Love Again
Love Again
We argue about it in the pub, though it’s a cocktail bar I no longer love, and although they epitomise this place the music is simply not loud enough. It’s too much, and I run, through Wellington Square, past the redbrick house Richard said we’d share. Later, bootleg music in hand, I walk quietly to his room. All I can offer are songs, and he isn’t there when I try. “Otherness breaks down in the realm of Imagination” (Richard McCabe). Not in these sweltering summer nights, unable to sleep and thinking of him.
These songs I can never leave. Suede, ‘The 2 Of Us’. Radiohead, ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’. Tom Waits, ‘Blue Valentines’. Jeff Buckley, ‘Hallelujah’.
***
“It will all come crashing down, my desperate icon”Mansun, ‘The Chad Who Loved Me’
Fictional lovers depart for foreign climes. I gave him a year of my life, a world; he walked away. Extended holiday, unavailable for comment. Paul Draper, Mansun, 1995-2003.
Mogwai, ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’. Arab Strap, ‘Piglet’. Meanwhile, Back In Communist Russia…, ‘Morning After Pill’.
***
“Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare…”Philip Larkin, ‘Love Again’
I saw the words on his wall, lined sheets of washed-out ink. Laughed when I realised they weren’t for me.
She was edgy that night. As we sat in the Cellar, she was on the edge. I knew something was wrong, could never have guessed. I went home, to Chris, and she looked at him with shadows in her eyes.
Jackson Browne, ‘Sleep’s Dark And Silent Gate’. Take That, ‘Pray’, my single favourite song. Mansun, Manic Street Preachers, Embrace.
***
Dragging through flattened grass with heavy joy, I rehearse the lines in my mind. His themes remind me of me – a desire for truth, for purity of experience filtered through art, for intellectualisation and spontaneity to call a truce. But his characters remind me of you. The darkly humorous cynicism, the restlessness. I don’t tell him the novel’s called Women In Love.
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves
The way I feel today - 10 July 2004
Just seventeen - 17 March 2004
Roads to freedom - 25 February 2004
Confessions of a failed self-harmer - 25 February 2004
Manchester, united - 25 February 2004