Back in Your Life

A rough approximate of a recent event, worth logging (if the wider community's anything to go by): As per formula, I was ignoring my business in a run-down recreation centre, just off the main street, when things happened. Dig: the duke-box was playing a honky-tonk song, and, perhaps inspired by its lull, I followed a stray whim to an overfamiliar presence being pressed beneath half a pound of steel and almost failing to respirate. He spotted me, and subsequently I him, and a hazy sort of conversation began. It was stunted, somewhat, by what I sensed to be a reluctance on his part to participate, owing, one presumed, to the myriad of prior occasions in which we had featured, but his reticence wasn't such that mutual conversation was impossible, and a satisfactory degree of communicative force was eventually achieved.

"How's it?" I began, somewhat cautiously.
He peered at me with vicious indifference and milked the pause between question and answer in a most uncomfortable manner.
"Mm," he eventually shrugged.
"Ah."
Another manufactured pause.
"Er, how's Nicole?"
A glint of pain flickered across his mask.
"I don't know," he said. I pressed the matter no further.
After failing to think of a suitable topic, I was eventually spared of social suicide when he reintroduced the very matter I'd vowed not to press [see above — edward.].
Something like, "Abandonment of hope equals pure sexual magnetism."
I nodded for lack of words.
"Of course," he continued, "when I had her, the hope returned, and she simply left."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"Are you?"
"A bit," I said, rather too ambivalently. He seemed temporarily pleased at my honesty.
"And yourself?" he half-asked.
"Oh, the usual."
"You mean this garbage?"
"Yeah." I turned my eyes groundward and we spent a wistful moment listening to each other breathe.

"Perhaps it's time you retired," he said finally.
"Oh, I don't know," I shrugged, "I still kind of enjoy it."
"Well, at least you don't have to put it up."
"Hey, fuck you."
"Touché."
"Don't fucking say that. It makes you sound like a wanker — well, more of one."
"Coming from you, or should I say here, that's quite the insult. Congratulations."
"Hey, fuck you."
"No, you've done that one."
I attempted to insult him via a mock laugh.
"Don't laugh at that, it wasn't funny."
The fucker.
"I... I... It's not like you're any better!"
"Oh?"
"You and your nigh-emo outpourings of... withdrawn... er, pessimism! 'Here's another parable about why my life sucks.'"
It was a weak attack and he knew it.
"Well, we can't all be clot-headed obscurantists, can we? Some of us favour relative plainspeak over labyrinthine thesaurus-wanking, particularly the people who read the things. And, you know, actually coming out with it, no matter what 'it' is, is certainly preferable to burying it under an impenetrable layer of ironic detachment, don't you think? The nature of my jottings is beside the point. The only salient feature is that it's true to me. Can you say the same thing?"

I fumed intensely, feeling the age of enlightenment slide away from beneath me. This was going to be messy. Then I remembered my trump card.
"It doesn't matter what happened before, nor what will happen after," I said, unable to fully conceal my smirk.
"I'm sorry?" He looked genuinely puzzled.
"Hm? Oh, nothing." It was working. I suppressed a giggle and continued. "For now, there is you, there is me."
"What do you mean?" he said, visibly irritated.
"Only that for the moment I am here, and you are here with me."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Our reason to be," I said, lingering perversely on the last syllable.
"Is this supposed to be funny?"
At this point, I wasn't quite sure if he had noticed the several bullets I'd carefully lodged in his chest, but he was certainly rattled enough to strain a look of icy indifference. I readied my flame and moved in.
"I feel it all," I said, "and you feel what I am doing to you."
"You've really outdone yourself this time," he dead-panned. "Am I supposed to slap you now or something?"
"There is strength in the tenderness we give to each other," I answered, drawing out grammatically nonexistent pauses.
"No, actually, I'll just leave. Bye."
Desperately, I fumbled for the words I'd seen so long ago.
"The pressure!" I called out. "Oh, the pressure!"
He looked back at me briefly as he pushed the door open and his eyes said more than words ever could. But since words are all we're dealing with here, something like "You're a cunt" probably wasn't far off.

To this day, I still do not know whether my somewhat pathetic japes actually registered in the way I'd intended. By tomorrow, however, the answer was clear. A handsomely decorated poster bearing the words "Fuck. You." (I've preserved the dramatic punctuation) had been affixed to my door, and there was no doubt who by. Peeling it off, as I was wont to do, I noticed a viciously rendered cliché scrawled on the back: "Truth is beauty". Trust him to make an old hat new again, or should I say true again. And it worked. For those few minutes, I felt like the most wretched aesthete who ever lived. My school-boy sneerings at words of passion only served to discredit my own lacking emotional intelligence. But Fuck, he started it.

Later that week, the phone rang, with him on the other end of it.
"I read it," he said.
"Oh."
"..."
"And?"
"Surely, if you're that bored, your time could be better spent thinking up something original?"
"But you see my plan worked. This is the only way people will pay attention."
"People will never pay attention."
"Yes but they'll at least notice him and smile once in a while."
"Smile? With these jokes?"
"OK, cringe then."

Despite its obvious shortcomings, the above incident at least parlayed the tedium of a particularly uneventful patch in my life, wherein my weekly highlights consisted of ritually watching two sitcoms I loathed (what was Elvis Costello thinking?) and not getting excess droplets on my trousers after urinating. Fortunately, in addition to an inexplicably felled tree in my garden, the following year introduced all sorts of astronaughty adventures and dog-bonding, and I was even glad for having the contrast. It pays to wait, after all.