‘Yeah. Yeah, come up.’ He steadies himself on the bannister and the noise of the party engulfs us as he swings open the kitchen door. Everyone stops for a moment.
‘LADS! FOUND THESE TWO LOOKING FOR ROBBIE ON THE DOORSTEP,’ he shouts with smackable smugness. Some roll their eyes whilst others cheer, others pay no attention at all and the girls move in closer to the men they’re sat in front of.
‘Drink?’ Steph glares.
‘Bathroom first. I’ll sort out my face. Pour us one in there. Then let’s give this a go.’
I hadn’t been to a house party in years, the coy butterfly-sizzle of excitement about the hours of pre-game are lost and forgotten. Nothing about being stood in somebody else’s bathroom with a cheap bottle of vodka between our legs felt naughty, it felt a bit grim and regressive. The fists banging on the door outside were not of rowdy teenagers who’d overdone it, not of new-found couples burrowing away for the night for a private snog, but of four thirty-year-olds after the cold, flat porcelain of the toilet to rack up lines of cocaine, which they’d later learn was actually ketamine. We let them bang.
‘Remind me why we’re here again?’ Steph screws back on the cap of the vodka, wrestling with the cheap teeth on the cap that won’t quite align. Impatient.
I ignore her, transfixed in my own reflection. I do not look like my photos and although I have spent countless lost, and wasted, hours studying the planes of my face to an almost scientific degree on my phone, it feels like the first time I’d really seen myself in months. Vulgar. Vile. I do not look like my photos. Of all the places to be incarcerated as a fraud, tonight’s setting couldn’t have been more perfect. As we’d walked flat-palmed, pushing doors in the dark to find the toilet, I had spotted five men I’d at some point matched with on Hinge or Bumble that had later gone on to ignore my witty, well-thought and, through a series of screenshots to friends, well-vetted opening lines. I had arrived at a place of uncloaking.
The banging becomes more incessant and grows to a kick that shoots the brass lock up and off its holder, the four men fall in crying with laughter, pulling each other down to pull themselves up in a twisted rugby scrum. I may not have looked like my pictures but they certainly didn’t look like men. Little boys, still.
In the kitchen, it is much of the same tired scene we had left in the past of our pre-youth, where we were too young to be doing any of this at all but still stabbing at the perceived rituals of fun that we’d learned from films. Scattered plastic shells of shots and stepped-on crisps nestle deeper into the thin cracks of the wooden floor. No one here was having fun. Everyone is desperately ferrying around in a painted distraction, feigning merriment, if only to not feel cheated of the future they thought they’d be living for an hour or so. Thinking they’d have kids by now. A house. A holiday or two a year. A career. But here we were, acting fifteen, feeling forty-five, grappling for an artsy shot by the plugged-in disco lamp, rehashing unread articles that made one of us sound cultured and the other aggressive.
Empty.
Your Boyfriend in LA Loves Me from Across the Ocean
When was ‘psycho’ so sexy
Yet still castigated?
Everyone here is married
But they’re all fucking, faking
When was dumbing it down
Cashing in as enough?
Who sold you the fear
That you need to be seen as in love?
They grin doe-eyed and warm
In every photo you post
Happy Valentine’s, Babe
I Love You The Most
It all screens so perfect
But I scream DENIAL
Am I bitter and twisted?
Just crave a number to dial?
Scroll
Where are you finding these partners?
Will you teach me your rules?
What do you serve them for starters?
Are you drugging these fools?
How are they harnessed
So tight to your hip?
Bzzzzzzzzzzzz
Oh
A DM!
‘I miss you gorgeous’
… sorry love, it’s him.
Mercury in Retrograde
We are ruled by
A fool’s literature
Our settled Sunday readings
Map out an astrology-pulled apology
For the curves and quirks in our hapless week’s psychology
Clutching a passionate grasp around instruction
That limits our habits to the moon’s and sun’s seduction
We are led by the hand, willing participants in our own abduction
Lured by the romance of another world’s aura – chunked construction
Running blind from our own control
Two thirsty dogs lapping from a cosmic bowl
Two sapient dogs lassoing a leash to their own soul
Dutifully bowing to boldly meditate
Around Leo’s planetary heavyweights
Obediently howling at a weekly Mailchimp email to celebrate
A half-hashed understanding of Mercury retrograde
Cocking a leg to salute a sold faith
Doesn’t the whole infinite eclectic point sort of dissipate
When we hand a stranger a title that lets them control our own fate?
‘I Know I Can’t Talk but …’
Darling
You and I are important
And what I thought to be suffering
Was an inkling and a drain
But what the world around you is doing
Is seldom progressive
Just shouting SAME
SHAME
SHAME
Never looking back at the woman
Who was privileged enough to realise
Those sentiments were a gain.
#whatafeministlookslike
Dyed of its natural conditions
Died of its misconvictions.