The Naked Truth

My best friend says she’s worked out what she is, she’s an adventurer.  The next day, when she’s driving me to the station before I embark on the uncharacteristically supremely romantic gesture of a five-hour round trip with a chaste cup of coffee in the middle of it, I tell her I was thinking about what she said (I thought about it in the bath, which is where I have all my best thoughts).  She says that after she told me, my reaction (my non-reaction) made her go home and write in her notebook that if she was going to have any more revelations about being an adventurer she should keep them to herself.  My non-reaction, though, wasn’t because I thought she was nuts, it was because I thought she was right:  yes, that’s absolutely right – now on to the next thing.  She does have this unquenchable conviction that life is an adventure, and the next exciting thing is waiting round the corner.  It can make her exhausting to be with, but I feed off her energy as she feeds off my peace.

Lying in the bath, what I was thinking was that the term adventurer has somehow more negative connotations than I know she meant it to, it has suggestions of opportunism that don’t apply in this case.  She said that she was always looking for  fellow adventurer and never found one, and I thought that what I was looking for/invariable find is cerebral types with an ingrained streak of rebelliousness – and then I thought no, that’s not it.  It’s adventurers that I unerringly head towards, but the difference is that I don’t venture until I’m slammed in the face with it (and then I’ll make the most of it: my rallying cry when faced with seemingly hopeless adversity was always: “It’s an adventure!” but it was less a reveling in the circumstances and more an invincible belief in my ability to survive and come out the other end with a good story to tell: nothing like a good face-slamming to up the narrative value).  Because I tend to stand around looking sideways waiting for life to wander into me, I admire those who run into it headlong, and I value those who grab hold of me and make me run into it too.

I suppose that although I was never a scuba-diving. Parachuting, white-water rafting adventurer like she is, I was once more of an adventurer, even if what I was seeking out was nihilism, and now what I seek is a happier temporary oblivion.  My adventures gave me cracks in my heart and soul, not my bones, and the thrill was less of one and more of a growing dread, in the end.  That’s what I’ve learnt to avoid, or at least to avoid heedlessly: I weigh up the options more carefully now before I expose myself to bruises on my inner skin.  I like myself for my ability to learn from my mistakes, even if I bemoan my tendency to have to learn the hard way, and am sometimes perplexed by the lessons that haven’t  yet sunk in.  Perhaps it’s just that fellow feeling I search out: the adventurers who have learnt some things the hard way, but who haven’t stopped believing that it is still all an adventure.

I’m painting you a picture.  An actual, on-canvas one I mean, not one that depends on your imagination interpreting my words. I’m not entirely sure why I’m doing it, or where you’ll hang it, but that’s the least important part of the equation.

It’s just a series of coloured lines, unexceptional looking, if a little garish; you’d get much the same effect from a sheet of wrapping paper (except that the lines would be straighter: I can’t draw a straight line to save my life, far less paint one). It’s just every line of colour means something , and I painted them all with love.

Somehow, the summer is working out better than I expected.  Partly this is because the temperature dropped dramatically, and while everyone else was moaning about the worst July in living memory, I wandered round happily saying, “Oh, NOW I get it!  Summer’s great, isn’t it?” and, having run out of furniture to paint, pulled out my oil paints.  It’s been a very long time since I painted: I keep forgetting to be kind to myself, and spend quite a lot of time in despair, and an inordinate amount of time every morning scraping off all the paint I applied the day before.  But there’s a moment, when I’m applying the next layer, and forgetting to remember that I wished I could work out what I’m doing, when I’m perfectly happy.  And because I think that much of life is made up of tiny moments of isolated perfect happiness, that is enough.

Everything else seems tempered by a rather lost yearning, but I’d still rather have that than not feel.

I don’t react well to summer.  The heat first poleaxes, and then deranges me.  Right now, I’m in the deranged stage.  Last summer I painted my whole apartment in heat so severe that the paint was drying on the brush faster than I could get it on the walls.  This summer I lay around on my sofa for a week or so staring sweatily at my living room, and came to the conclusion it looked “transient”.  I’m still not entirely sure what my soup-like brain meant by that, or why I felt this was so disturbing, given my fondness for rescuing furniture from tips, and my penchant for using outdoor furniture inside: it seems hard for it NOT to seem transient.   My solution was to buy more bookcases, and paint anything that would stand still long enough, and now my living room is a library with a sofa in it, which seems to me pretty much ideal – and as usual, the hotter it got, the more paint I applied.

That’s it for the summer now, really – I can’t muster up any enthusiasm for anything that can’t be painted.  Or at least not until I go away.

“Those years were mainly shit, but there was some good stuff, and most of that was you.”  I find it hard to reply at first, because I’m so stunned at how selective his memory is.  Finally I remind him that he was actually pretty horrible to me. “ I TOLD you I’d been to rehab, “ he says, but he apologises, quite formally and in a way that makes me think he has forgotten the particulars.

Later I decide, just as formally, to forgive him.  It occurs to me that my memory is also selective: I remember the years when he was one of the people I loved most in the world, but dimly, through a haze of bitterness: I mainly remember the last part, when he was trying to destroy me; I pile up and pick over incidents scattered through those years, and choose to forget my part in them.  I don’t make excuses for him, but it’s too easy to remember myself as an innocent victim, and to forget the slow and steady emotional papercuts I inflicted too.  It crosses my mind that I would think that someone who refused to forgive me for what I did in my drink-and-drug-addled extended adolescence an idiot, and it’s not as though I, too, have not had to ask forgiveness, and been grateful to receive it.

From him I learned to watch my back, and to recognize an abusive relationship a mile off.  I should have learnt that a serious drug habit and amorality have to co-exist, but that was a lesson I made other people learn.  But it’s over.  The past is the past, and some people have to learn lessons the hard way, and I’m tired of picking it all over.

The thing about him, and all these boys from my past, is that if you get half-way to redemption, you remember the bits you learnt from – the bad bits.  You forget, until the past comes looking for you again, that somewhere in there you were loveable, that the things you effortfully forgive yourself for are the things others effortlessly forget.  I review the past in my head, and tot up all the bad I did, and think that I’m better now, but who is to say that in twenty years time I won’t be standing in judgment on this present me, who is hardly a picture of untarnished goodness, paragon though I tend to think I am?  And maybe in the future I’ll dismiss this present me in favour of the future me, so much older and wiser (again), and forget that it was still always me in there.   We are more than our deeds.

I hold to this, and decide to see him again, and although my memory has tried not to hold on to the good that I used to see in him, I let myself build up the good I see now.

I hate the summer. I hate the heat, I hate the clothes, and I hate the amount of feet on display. It’s quite possible I’d feel differently if the heat didn’t make me want to throw up/pass out, if I went brown, and if I didn’t have an anti-fetish about toes, but as it is, I hate the summer and complain relentlessly about it all the time that I am relishing holidays and not spending an hour in the morning trying to warm up enough to take off my fifteen layers of clothes in order to get into a hot bath.

Mainly I hate the clothes, and mainly this is because I live in the land of people who go a lovely toasty brown as soon as the sun appears, and therefore I do not appear interestingly pale, but rather sadly underdone. If I had lovely brown legs, I’d happily wear little summer dresses, and if I didn’t hate feet I’d happily wear strappy little sandals, and not complain at all, or sit around in a haze of heat irritation looking critically at other people’s clothing choices.

Things I’d say to other people about their clothing choices
Anyone wearing low-cut jeans: Girls, I know you looked at yourself in the mirror before coming out and thought you looked really cute showing off a pretty curvy waist and a nice brown tummy between your t-shirt and your jeans, and you do – from the front you look very cute. But have you seen yourself from the back? The miniscule little bit of body fat you have has all been shoved up over your waistband, and your bottom looks as though it’s been put in a sandwich toaster. I’m not quite sure that’s the look you were going for.

Anyone wearing harem pants: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Never has such a horrible garment been invented. You couldn’t possibly have bought those because you thought they looked good, so you must have been sucked in by the hype, which is all lies. If I read another word from some deranged fashion writer claiming that they are comfortable and flattering to all body types, I will scream. How comfortable can something be that makes you walk as though you’d just shat yourself? And the horrible truth about them is that they are unflattering to everyone, across the board: they make tall slender girls look as though they are tall not-slender girls, and anyone else – particularly anyone else with hips or a tummy (who seem irresistibly drawn to them) – look as though they have more hips and tummy than they started out with.

Anyone wearing weird blouson-type tops: Why? Really, why? If you have a waist, it’s lost in the billows, and if you don’t have one I’m afraid it’s billowing out over the daft tight bit at the bottom of your top (which is sitting in a particularly hideous way at the top of your bottom).

Things other people would say to me about my clothing choices (and sometimes do)
Aren’t visible bra straps so at least a decade ago? Oh, shut up. Until it stops being hot enough to wear strappy little tops, and until bra manufacturers and strappy little top manufacturers manage to align their strap positioning, I’m going to be flashing a plethora of straps. And anyway, this isn’t just a summer thing: I have such weedy narrow shoulders that things are always falling off them, and my bra straps are always on display at some point. Interestingly, this works as a perfectly good reason to buy expensive underwear (better visible-strap quality).

Leggings? Why? Really, why? OK, look, I really tried to resist the leggings-lure. I swore that I’d so overdone leggings in the 80s that nothing would induce me back into them. But then I wobbled, and finally I fell back into their soft, stretchy embrace again. Plus, in the part of my mind which revises my fashion-rules to suit myself, you can wear leggings with a little summer dress in a way that you can’t wear stockings with it: this works even if you’re wearing cropped leggings that show roughly the same amount of pale leg-skin as would be showing if you just wore the dress (OK, strictly speaking, probably none of this works, but it does in my heat-frazzled mind, quite possibly in the same way that other people look at themselves in harem pants and think “Comfortable AND flattering! Result!”). By the same reasoning, you can wear leggings and a top, and if people think you are wearing a ridiculously short dress with nothing more than a pair of tights, you can just roll your eyes and say “But they’re LEGGINGS” which are practically trousers, even though they look exactly like tights (my favourite piece of clothing is a pair of glorified leggings which masquerade as trousers (they have pockets and a zip), allowing me to pretend that I’m perfectly respectably dressed whilst still basically saying: Check out my long skinny legs and pert little ass). You may well mock leggings, people, but they are a godsend for people who don’t tan and who are vain about their legs. Granted, they are kind of the anti-sex (although apparently not as much as my much-loved wooly tights), but they can be yanked down to your knees pretty quickly.

If something is too tight to wear underwear with it, don’t you think that maybe it’s just TOO TIGHT? No. (I can’t answer at any more length because then I might stop remembering to hold my tummy in).

Don’t be silly, of course your legs aren’t too white to wear dresses! … Oh. Right. Leggings – good choice. And I was wearing fake tan!

You know, there’s a fine line between “quirky and original” and “odd”. I know. This IS quirky and original.

“I got my period.”

“That’s not entirely a surprise,” he says.

“What do you mean? I think it’s a couple of days early.”

“Well, you do get kind of… rampant before your period. And you were kind of…manic.”

What does he mean? I think. Surely I’m always pretty enthusiastic?

Oh.

“You mean when I said “Let’s have a nap,” and then got pissed off with you because you fell asleep instead of feeling me up?”

There’s a telling pause. I think he did point out, after I’d prodded him awake indignantly (both indignant by the time I’d woken him up) that it had, after all, been me who had suggested sleep, and also that we had been fucking for four hours more or less non-stop before that.

Worse was still to come, though. A couple of months later, I stand in the doorway and look at him.

“OK, you know when I said, “I know you’re having a major life crisis and aren’t really thinking about orgasms, but that doesn’t necessarily apply to me, too?” (He obliged).

“Yes?”

“I just want you to know that I’m not completely insensitive. I just got my period.”

He graciously accepts hormones as an excuse for complete insensitivity. I make a mental note to try to remember not to act like a sex-starved bitch next time I’m premenstrual, and put it in the same place I put the mental note I’d made previously.

I still don’t get the point of exercise, which is disappointing because you’d have thought that after plugging away faithfully(ish) for over a year, I’d be a bit more enthusiastic. Well, I’m not. It still a chore and a drag, and I only really do it so that I can smugly say that I have done it.

Granted, there are some advantages. It’s great at building up your stamina for sex, which is often useful (“I seem to have been administering this blowjob for a very long time in a rather awkward position… my lips have gone numb, but hey! my inner thighs are holding up, my back is fine, and there’s no problem with my neck… if it wasn’t for my morbid fear of dislocating my jaw again, I could carry on forever! Oh, thank God…”) and while I would punch anyone in the balls who suggested that I wasn’t fully flexible and the bendiest thing ever before I started doing bendy stuff with my clothes ON, I’ve noticed a marked tendency not to feel as though my joints are all facing the wrong way the next day (although obviously if you foolishly point this out to anyone, they will then double their efforts to pretzel you further, in the hopes that you will be staggering about the next day bandy-legged). And there are the muscles and general tonedness, which is quite nice, but I didn’t feel massively untoned beforehand. Even the thrill of having stomach muscles for the first time in my life is wearing off now.

I STILL don’t get that feelgood feeling about exercise – mainly I get the feelbad about putting my body through such torture. The only good thing is that I like my body more in the morning when I’ve exercised the day before, but even then I sometimes get confused and like it before I remember that I didn’t yoga (there’s nothing much going on in my brain in the morning until after coffee). Also, I can’t escape the feeling that I’d like my body all the time if it would just melt off a kilo without me having to give up roast potatoes. I STILL want a cigarette break halfway through, and I’m STILL only really motivated by competitiveness: when my best friend injured her thigh playing soccer and couldn’t train for a month, I felt it would be unfair to carry on without her, and then I was still sympathy-unexercising by the time she’d injured her ankle.

Now of course, a thought has occurred: maybe all that stuff about endorphins is rubbish? Maybe “endorphins” is just another word for smug? Oh, NOW I get it!

Half-way through the morning, I start thinking of old slights. It’s not my habit to bear grudges, or to brood on other people’s sins of omission, so when I do I do it with a vengeance. Last night for some reason it was the prospect of anything happening to my daughter that tormented me. I’d write it off as premenstrual except that I doubt it. It wasn’t until I found myself going out for coffee with my best friend, and realised we haven’t quite got a grip on the notion of being on holiday that it all started to make sense.

The summer stretches ahead full of possibility and potential – helped by the fact that although it’s hot it isn’t the debilitating heat that makes me want to lie in a bath of icecubes until it’s over – and I keep thinking I should have got started on it already. But the more I think about it, the more I think I need to just decompress first, and let it all go for a few days.

a love letter in the mail.

I used to be far better at carving out time to write: now I write at a snail’s pace and forget which notebook I wrote it in before I manage to write it here. I had mainly written the post below when I read Marianne’s post about how people see us, and I think they are related.

We show a face to the world, and whether it is all of our face or only an aspect of it, how it is interpreted is dependent on other people’s willingness to see it. I think I see all of the people I love best, but I’m observer by nature: I watch out for the half-seen glimpses. I’m sure I’m as guilty as any one else of projecting my own image of someone else onto people I’m less interested in, though: I accept my impression of them, and don’t look further. I think that my loved ones are more talented and interesting than everyone else because I have been willing to let them reveal themselves: there has been something in them to attract me to them enough that I have wanted to look below the surface. By the same token, there has been something in me that has made them let me reveal myself (and maybe, with lovers, that’s what they actively look for: they look to find something that will let them justify taking a risk in return for a contained emotional and sexual freedom). Whether they are friends or lovers, I love them for seeing me.

One day, three separate people said, in different ways, that I allow them to be themselves. I must have been radiating compassionate love and understanding across the universe that day. A while ago I read an article about friendship that seemed to suggest that we value friendships only because our friends are people who allow us to be ourselves. I took issue with it, because I would hope that more than that, friends are people who actively add to the sum of human happiness by being their own unique selves: I would be sad to think that my friends didn’t gain as much from my funny little ways and invaluable insights as I do from theirs.

But the three people who spontaneously burst out with gratefulness are more than friends, and that shifts everything slightly sideways. A lover once asked me if I was more myself with friends or lovers, and I eventually concluded that the answer was lovers, because the nature of clandestine relationships demands a certain amount of unfettered honesty to balance things out. The instigators of clandestine relationships, as well, maybe have more need than others to be seen as themselves, because of necessity they hide or feel they cannot express aspects of themselves, and it must come out somewhere.

It’s easy for me, anyway: all I want is my lovers to be themselves. I don’t need them to prove that they can hold down a job, or make a meal for the kids, or even tidy up after themselves: I just want them to take me somewhere I can’t get by myself. If there’s a danger in long-term relationships of falling into definable roles and being seen in terms of fitting into society, then with me the danger is more that the outside things that define people are the ones I undervalue: how much you earn and how successful you are, and what a sterling job you do as parent or partner are less relevant than how you respond to me and fulfill my needs, which are purely bed and emotion based. I’m not saying that long-term relationships inevitably get bogged down in domestic role-playing, but there is a reason (or a million reasons) that people stray, and it’s generally a need for something that isn’t available at home. It’s quite possible that the reason people stray in my direction is because I offer a lack of responsibility, and a chance to let their annoying, as well as their creative bits out to play.

If you did a quick rundown of the qualities common to my nearest and dearest, then in amongst intelligence and imagination and creativity and (mainly) shared political views, “difficult” would also feature, and I’d lump myself in there too. I have a high tolerance for people’s annoying bits because I’m aware of and expect tolerance for mine. I hate the idea of putting people up on pedestals, if only because when the exalted one inevitably falls off, the cry is always “but he/she is not perfect after all! I’m so disappointed!” rather than “I’m such an idiot for expecting another human being to fulfill all my expectations of perfection.” We’re all flawed – why should we expect other people to be flawless? Perfection is only when the balance tips more towards good than bad. Perhaps it’s because I’m aware of my own feet of clay that I’d rather everyone else has their own on show. Perhaps their feet of clay help to reinforce my belief that however much I love them, I couldn’t take on any of them full time.

In any case, it’s people’s complexities and contradictions that draw me to them: their annoying/baffling/inexplicable qualities and funny little ways keep me interested. But of course I don’t value most my tolerance: I value much more the appreciation of the freedom I offer, and I revel in the idea that I offer a safe berth for creativity. The truth is probably that I am a haven for (mutual) self-indulgence, and a soft landing for lack of responsibility. I can’t help noticing the re-emergence of boys I knew in my youth: there’s an appeal in reconnecting with someone who knew you long before you acquired the many roles and responsibilities of adulthood, and in a woman who doesn’t look to you to provide any of those. And there’s a headiness in the freedom of being returned to a state where the trappings are irrelevant, and all that matters is who, and not what, you are.

I can’t deny, though, that I get off on being the conduit for what would be otherwise unexpressed: it feeds my ego, however much I dress it up in altruism and the role of lover.

It’s all doing, and no reflecting, right now. This doesn’t suit me – I hate not having time to catch my breath, or reflect – but must be endured.

“Maybe that was making love,” he says.

“Honey, it was definitely fucking,” I say. I think about it for a minute. “It was a loving fuck.”

think, laugh, and in the end
cry
feel loved and adored, always (even when I’m a crabby bitch)
feel sexy even when I’m bone-weary and travel-worn and emotionally frazzled
come so hard I don’t forget who I am but remember what I am
reassess and reevaluate and eventually
lower my guard

Things on my mind this morning:

I’m losing my voice, which is probably allergies rather than germs, but it may be a sign.

It’s getting too hot to wear boots. I may be able to drag the boot-wearing out until the end of this week, but after that I suspect it’s all over until the autumn. This is depressing.

I keep wanting to wear my nightdress to work (I HAVE worn my nightdress to work. It’s not really a sleeping-in nightdress, and I do quite often wear it as a slip, and I wore it respectably while relying on my reputation for sartorial quirkiness, but still).

All week I have been confused about what day it is. I think today is Thursday, and that’s good, because I’ve been trying to get here since Tuesday.

I need new underwear. Not just “I neeeeeeeeed” new underwear, but I actually do. Having been labouring under the delusion that my tits are getting bigger, I then remembered that I stuck my bras in a hot wash a while ago. This is depressing, but the thought that I really genuinely need to go shopping for new knickers is cheering.

I have to sort my summer out. I think this also is cheering.

“You look very cute these days. Are you in love again?” one of my colleagues asks in passing. I think, In love? Again? and, Don’t I always look cute? Am I ever in love? Do I tell people these things? Am I more in love, if I’m in love in the first place, than before? What’s more cute these days than was previously cute?

Then I think, Can’t eat, can’t sleep. Maybe there’s an explanation, and it’s not just the heat.

But yesterday I thought it’s none of that, it’s just that I’m happy, in general. Things recently have reminded me that I’m fortunate, and one of the ways in which I’m fortunate is in my awareness that I am loved. I’d rather not forget that, or take it for granted, because it keeps me going when the edges of dark nights of the soul creep in, and when I’m contented anyway it makes it show.

I get up and make coffee and take it back to bed, keeping an eye on the clock to make sure I have enough time for bathing and dressing and getting out the door on time.

“Drink your coffee,” I say, because he never does, and then when I collect the cold cup later I think crossly that if he wasn’t going to drink it then I could have (my early-morning thoughts being pretty much focused on coffee, as a rule (although not to the exclusion of everything else)). He mutters something that could be “Yes, I WILL drink my coffee, every last drop,” or “I really should have got up and made YOU coffee, shouldn’t I?” or “Why don’t you just shut up and drink your coffee?” or even “Why the hell do you have to wake up so early?” and rolls over towards me.

He pulls my legs apart and tugs me down a bit on the bed where I’m propped up on the pillows. I sip my coffee and look down at the top of his head between my thighs, and think: “This is nice”, until the coffee cup starts to lose its allure and I fling it vaguely in the direction of the bedside table and slide down a bit more. The caffeine high kicks in at about the same time as his tongue does.

Some time later I drift downstairs to wait for my ride, and then float into the car. “You look cheerful this morning,” my driver says, and I say yes, I had a particularly good breakfast, and smile all the way to work.

Sometimes, I don’t want to come. Sometimes, I really, really don’t want to come, because it will stop me feeling what I feel: I’ll stop teetering on the edge and go over, when I’d rather teeter indefinitely.
Sometimes, I’m so focused on coming that fucking, for me, seems like nothing more than a question of getting him in the right position and keeping him there indefinitely until I can get to the point where I’m so spent I’ve completely lost interest in what he might like to be doing. Sometimes, I think it’s not going to happen, and then as soon as I think that it does (he might have something to do with this).

This is one of those times. I’m enjoying having my brains fucked out, and quite happy with it not really going anywhere – it can go on indefinitely as far as I’m concerned, and maybe a bit past that – when I begin to feel it might be going somewhere. Clearly he feels the same thing, because he hisses “If you come, I’m going to fuck your ass,” in my ear. And I don’t want to have my ass fucked right now; more than that, I don’t want to not have a choice about having my ass fucked. I can feel myself start to squiggle back from coming, wriggling beneath him so that his pubic bone isn’t driving against my clit and his cock isn’t hitting my (possibly imaginary) g-spot, all of which is quite difficult as I’m not really in a position to move very much at all, neatly folded up as I am. And then there’s a knock at the door and extrication and it passes.

“I didn’t want you to fuck my ass,” I say when the interruption is over. He looks at me in astonishment. “Of course I wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t want me to.” Oh. Well, I know that, now that I’m (semi-)rational again. What scares me is how irrational sex makes me. It disconcerts me that if I’d come and he’d tried to fuck my ass I’d have let him, even though I didn’t want it, just because I’d have accepted the logic of consequential action, because apparently when I fuck I lose my fucking mind. Even though I can see, in retrospect, that there’s nothing in it for him to do something I don’t want, I still know that at the time I accepted unquestioningly what he said: there was no part of me that thought I could refuse, or that maybe he wouldn’t, or that there were options open to me (and it’s not as though I’m scared of saying No when I feel I need to, or as though I don’t know very well that my No will be respected).

In even more retrospect, though, this inability to access rational thought when being fucked does explain quite a lot.

What I intended to say to one of my best friends was less tactful than I had planned, but a lot more tactful than I meant. I planned to say, apropos of the many things it seems to me that she is misinterpreting and my advice: “The thing is, you’re a doer, and I’m an observer…” and then I would lead gently into the glaring truth that maybe she’s so busy trying to make things happen that she doesn’t notice the undercurrents (as someone who can’t really be bothered to make things happen, I have plenty of time for undercurrents, and sound opinions thereof). What I said, somewhat snappishly, was: “I’m a much better judge of character than you, and I’d trust my reading of a situation over yours any day”. What I could have said (and it may still burst out one day) was: “Do you think you’re in the middle of a nervous breakdown? Because we think you’ve completely fucking lost it. Would you like an intervention, because some of us are rapidly getting over our Britishness about such things, and we’re about ready to deliver one?”

And then the same day I had an idea of startlingly brilliant creativity, and expounded upon this to one of the people I needed to make it happen. This then led into a conversation about something I had written that made me mentally write the words WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? WHY DON’T YOU GET IT? On a mental piece of paper, and place it under another one which said NOT EVERYONE HAS TO GET EVERYTHING YOU WRITE, YOU SELF-OBSESSED FUCKWIT. But I still carried on a mental (I choose my words with care) conversation with myself in which I admitted that he might have had a point and maybe I could push myself a bit harder and also found myself thinking that it was clearly foolish to try to have sensible conversations with people at four o’clock in the morning when they were so addled by sleep they had NO IDEA WHAT THEY WERE SAYING, and ANYWAY he was just saying he loved my writing because he wanted to get into my pants. Even if he was in my pants, and appeared to be saying he didn’t like this particular piece of writing.

The next day when I was recounting this to someone else, leaving out most of my internal ravings, I said I couldn’t understand why he didn’t see that it was about risk, and falling in love, and… “Oh,” she said, “I thought it was about something completely different.”

I’m still pretty sure that it’s all of them, and not me.