ONE HUNDRED MILLION TINY CUTS AND BRUISES

I haven’t had sex in a year, the kind of sex a university student should be having. Meaningless and vain. The kind I have had since the year clock started counting, the wrong kind, has been polluted by the enemy to vanity and emotionlessness. Confusion and feeling. Mostly anger and sadness. I got tired of searching for synonyms and so stuck to using words I knowed already. Ideas for writing have beaten in my head like drums, not the fun kind, or the musical kind. Those full of oil, of corruption and hope and greed. Waiting to be ignited. To kill and destroy all in their vicinities. Drumming that echoes louder until ceasing entirely, usually when I go to write, which they believe to be better than. After I had the correct kind of sex, one year ago, after leaving and lying about leaving, I felt pride and shame and decided I wanted a sandwich. A sandwich shop which had walls waxy like my skin and hair and charged me four pounds for the worst sandwich that I will ever have had. Mustard and meat. The second of the grey variety and the first of the neon Simpson. The shop later closed down for reasons, I told myself, were related to the fact that it never wanted to make sandwiches, but wanted to sell drugs, of the white variety. Out of its back door and sometimes wedged between two slices of bread that looked wrong and mustard that tasted like D’oh! A theory that would explain why the day after the night I last had the correct kind of sex, one year ago, was the first and last time I destroyed a chair by just thinking about it.

 

Instead of sex I work. With as much effort or sweat or anxiety, work gives me something sex never could. After 9 hours of reading plastic like palms left in the bin. Or on the bed. Or in the bath. After deciding whether two sets of sheets to change means friendship, failure to love, or failure to make it, (the kind similar to mine). After tissue flowers and scaling towers my bones and body scream for the other to be quiet. My mind sinks and shrinks, reducing to a coulis, bringing the kind of exhaustion that comes cousin to clarity, purging all thinking and feeling and want to start screaming. The kind that carries me home where I remain indefinitely. Until tomorrow.

 

Tomorrow, where seminars have started and sleep is not sleep but study time borrowed. One year ago eyerolls lived in the face of the pretty girl in the smoking area, now the intelligent leader. Astonished. That someone might be wrong. That I could possibly be wrong. The fool who came 5 minutes late and covered in wet and cold with fickle, darty, scared eyes and who smells of plastic. Who thought that raising a hand and projecting his voice might fix it. It didn’t. ‘It did not’ thought the room filled with eyes emptied by boredom turned to business (August to September). A room of people whose smiles seemed all too unfamiliar, crafted, created like flowers. Some of whom I imagine have just complained to the sad receptionist about the standards of housekeeping at the bad hotel they were staying at. About the stranger with a lanyard they saw staring at their rubbish. They roll their eyes at both. Something the wet fool too scared to look could and often will only imagine.

 

I wasn’t happy a year ago. I also wasn’t so organised. Yesterday I pencilled in time in my planner to plan my week. 5 minutes. In which I pencilled in my next 5 minutes of planning and reminded myself that I have to wake up, that I have to write something and that I have to post it, that I should care about what I’m making. Which I do. One year ago I didn’t know anything, just as I knew even more nothing the year prior. I wonder how much nothing it will turn out I know this year. How time will tell me that what I know, say and do, or did, one year ago, might somehow have been corrupted by the person I believed I was, or was becoming. A year ago, before the anger and sadness, before confusion and regret, I just had sex. The kind where I wasn’t in my twenties, where the number of tiny cuts and bruises weren’t in the hundreds of millions, just ‘plenty’. I was still at university, not miles away, years ahead and lost in time. Where collars are stuffed white and my time isn’t mine. I can’t help it, I can’t not see the men the women my friends will be, how their bellies will grow and hair will thin and recede. The lives they settle for, with nicer cars than their parents had, distracting away as to them they transform. The same regrets and resentments. The same pain, those that come with a life lived in acceptance. A hole left by a heart filled with unanswered questions, unfulfilled wants and hopes, those sacrificed for safety. For certainty. I live in that world, there, where we speak because we should, because it's good, not here. I haven’t for one year.