11/06/05 - Single
There's nothing more embarrassment-inducing than being single and having to go on dates. It's a state of being that's inevitably accompanied by red faces, social-skill paralysis, empty brains and shuffling pigeon feet.
When you're half of a unified whole, life is formulaic. You know what to expect: he'll come home of an evening, hang up his coat, pour a sherry, kick back for The Bill, have a pizza, forget to flush the loo, go to bed, tell you he's 'too tired', roll over and go to sleep.
And so it goes on. There's no need to worry. They like you, you like them; you can get on with the banality of life without the blood rushing to your face and butterflies thumping at your intestinal walls each time they walk in the room. You never have to over-analyse the significance of the X at the end of a text, or wait for the phone to ring. You never have to endure the awkward social dance that follows the walk home from the pub, when you reach the junction where he turns one way and you turn the other.
You both say you 'had a nice night', the street corner falls into silence, a prolonged glance is exchanged and you scuttle off in the directions of your respective homes, both imagining what the other looks like with no clothes on and wondering torturously in parallel if you should have/could have kissed them goodnight. And do they, don't they, will they, won't they, like you, love you?
18/06/05 - Human Mural
There's always a degree of surprise/shock/delight when a lover first de-clothes in your presence. Folk come in all sizes, shapes and guises. Reality doesn't always meet expectation: maybe they will have webbed toes, prosthetic balls or a hairy back.
I knew the man I was seeing was into shock aesthetics (he'd lent me a book on Russian prison tattoos). So while our friendship blossomed, I attempted to mentally prepare myself for a tat or two.
But when the day came I didn't like what I saw. At all. My 'open mind' imploded. As he stood naked in my flat I realised the question in hand was no longer where he was tattooed, but where he wasn't.
This wasn't the mere spattering of anchors and a few ex-girlfriends' names etched drunkenly into his flesh. It was a human mural, comprising six cherubs, one Welsh dragon, two piggy-looking creatures, one fire-breathing dragon covering his whole back (with no flesh showing), a large cluster of comedy skulls (which I've asked him to fill in with an indelible marker; I don't like indulging in acts of intimacy while staring at emblems of death), a Celtic thingy covering half an arm, patterns covering his entire chest and upper stomach, a rainbow-swirled body stocking sheathing one leg from ankle to buttock, and a fierce face (which he says is 'friendly') on his lower torso. I needn't spell out what comes out of the mouth.
25/06/05 - hypocrite
When your body starts to go wrong, you hope other people will have the nous to scratch beyond your physicality. To reach in through the pit of your stomach and drag out the same person who's now forced to live in a body that's different - and, let's be frank, in the perception of many, less attractive than it used to be.
I was shocked at the sight of tattoo man naked (or as naked as you can be when your skin is swirled with red and green). I couldn't sleep. I wondered in the dark why the embodiment of my soulmate had to arrive in pictorial packaging. Did everything in my life have to be so ironic? His interior was faultless, but the sight of his exterior patterns next to my pink flesh made me squirm with uneasiness. The tattoos bothered me. But not as much as the fact that my 'doing as you would be done by' stance had withered: I was emerging from this affair with the word 'hypocrite' tattooed on my own forehead.
I've got physical aberrations far more irksome than a load of inky skulls spattered across my body, yet he wasn't judging me. I listened for a few hours as he slept gently next to me before the idiocy of my situation leapt up and spat in my face. I might not like them now, but suddenly I remembered that in time my vision will diminish, and the dragons and cherubs will be dragged slowly into the dark. Then I'll miss them. Desperately.
02/06/05 - leaflet
New love makes bad things go away. You don't have to (for the moment at least) go out every Saturday night when really you'd rather be picking about the house in your pants. The bank is snapping at your tail, the bathroom hasn't been cleaned for two months, there's rain soaking through the bedroom wall, but none of this matters any more because someone loves you.
I spent the night with my human mural. I awoke in the morning and peeled open a sleepy eye to meet the longing look of a cherub, staring at me from his arm. I felt warm, loved, and sad. Sad because not everything goes away when you fall in love. I'd told him of my fate, he'd said it didn't matter. I wasn't sure he really understood, though. He'd yet to see me in the most disabling of situations: the crowded street that'll have me hanging on to his tattooed arms with the suction of a needy limpet.
I thought about giving him some reading material on my condition. I didn't. It's not very sexy to thrust your new lover an image of a vulnerable-looking soul clinging to a white stick, with text asking them to 'give generously'. Charities need money, so their informational leaflets depict sods like me in the most pitiful of poses to yank at your heart strings and make you cough up. Not helpful when all you want to do is inform your bed buddy (in the least scary way possible) what the future might hold.
09/06/05 - tube
When the summer comes, London's tube gets hot and its people get bothered. You step on board, grit your teeth and wait to remove your face from the armpit of the man in the cheap grey polyester-mix suit who's just seen fit to hold the handle above your head and remind you that he's more pungent in July than he is in January.
Since when were humans meant to be transported through tunnels like hot itchy ferrets trapped in tin crates? It's not a nice place to be. But there's one thing that makes the heat and the banality of the daily commute fractionally more bearable: the pursuit of staring. People opposite get to stare at you, while you get to stare back at them because there's nothing else to stare at. And while you stare you all get to hold books and newspapers and pretend that none of you is really staring because, after all, didn't your mother tell you it was rude to stare?
I stare because I still can: at the man scoffing a limp-looking burger at 8.30am, at the woman applying eyeliner to the rhythm of wheels on tracks and at the bloke who's scratching his balls because he's forgotten momentarily that the people around him have nothing better to do than stare at him. Collecting the miserable faces that line my daily commute has become an activity in itself. I'm gorging and fattening my memory for a time when I'll only have my own mind to stare into.