Friday 19 March 2010

CONFESSIONS OF AN OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE - blog ten

There's a reason I haven't been blogging. I was seeing someone for a while. I was sent to interview a band and Alex was the lead singer. He was tall, he had tattoos which covered his arms and his neck, and some of them he'd done himself. He had piercings. He was eloquent, educated, he loved hip-hop, he was kind and he raised one eyebrow whenever he said something he was proud to say. It was an intense fortnight. He was sexy.

He smoked a lot but I could overlook that. He drank a lot but then drinking chills me out somewhat so it was probably a good thing. The once pristine white walls of his room were covered in haphazard graffiti scrawl, and I could oversee that. Half his room was lino and half was carpet and it distracted me and bugged me that the neat conservative pattern of the lino was interrupted without explanation, with not only an entirely different pattern but an entirely different material - carpet. I’d think about it for minutes on end, staring at the floor but I never asked. Had I have asked, I would’ve been in danger of revealing my secret…it would have no doubt unleashed a jibbering nervous wreck.

I pushed my urges to question the disorder and chaos of his life to the back of my mind. Alex was a good kisser and the raised eyebrow thing, hot as hell. I though he was a bit Larry Clarke’s Kids-esque. He though I was a bit “vanilla.”

I could overlook the musky smell of the duvet, and windows, which hadn’t been cleaned for so long they were starting to block out the sunlight. I could overlook the tiny sprinklings of tobacco on every surface, I could even overlook the 7 mugs of half drank coffee solidifying around the room (I counted. Twice.) But what drove me out of Alex’s arms was one thing and one thing only - the mountain of clothes in the left hand corner of his room.

It was absurd. The boy HAD a wardrobe but it remained empty. All his clothes existed in a huge, jumbled, nightmare of a pile. How could he ever find anything? How long had they been there? What if tiny creatures lived in there? If there were tiny creatures in the pile then they may spread to the bed! Bed bugs. My pores began to tickle with prickly heat as they exuded sweat. My god – I had to get out. I bolted up the road and never saw him again. I ignored his calls and eventually he stopped trying. It wasn’t love it was a two-week fling. Opposites attract? I think NOT.

NB: I have only ever been in love once. We were at university. It was the 5th November – Guy Fawkes night and Thomas had been out drinking and watching the fireworks with a group of our friends. I had a cold so stayed in bed. Later, he creeped into my room at 3am a bit merry (christ knows how he’d got in.)

He must have been making a bonfire because the next morning, on the spotless eggshell-white doorframe of my room was a black, clumsy, sooty handprint. I smiled. My eyebrows didn’t knot together in angst; I didn’t reach for the marigolds or the bleach. I just smiled. I didn’t clean it until I moved out of that house. It was like a little paw but cuter. Now THAT'S love.

1 comment:

  1. hey loving it! finally getting back into this blogging thing. Thought I'd drop by and say hi. Charming post by the way, really. No crit from me.

    ReplyDelete