This much you know: you want his attention. You’re not sure to what extent and it’s not a trait you’re comfortable with; this need of yours to be liked by him. It was once a fleeting attraction, one of many you’ve had across this uneven terrain known as adulthood. But something uneasy, heavy, without an expiration date, passed between you. Not a good thing no, but an unsavoury thing that one shouldn’t speak of. It’s talked on in whispers, not to be said aloud. Which is odd when you think about it because the country you were born into talks of choice and freedom but by the same brush doesn’t want to acknowledge those two things. This state says without saying: you can have this autonomy over your body but please don’t shout about it. We protest for these rights, are seemingly comfortable addressing them in groups, but the gory details aren’t to be bandied about.
At the hospital: bleeding, crying, saying this is all my fault. You carried it alone and now, though you want his attention and crave his desire, you wear a constant badge of resentment for how he left that certain situation unscathed and now you know the word trauma, speak it in sessions with a woman named Lara for the nice price of £45 per hour. But the thing that passed has elevated this once-forgetful fancy into an urge to be - what? Wanted no, but perhaps remembered. Etched into his memory. Another thing you’re not proud of: this almost narcissistic want of yours.
Months have passed wondering if you might see him as you walk along the shore or shop in Lidl. So how does time align to bring him into your eye line twice in three days? You hear his skateboard first; that low rumble of the wheels. A sound both comforting and anxiety-inducing. It makes you think: fate. Or perhaps, if you were having the kind of day that was cushioned in cynicism, just unfortunate circumstance. The second time you practically stalked him until he noticed you. But noticed isn’t really the right word because you tapped him on the shoulder leaving him with no option but to notice you. You forced his hand, his acknowledgement.
You don’t know much but you do know that you don’t work as a two, a double act. No, that was rehearsed and staged and vetoed as impossible; a show that’s curtain will never come up again.
The word love was uttered and now you think (after what could be labelled as an almost obsessive analysis) it’s a surface level attraction that doesn’t flourish under any serious setting. That is to say, it should have remained as a fleeting fancy. Safe at a distance, unsettling under intimate circumstances. This being the thing that disturbs you most: the dirty nature of it. The way it unfurled into something quite animalistic with an end point of bodily intrusion where clumps of your cells were mingling together to form one new whole. A whole that clawed at your insides and made you feel at each moment as though you know longer understood your own body, the rhythms of it.
You told him what was happening not through words spoken, said aloud, but through characters composed on a 4.7 inch screen. At one time in the not-so distant past this would have been an impossible. And if it was at that time instead of the time that we live in now, he likely wouldn’t have been privy to the something that had occurred. How the tablet didn’t work, it was too late. How you knew even before you actually knew. And then you asked a question that you already knew the answer to.
Has this happened before? It has, yeah. I see.
Upon confirmation you felt almost inexplicably less special because you understood that this isn’t new to him, it had indeed happened before. You wondered then if it might happen again and reconciled that it probably would. It didn’t occur to you, at that time anyway, that there was something nonsensical about the reaction of feeling less special. That you should even want a vote as being special, from him, was questionable in itself. But there were a lot of unusual thoughts and feelings and you know, now anyway, that there is little sense in beating yourself up.
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