11/09/04 - Portrait Artist
My senses are my enemy. Half of them don't work, and the ones that do serve me too well. A few years ago, I started to lose my sight, and my body clamoured to compensate. My sense of smell spun into overdrive.
Around about the same time, I met a portrait artist - he was a wild romantic and I wanted to love him. A mutual friend thought we'd be good together. She said that he had trained at the Royal Academy and liked drawing girls.
My mind did somersaults, I had visions of my naked youth immortalised on canvas (he was Rene and I would be his Georgette). We would fall in love, marry and run away to Paris, where we'd grow old and he'd paint my decaying flesh with love until my dying day. I had it planned.
Eventually, we met at a party. He said it was beautiful the way the light caught in my hair. But then things went wrong. He took off his shoes and my overblown romantic ideals were immediately dashed. A pungent stench seeped over the room. My sense of smell is acute. This man had no money for new shoes, but that doesn't mean he couldn't wash his feet . I opened the window. He made no apology.
Perhaps he was my polar opposite, with no sense of smell at all. But that wasn't enough. The conversation dried and that was the end of our love affair.
18/09/04 - Aussie Porn
My friend loves repetition - I'm forced to dredge up the same stories again and again for her amusement. Her favourite is the one about a suit boy who didn't have much going on between his ears. He took me to a West End show and then audaciously complained when I walked behind him on the way home. I walk one step behind people because I can't see at the sides, I tried to explain, but he didn't get it. He was clearly never going to understand.
I'm not sure why, but I still went home with him that night. It was late and his was closer than mine. He lived with five flatmates in a two-bed flat above a shop in Camden. One of them was actually called Randy and slept on a bed by the cooker. We slept on a bare mattress riddled with those ambiguous stains you hope are just spilled coffee and not something more sinister. We shared one pillow (without a pillow case, of course) and a nylon sleeping bag. The net curtains were brown and the walls were clad with hard porn.
When I questioned his forthright choice in wall covering, he said that women loved it. I wanted to go home, but the streets of London are dark and vulnerable places to be alone at 3am. Somehow staying put was preferable to fumbling around trying to find the right night bus home. I was stuck. Trapped until the sun came up.
As soon as it did, I left.
25/09/04 - High Fives
I met a man who spoke three languages and made me laugh. I liked him, but he came with two small problems. One, he wasn't exactly available; and two, he kept doing high fives that I couldn't see.
I had known him vaguely for a while, but at a party one night saw him in a new light: I was single again, and suddenly he was captivating.
A few weeks later, we met for a drink. I'd heard mutterings of a remote girlfriend whom no one had ever met, so I came right out with it and asked about her. There was an awkward shuffle and then he replied with a long silence, which could only mean yes. I guess he thought that if his mouth remained void of words for long enough, I'd get bored and forget what my original question had been.
This man was meant to be trilingual, but suddenly all he could do was guilty silences and high fives. Every time I said something he liked, he would raise his hand to invite an appreciative midair hand collision. Except I would never see his move, and he'd be left waiting with his arm suspended in the air, wondering who this weird girl was who never reciprocated his silly hand gestures. He hadn't clocked that I couldn't see around the edges.
Eventually I told him. He said his granny had gone blind, so he understood. My secret was out, but he still did it again several times before the night was out.