It’s been so long since I got butterflies in my stomach
But he’s weird and he’s wonderful, wit sharp as a blade – he’s an equal
I don’t even mind that he’s an Aquarius
Or a gin-drinker, a Cambridge fellow with the ivy league prep
I take off his glasses when we’re alone
I let myself get washed away in his passion
I listen to every tick of the metronome
As we out-weird each other in conversation
And giggle when we lose
It’s just this odd, dizzying gravity
And the smile he cracks when he swings upside down on the bar
An athlete and a scholar
And I’m not in love but I could be
If I let myself fall
Maybe I will
Maybe we’ll be exclusive one day
Not just yet though, not now
There are too many flavours in this jar
Too many colours in the rainbow
Granted, all pale when he smiles
And I never thought I’d date a neurosurgeon but here we are
Life’s strange yet I’m even stranger
I won’t let myself fall just yet
Even though I’m so damn close
He’s a curiosity and I’m a kid with a jar
Waiting for strange moths
By the fame of a single candle
Come to me
It won’t hurt a bit
I’ll crush your windpipe in silence
It’s Pete Doherty’s diary I’m writing whenever I fall out of love with myself for a little while and start missing pieces of my past.
There’s a grand, heart-shaped hole in my soul where a boy used to be – its blackened edges are healing well now, or at least so much better than they were last year. I didn’t take the road most go down when something breaks – I didn’t get a new boo to distract me from past sorrows and indiscretions this time around. I said I did. I lied.
I kept me to myself, closed off and drew my barriers clearer in the sand. Torching all I had, all I was with him allowed me to start afresh. Tabula rasa. A new me – a newborn me. And just like a child, I learnt everything again. I walked, and talked, and thought, and felt, and learnt to love myself in ways I haven’t done so in a long time. And I got healthier, and I pursued my passions, made new friends, slept in the arms of platonic best friends without ever letting them have more of me than I was ready to give. And I still cried for him, every now and again. Every couple of months, I’d have this one night when I’d just cry and the tears wouldn’t stop for a while – weeks passed, a new year started. One night I realised that I didn’t know who or what I was crying for anymore.
I moved to Scotland and met a guy – a couple of them, actually. It’s been the most fun, just playing around and laughing at 2 am shadows, and then I moved on. I held myself tighter at night.
A few weeks passed before I let my first love hold me again and heal me, breath life into me in ways no one else ever could. For once, he gave all he had and gave it selflessly – he let me go without a word once I felt like moving on again.
I met long-forgotten loves and various shadows of the past along the way, and in a twist of fate they all seemed to gather around me in a circle of love. I don’t know why. I don’t know how they knew I needed it.
It’s a weird thing, realising that you’re loved. Truly loved, not for any reason at all, just for you. The pure you – your essence. I couldn’t love myself like that for a long time and so I didn’t think anyone else could, either. I was a wicked creature for a good couple of years.
I really miss Kieran. Fuck, he’s just about the best man I’ve ever known. And he was my best friend, truly, my best friend before we became anything else – his sharp wit was only ever rivalled by the purity of his heart. I’d give anything for his friendship now – and we still talk, sometimes, and I still care. There’s just a lot left unsaid, still, and I’ve hurt him in ways I’ll never be able to fully atone for. If I could change anything, any one thing… I’d keep his friendship forever. I’d keep him close to my heart.
That’s what I’m crying about, most days. Boys and girls there was never a shortage of – and yet only a precious few of them got more than a couple of laughs out of me before I fled. The vast majority of those who did I managed to keep close, even as we took different routes and said our goodbyes. Not him. Not Kieran. I was a stupid child chasing my tail in circles and singing along to Dustland fairytale in dingy karaoke bars – I did everything I could to push back the moment when it would all inevitably come crashing down, even if it was just by one day, one breath at a time.
I got caught up in a fantasy, a twisted forever-world of sorts, one where I kept getting sicker and sicker the more people wanted to bask in my pale, inebriating glory. I was suffering so much and people liked it – they helped maintain my circles of gloom, my twisted black flips of fate. They told me I was their muse while they watched me die.
And so I got sicker, I got thinner, I got more and more dizzy by the day. Everyone ignored it. I was barely 40 kgs by the time I got myself into therapy, the kind with the waiting lists and nutritionists telling you that it’s all about control. Maybe it is. Never knew I was anorexic until the day I got diagnosed and walked out of the hospital in what felt like the first sober moment I had for years.
Time finally felt real. And so did life – suddenly I was somewhere; embodied. I was made responsible for me and I decided to carry the burden instead of hiding away in another sickening love story of sorts. I told no one but my two best friends. I worked towards making it through every single day. One / day / at / a / time.
I learned to love again. I re-learned the art of shutting the fuck up and actually listening to people when they talk, of remembering names, and faces, and what happened to that haunted house that your grandpa used to live in. The army jacket. Life used to slip past me. I never really listened to anyone. I wasn’t really there.
And now I suddenly was, and there was just so much love around me. I never knew I had so many friends.
So I listened. Made time for them. Stopped lying. Learnt to be present. I became a better friend. I learnt to love people back.
And yet there are few that will never know or bother – there are the echoes that still haunt me through sleepless nights.
I can’t think of how life would have been different had I made the commitment to heal myself way before I actually have. I do have an idea, though – I just can’t torture myself with indulging in it for longer than a nanosecond at a time.
I hold my breath and count to ten as then clock strikes 5 and shadows flee every which way – an echo of a future memory makes my ears ring with loneliness. I’m fine now – I’ll just have to learn to live with the knowledge that some things cannot be fixed. That some friends are gone, that some mistakes cannot be undone.
There’s a couple of people I miss. I’m not sure if I’ll ever see them again. I’ll cry for them, still, just in case I do – just in case there’s still anything there to cry for.
5.26 AM.
I’m not sad anymore. I’m just learning to live with the echoes of my mistakes.
Or at least a place that feels a lot like it – an old Victorian building by a winding road somewhere up or down a hill – it’s a slippery slope, directions – where I can hear the trains as they pull into the station nearby, just a hedge between our back garden and the rails, blinking lights and crooked, gothic-looking windows on the other side of the tracks.
Redland station.
And we sometimes go down to our local for a drink, follow the crooked roads along what appears to be a row of enchanted houses on our way down. Their windows light up with a sizzling, will-o-wisp glow as we walk past.
It’s different now – so many things are, and yet we live in this glowbox of twilights and daybreaks ever-fizzling as we submerge and soak in the rhythm of memories we’ll write even sweater songs about. Ta-thum. Ta-thum. There goes the ancient drum, a battle call that used to strike fear into the hearts of those who came before us. We’re going deeper this time, to the days before, to the memories as yet unlived…
It’s autumn every day, here in Cotham. Spring never came and summer skipped us in a heartbeat – in a funny way it’s all about the decay when we dance.
We used to love, once, and I remember those times with no fondness in my heart. I don’t actually remember them, to be perfectly honest. I don’t have those memories anymore – they’ve all burnt to the ground with any semblance of a feeling I had left. The king is dead – long live the queen.
I despise the person I was back then. I’ll forgive her one day – I can only hope so, anyway. Because I haven’t forgiven her for giving up on me, not yet, not to date. And she shouldn’t have, either; I’m braver and bolder and so much different now than she would have thought possible. I’ve changed. I’ve grown. I’ve killed her. I had to.
And I’m always a newborn at daybreak, I once wrote. Well, I’m a child now – a toddler, re-learning the ropes of walking a path I can’t talk about just yet. It’s elevating me above my former life and let me tell you, the view’s already worth it.
I let everything fall away. I built myself up again. You don’t really know me anymore.
I learnt to listen to the sound of silence, and my thoughts when I’m alone. I can sit with them now. I don’t need to be distracted.
And I fall asleep in a room enveloped in the soft glow of star-shaped fairy lights, looking out onto the hills in the distance, their slopes spattered with lights that sparkle like gem stones as silence and magic blanket the land. Everything sleeps. So will I, soon.
I’ll just take another long breath in and trace the dark lines of rolling hills against the horizon as the night drags its way towards another spell of daylight and the witchlights blinking at me from the other side of the tracks welcome me home.
You’re my heart and my soul and I don’t care what anyone has to say about that. I won’t ever stop talking to the dead; not that you’re really gone or dead to me, anyway. I lived the better part of a quarter of a century with you around – and that’s a bond I won’t break, not for love or money.
Don’t worry too much about me, JJ – I love you and I know that I’m going to be okay. Thank you for everything. Always, always, always in my heart, brother.
No one knows about Ally. One of my many lives, one of my many skins, one of my many pasts – for months, Ally and I lived in this strange bubble. We didn’t know each other’s last names or phone numbers – we’d just meet on campus and go on long walks in the forest, passing deer tracks and posters of some of Redhook’s washed up serial killers.
I still remember her scar, that long sliver of shiny skin running down her back that filtered its way through the shadows as she pulled back long strands of her jet-black hair. She had the palest skin. Half-moons and crescents of freckles, valleys between her bones, black ink that curled its way down her slender figure.
We’d sit together on her bed. An enchanted forest of memories strung up on her wall, posters, pictures, stags and antlers, drawings of a field in bloom, twigs and witchy paraphernalia – she’d put a spell on anyone. And she did, every single time. She moved to the rhythm of a different age, swinging gently in the moonlight, whispering to me about death and sorrow and love so selfish that it burnt a hole in the both of us – she would wince and close her eyes, long, thick lines of lashes falling against each other as the first wave of acidic nothing hit us both.
She would teach me about sickness. True, unhinged, unbridled, raging sickness. Pure, selfish paranoia, hate, rage, malice, and comradery.
I fell in love with the feeling. I fell asleep in her arms more often than I cared to admit, some time after her boytoy dropped by to spoil us with a bag full of goodies and words, endless words, kind words, words that felt like butterflies for a split second – fleeting as all my fancies, I only liked Jason for brief moments before Ally told him to leave. We’d play in the shadows from thereon out, nor friends, neither enemies, nor lovers, neither sisters, we would tear the world apart, descend into our shared sickness, and love on whichever wretched and miserable words came to mind on the way.
I would kiss her nape in the moonlight. We would lie on the grass, in a little clearing by the Hudson river, talking about dropping acid and other unspeakable means of nihilist, millennial escapism. Her fingers would find mine in the grass, crawling like a spider, moving swiftly against the dew – my brain lit up with swirls of colours as our hands touched.
In line at another cupcake shop, winking at the cute barista with the chipped black nail polish – she’d grab hold of me and feed me poison and before long I was riding shotgun in an old Chevy, resting my arm against the door and letting the wind catch in my wavy strands, a sun-soaked paradise of mid-May bloom, fragrant air, and a pair of raspberry vodka goggles, pink fog curling into lenses as we drifted through the Catskills.
‘What’s on the other side?’
We never got the answer.
Reaching below, behind, be…fore? There was a time. There was a time for everything, even remembrance, months and months of witchery and walks and woes as yet unspoken.
Ally… where are you now? Who are you now? How are you now, Ally? Do you still think of me? Do you still think of us, and the lace-like light filtering through your curtains, those moments where there was nothing but silence and us in the world, just us, us and no one else? Do you ever breathe out and wonder if any of that was even real? Or what my last name is? Do you ever wonder where I am now, if I am now, how I am now? Do you ever look at your tattoos and remember how I used to trace them, learning each curve by the month, by the hour? Or how I used to snap pictures of you in one of your oversized sweaters, a hefty bottle of brown paper-clad spirit in one hand and who knows what else in the other? Or how we used to hate, then love until the very first light? First blood, first breath, first sight – what was it you felt when you stole that first glance?
What was it I said when I’ve seen you last?
It all feels like a blurry memory of a self I no longer recognise. No one knew me back then, not for those few months. It’s like everything fell away in a vacuum of sorts, a bubble of an episode of American Psycho – three years feel like a couple of lifetimes when I think back on it. When I think back on us.
Were we ever friends? Was it love or was it just magic? Pure, vicious, guttural magic. Dark glow and flashes of pale skin under the moonlight. Shadows, moonlight, shadows, moonlight, shadows… riding shotgun in an old Chevy until the road ran out and we were left with nothing but a memory of springtime symphonies and the 4 AM silence.
It’s harder than you think. An abyss deeper than death and sadder than any sorrow. Echoes fill the empty space in between. I never, ever, lose time whispering to the wind – sometimes we close the rift. Fingertips press against each other or they very nearly do, just another nanometer, just another ‘I miss you’ from a timeline where things played out in your favour and I’m but an echo…
I miss you.
I dream of you often – I don’t think I’ll ever stop whispering to the wind.
Sometimes I still get that sinking feeling,
That dreaded whisper in the night,
Curving its way up my clavicles;
He holds me tight, fingertips pressing
Into my flesh
Sometimes I close my eyes and pray
That they reach my heart
And rip it out of my chest.
And for all I know,
My brother, he loves me so
And we have this rule, between him and I;
He doesn’t ask questions and I get to lie
About love and loss and previous journeys
He takes it in his stride. Never asks me
Who I’ve been for the last year or so
When I return to him, I’m always brand new
Like the moon to his starry night
Oh, my brother loves me right
And does so in a silent, ever present way,
Even though he knows that I can’t stay
I never do – he’s okay with that
Lets me roam, lets me thread
Through the tall grass as the moon
Sets the sky alight;
Brother, hold me tight,
For in this maze, I’m dreadfully lost…
Pale, cold, white as a ghost
Waiting for the tide to turn,
My magic to return
As the next moon rises
I’m not sick with sadness anymore
Quite sane these days, if I shall say
He finds me and plants a kiss on my cheek,
He says he loves me anyway
And as much as it touches my half-crescent heart
The next night I’m gone, I’m gone, I’m gone again;
Gone with the dark
J's photoalbum of youth, and loves, and in betweens 