting for his turn to speak. The chubby girl with her hair in a half-plait came to the end of her poem abruptly. She finished reading without the usual dwindling delivery, the sense of a feather coming slowly to the ground to signal the end. She just stopped. This was the first reading Mark had attended and Maria was thrown off. I didn’t like Maria. She had a habit of making herself into a victim over the smallest of things, listening for a slight in every change in your breath. I didn’t like Mark either, only I was too young to understand it, and he was a lot nicer to look at than Maria, trembling with irritation at her Wednesday night ritual being disturbed by this intruder in Lord Byron cosplay. 

What would I do differently if I could go back, knowing what I know now? 

I’d live like a nun. I’d probably still be a virgin now, seeing through the hype, sparing myself the risk of pregnancy, the stress of STI tests. If I could go back to the start and tell myself what I know now, I wouldn’t bother going out and trying to enjoy people, trying to feel the way I thought I should at that age. I’d stay in and study, go to bed early. 

I very much doubt I’d go out with any of my exes, but if I did, I certainly wouldn’t go chasing after Tommy after that little stunt he pulled. I imagine myself at eighteen, pulling the Nokia from my bag and seeing the message. Instead of panic flaring white in my gut, I’d smile. I would have other things to attend to.

Ok, son, do what you have to do. But I’m doing nothing. 

Well, what now? Now, nothing. Now let the wide open space stretch out, there’s nothing to be scared of.

I’d observe people. I wouldn’t perform a personality, would never say things to be funny, to be thought entertaining. I would not engage people like Mark on their opinions on Important Subjects. A strapping, masculine boy, let him decorate the place. But a statue on the mantelpiece is just a statue on the mantelpiece, however handsome it may be. 

And I’d never text anyone back. 

Since posting the tiny story The Playwright in his Final Year a few days ago, I’ve been thinking about that character and my attraction to him. When I say my, I of course mean that of the composite whose voice I assume in the telling. What does my interest in him say about what I find attractive?

I stated that Mark, the undergraduate playwright, was a bastard, “plain and simple”. Not a Good Guy. He couldn’t resist the urge to blight my naive excitement about a book with his unfounded elitism, ideas he had misunderstood in lectures on Very Important Subjects, fermented into sour snobbery. My attraction to him is more interesting than his character. Was my young brain addicted to looks and charm that concealed something slightly rotten?

I knew that Mark would never consider me girlfriend material. Why was that? The problem wasn’t looks. It wasn’t that I had no ideas, thoughts, responses, took no interest in things, had no passions or nothing to say. I felt it very distinctly, this cut-off point in possibility. He would smile his wolfish smile at me, it didn’t hurt to let his eyes linger on me, and my young babbling bolstered his sense of sophistication, his chic, better-knowing cynicism in the face of uncomplexed joy.  But I was not fit for anything more than a passing amusement, eyes rolling at my unoriginal elation.  

I was too young to understand that what interested me about Mark was only his face, his bulky physical strength, and his status. It was not the truth of him or the talent he believed he possessed. He belonged to a tribe that never questioned his position among them. If I were closely associated with him, then I would come closer to this myself. He had a social currency that would make certain things possible for me. There was dishonesty on both sides of our push and pull. 

It’s alright for you, you’re beautiful!

I was eighteen when a friend shouted this at me, her defence at my pointing out bad behaviour unrelated to either of our appearances. She could shout at me as long as she was shouting something flattering. She wasn’t in the right, but she had been wronged by life, the implication being that she was not beautiful. She had been dealt an unfair hand. She should not have to apologise to me, blessed as I was with good looks. She had cornered herself and didn’t want to be wrong. (I’ve never understood people who refuse to say they’re sorry. Do they feel that they’ll be depleted by an apology? What do they imagine this depleted state would feel like? Would there be physical symptoms, like being low in Vitamin D? And is it that they don’t want to say sorry, or that they aren’t sorry?)

It’s alright for you, you’re beautiful! Just let me have this one!

But was it alright for me?

If I could rewrite the past, I would laugh and toss my hair in a flattering mid-shot and utter

Darling! Don’t you know? Looks are only an advantage if you’re plain on the inside! You’re going to be just fine!

and strut off into the sunset and choose better friends. 

I wonder how the one or two people who look at my Instagram excerpts will feel about this title. 

Are you really writing a blog post about how beautiful you are?

Actually it’s about how unattractive I was to boys in my early youth. The title statement refers specifically to the experience of my teens and most of my twenties, although I’m not going to provide a detailed account of this experience just yet. 

In my younger youth I knew that objectively speaking I was good looking but that I wasn’t an acceptable crush. I had a feeling that at some point in the distant future, I would be able to access my looks, to wield them, but it would not be any time soon. There was something about me, far too much enthusiasm and no skill at all when it came to the game, to remaining 

aloof

and mysterious 

and disinterested. If you couldn’t do that, it didn’t matter what you looked like. Girls far plainer than I always wound up with my love interests. 

Even in later life, when for reasons unknown to me I did become acceptable, my looks were not enough to make men 

text back 

pay their share

or behave appropriately in times of crises. In my life, at least, looks have been no advantage at all. An initial hook, maybe, a pleasant first impression that invites projection and narrative, but what good are they?

Footnote:

The writing I’m posting during this 28 day challenge is

underwritten 

overwritten 

begins as a strong concept but doesn’t follow through.

When I was eighteen I had my first experience of being dumped via text. My Nokia vibrated in the middle of a third semester lecture, bringing the news that I was now a free and single young woman. No discussion would be entertained.

If only I’d had the insight to never respond, to simply do nothing. How wonderfully underwhelming for him, how unflattering. The phone silent, unvibrating. Silence stretching out further and further into the space where the frantic protest should have been.

Did she... did she get the message? 

Hours later, still nothing. 

Did she lose her phone?

Nothing, nothing. Never any acknowledgement coming. 

Is it that easy for her to never see me again?

Fabulous, mysterious nothing, endlessly swirling with possibilities. 

What might the experience have been if I had kept silent? The beginning of a new way of living, placing myself firmly in the centre of my own story,

Ok, he’s gone. Now what?

And really given thought to what came next, the possibility of it. 

Extreme youth was on my side. I had time to waste, wealth to spare. But I didn’t know the power of it. Maybe youth is more of a sad wasteland then, than experience?