Monday, July 23, 2007
A load of shit.
I remember you were the first person I talked to about my feelings at 17… no one else had taken an interest in them before. We were young, drunk and in the back garden of one of the roughest pubs of our home town. You took my hand and confessed to self harming when you were younger, not for attention like your other friends, but because you ‘really meant it’. I remembered the group of girls you hung around with at school, before I knew you. We were at other ends of the social scale. You hung around with the cool hard girls, some of them were bullies. Me, I just kept my eyes lowered and my spine straight….I was never weak, but I was terrified of being noticed by anyone. I remembered their cuts being shown off with some kind of pride in classes; some girls would even yank rough slices down their arms in the middle of lessons with compasses. A friend of mine would burn the backs of her hands with aerosols held directly over the skin. I could see some of it was for show, but you, you really meant it. You said it really caned. I had already acknowledged to myself that I was in love with you, you telling me this and more made my heart just come out of my chest and out to you in the piece of air between us where we were straddling the same side of the picnic bench. We confessed things to each other…..not everything. Some things I didn’t have a comprehension of yet. We were both different to other girls…that much was obvious at the time. We always stood too close, sat too close, did everything too close. I felt so huge and unattractive around you. Maybe I never told you the way I felt because I was too ashamed of myself, not because I was ashamed of liking girls.
The way you were with me was so different that night. Other people’s problems had always come first, but here I was, spouting shit that had lived in me like a black hole.
Things changed after that… We weren’t really girlish after that. No more you bending over in dressing room mirrors so I could see if your knickers showed when choosing short skirts. We still said we were girlfriends to keep men at bay, but it was with a different edge…
The same night you tried to kiss me on the town war memorial, we snuck two bottles of beer out of the pub and sat there like tramps watching people get in and out of taxis opposite us. You tried to kiss me to freak out some old ladies who were getting out of a cab, but I was petrified and laughed if off.
A while later you told me on the phone you couldn’t be bothered keeping in touch with me, so I hung up on you. We haven’t seen or spoken to each other since. You flitted off to university and got another special friend from Wigan. You told me about sharing the same bed together all the time and showed me a passport picture you kept in your wallet of her – I guessed the rest.
You wrote to me out of the blue three years later, saying sorry for being a bitch and ‘dogging me out’. I wrote back but heard nothing….I guess maybe you just needed closure.
I still think of you sometimes, of how I felt when you said I could lay my head on your belly on my bed, when you wrote to me announcing the loss of your virginity…how you regretted it ‘proper dead bad’. Of revising A levels together sitting close at my parents dining room table, getting so wasted I couldn’t understand what the hell you were saying to me….fielding squaddies sometimes unsuccessfully in the local armpit of a club. But most of all for the way you listened, you were the best friend I’d ever had. ¶ 5:14 pm
The way you were with me was so different that night. Other people’s problems had always come first, but here I was, spouting shit that had lived in me like a black hole.
Things changed after that… We weren’t really girlish after that. No more you bending over in dressing room mirrors so I could see if your knickers showed when choosing short skirts. We still said we were girlfriends to keep men at bay, but it was with a different edge…
The same night you tried to kiss me on the town war memorial, we snuck two bottles of beer out of the pub and sat there like tramps watching people get in and out of taxis opposite us. You tried to kiss me to freak out some old ladies who were getting out of a cab, but I was petrified and laughed if off.
A while later you told me on the phone you couldn’t be bothered keeping in touch with me, so I hung up on you. We haven’t seen or spoken to each other since. You flitted off to university and got another special friend from Wigan. You told me about sharing the same bed together all the time and showed me a passport picture you kept in your wallet of her – I guessed the rest.
You wrote to me out of the blue three years later, saying sorry for being a bitch and ‘dogging me out’. I wrote back but heard nothing….I guess maybe you just needed closure.
I still think of you sometimes, of how I felt when you said I could lay my head on your belly on my bed, when you wrote to me announcing the loss of your virginity…how you regretted it ‘proper dead bad’. Of revising A levels together sitting close at my parents dining room table, getting so wasted I couldn’t understand what the hell you were saying to me….fielding squaddies sometimes unsuccessfully in the local armpit of a club. But most of all for the way you listened, you were the best friend I’d ever had. ¶ 5:14 pm
