The last drone of summer…..
He said he hated Sunday afternoons. Hated the way time was void and stretched on, like plane trails in the sky. Normal life stops, and is distorted by a kind of emptiness. A bumble bee’s drone that fades but goes on for ever. Everything in his world had a colour or a sound. We sat out side, him on the doorstep and me lying on the ground, knees bent skyward, trying to keep my hair out of the gravel, or the gravel out of my hair. We ate bowls of children’s breakfast cereal so insubstantial we had to eat two or three before we were full. It was the Sunday morning come downs, we stayed up like kids till 5 in the morning, drinking gin and watching David Lynch movies. I guess we were kids, just playing at being adults. How anyone ever rented me a house I’ll never know, I guess having a boyfriend with a car made me seem more grown up than I was.
Anyway, this boy with me here on the porch, this is not my boyfriend. I’m not sure what he was. Younger than me, and a talented musician for sure, he was a kid brother, a lover, a friend. He was there when no one else could be. This sensitive soul was an inspiration and an encourager when my stupid attempt of a life came crumbling around me. (And in retrospect was also a stand in for someone else. Someone whose real role in my life I had yet to realise).
But for now, this kid kept me going. A secret romance, played out in text messages and park benches, cheap cafes and crazy all nighters. Everything about it slightly out of step and surreal, a parallel universe. Once we spent all night in the park after agreeing to a lock -in in some weird dingy pub and missing our last buses home. Always the gentleman, he let me lay on top of him. I’d to lie and say I stayed over at a friend’s lest my boyfriend kill me. I’ll always remember the strangeness of being the first and only people in starbucks in town at 8am on a Sunday morning. Shivering and half slept, and laughing and laughing. It would be a few hours before the first buses home. It gave us time to work on our alibis.
Another time we visited the beach, in winter, for my birthday. We had to take two buses. I wore my see through plastic mac, and we sat on green boulders while he let me listen to his latest creation on his earphones. I was supposed to name it, I still remember my suggestions. Some days I turn my phone on to find a voice mail that would just be the piano playing. One month I spent 90 quid in text messages to him alone. And one’s he’d send me that made asci pictures. We exchanged art. I painted for him, he wrote music for me. Almost too old to be this teenaged and tragic. He was my escape, til another version of real life caught up with me.
How long did this last? That I don’t remember. I walked away with no explanation and it was all over just as suddenly as it had begun. Broken hearted, I had no heart in those days. I pity anyone who loved me because there was nothing there to love. I don’t even have a photograph. But I wrote some of the text messages in a note book, and the music, I made sure I kept that. There are memories too, although in truth often suppressed, for it was a painful lost period in my life. You deserved so much more than I was. But to apologise now for my younger self would be disingenuous. What I would say on her behalf is ‘thank you’.
