iPod (draft)

Charlotte Stephenson, Christmas 2007… Engraved on the back. Hmm.Well Merry Christmas to you too Charlotte, I mean I know it’s January already but really, I’m very grateful, you shouldn’t have. Playlists already formed and filed, what an earnest gesture, let me see… Bowie, Buzzcocks, Dusty and Chuck… oh you know me too well. Too well I’m sure. Ahh, I can picture it now. We, latched arms, crossed like swords at our tall gate of impudicity, tailored in vogueish charms fit for the K West; stand with shoes spat upon in a basement not two train stops and a flight of stairs down from where we first crossed paths; beer stained, drunk, lustful; two brash, fuck-starved glitter maggots, gaunt with catwalk hunger; too much coitus, too few carbohydrates, smart but senseless, threading tales clipped with artismic cadence of times we were never actually there to experience. Oh I am sorry I lose myself. Hmm, ‘loose’, myself. No, that doesn’t work. Anyway, I can’t really remember what your face looked like, nice plain hair though, you were probably very reckless too, and so you’ll understand. Charlotte, Charlotte, what an offering! You really shouldn’t have. I think I’ve already got one like this anyway. Hold. To my current concern I abide… Drury, Joy Division, Morrissey too. It’s 9am and you’re miserable now? I almost feel bad. Serves you right for getting drunk, or not getting drunk and just living your life so vacantly. Pop, you’re a bar of soap that can but lather in the palms of others, slip, here you are in my hand now… but I know that when you’re dry you’re just a cracked up, pleasant smelling lump whose only fate it is to wash away into nothing. Rather you than me, love. Not that I mind, we’re all going to end up dead anyway, and what’s a little squalor between friends? …I’m kidding! Don’t look at me like that, I can see your slack-jawed melt-face now, it’s so dull it’s dribbling down itself. Your vacant eyes are cracked like eggs, there’s thick yellow yolk oozing down your cheeks and you’re looking nowhere. I’d lick it right up if I hadn’t eaten already. No I really can’t remember what you looked like, oh well. Strange, I was staring at you for ages, too. We didn’t make eye contact. It was nice you left me your name, at least. And your iPod. If you’re like me then you won’t mind I’ve taken it, I prefer ideas to things; the impulse, my idea; the thing, your iPod, I’m sure you feel the same and you understand completely. Oh! …This is all so futile. I sit here and finger your wheel. Tee hee… …I sigh, I really do sigh, listen to me sigh, and I hope I’ll get a couple of quid for this down the electronics exchange. All I know of you is your face, which I’ve forgotten, and your iPod, whose batteries won’t last forever, yet still your thrown-together image is tainted with enough stark remnants of reality to make this whole little fantasy breathe its futile final breathe. I can dream all I want too, I can write upon you, usurp you as more of a… not I; literate the unliterable. Yes, I like that. But – wait, let’s just look a little further down this list… Spice Girls! Steps! Charlotte bloody Church!… Who am I bloody kidding, Charlotte? It’s my own sorry lack that’ll struggle with coming to terms with the fact you’re probably not the cut throat romantic that the reckless recesses of my blood-starved brain rallies with importentous fanfare, and that though I spin my weary webs of solipsistic squalor; these nets of languid empty signs that I use to tie the frays of life together and support some awkward ideal that’ll keep me going from day to day, you’re just as normal as the next. All you’ve got to worry about is where you left your iPod. Charlotte, oh my dear, dear Charlotte, you’ve given me a gift you shouldn’t have, a gift to a petty thief… a theif of signs?... a thief like me. In truth it was as you got up, still unaware of my presence, and left the row of seats, the ones where we crossed paths, it was then that the first and last thing I truly thought of you entered my mind. “Charlotte”, I thought, though I didn’t know your name at that point, “you really shouldn’t have left your bag open for us and all – but mostly me – on show for us to see.”