To quote Strindberg and Helium (which is quite wonderful if you haven't seen it, and where Amanda Palmer stole the intro for Strength Through Music from), a peculiar thing happened to me
*
Smiling at strangers on trains.
I've taken too much Tramadol again.
It's a familiar feeling. Floating
through the arms of my opiate saviour. Chasing away that relentless
lower back pain from the rotting organs inside my body, the ones that
betrayed me even before I was born. At least, I guess, I know how I'm
gonna die. The day to day effects of it, though, the PKD that's not
even at it's worst yet; I'm just another fucking opiate junkie.
Wasting the time I don't have, wasted. Oh boy. It's just that I can't
work when I'm in pain and this year, the Christmas drama has come
early. The obligatory “I'm home for Christmas” text from a
childhood ex-lover. That one, the one we all have. It takes all my
willpower and opiates not to fall back into the seven year cycles I
travelled when I thought that he was my soul mate. Just too respond
with my characteristic curt but polite response that fools that don't
know me call confidence, or arrogance, or both.
So I've taken too much Tramadol again.
To quell the pain, from my body, from my heart, from all of it and
everything else I can't tell you. To break the curse of the Christmas
drama, even for a little while. I'm up on my cloud like nothing can
touch me, floating down escalators and shrugging into seats. One of
the things I love about London is that you can disappear down the
rabbit hole of yellow lights and dirty tube mice (well, they're sorta
like rabbits) and emerge half an hour later, the other side of the
world. It's good for my head, these transport links, good for the
part of me I inherited from my father that is filled with the eternal
urge to run away.
So I'm in my seat. Middle of the
carriage. Trying to tell my brain that just because a cycle is well
travelled, familiar, it doesn't mean it's a comfort. Thinking about
do I trust that I've left enough food for my cat. Thinking oh shit, I
should adjust my eye-liner that's no doubt on my chin. When I sat
down, the bright, angry colours of the girl next to me's phone screen
drew me in momentarily, and I purposely diverted my eyes. Polite
respect. She's got her headphones in anyway. I have an instant
emotional reaction to her, lovely dark hair, curvy face. Kind, like
I'd want her to sing me to sleep. Curvy as fuck and I remember
thinking, I bet you'd look so pretty if you just smiled. Maybe I can
make you smile, one day.
I pull out my compact and I display
with a talent that only stems from a die-hard Londoner my ability to
adjust my make-up on my train. I promise you, I'm not so fucked I
can't do my make-up. I'm wary of leaning too far into the women
either side of me. Puckering my lips and reapplying my lip-gloss and
when I think I'm near presentable I flick it all back into my
shoulder bag and reach for my Kindle.
There's a few moments when I scroll for
my book where the tube lights flicker on...off...lovely dystopian,
ragged, flashing.
Then all of a sudden, the pretty girl
to the left moves for me. Pulls her headphones out of her ears,
holding them in one snow white hand, and she lifts her wrist. Dives
for my face, cupping my chin in her hand. For a nanosecond, and I
react, lean out of her reach, back onto the woman on the other side
me. I usually have some clever and quick witted cutting response, for
situations like this, but it's all happened too quickly and I'm just
stunned. Staring there, I've instantly gone to swipe her hand away.
Quick hands palms out like they teach you in all the self-defence
classes for young, single, angry fuck-you women.
She stumbles over her words.
“You gotta bittofa-”
The quickest response I can muster is
“Don't touch the face.”
She's French. That sexy accent that I'm
always a sucker for. I'm torn between the horror that an absolute
stranger has felt the need to touch my face, and the intimacy that
her gesture, had she managed to grab a hold, would have created. Do I
feel like this because she is pretty, or is it something else,
something to do with my ex-lover's obligatory Christmas hello text?
Some self-preservation screw you buddy urge?
The French-girl, she realises that
she's overstepped her mark. Instantly looks down at her feet, turning
half-red and mutters a quick sorry; because I'm so still in shock, I
don't tell her that it's fine.
However I'm to English to move. Not
that there's anywhere else to sit at half seven on the Victoria line
to Stockwell anyway, and my kidneys still hurt despite the Tramadol
haze and I don't want to draw more attention to myself than I already
have anyway.
So I sit. I ferment. Her touch has
woken something inside of me, some distant memory of my ex-lover. No,
of all my ex-lovers. The one nights and the long terms and the maybe
might have beens and the never weres. The ones that meant everything,
ones that meant nothing. The ones that meant nothing that ended up
meaning everything. The ones I was in love with, or in lust with, all
the things that fell apart that I over or under reacted to given the
point I was at in my life. I wonder, at any point, if one of those
men or women had touched me like that, I would have just widened my
eyes and smiled like I do when I want to get laid. Why then, was that
okay? For them to cup my face out of the blue, for me to inhale and
close my eyes and smile into their kisses, feeling something close to
the harmony of love? I feel the echoes of a thousand loving touches
burnt into my skin, a surprisingly levelled reaction, seems my love
life is essentially me reacting very calmly to a series of
unfortunate events (this is the name, by the way, my mother commonly
uses to refer to my romantic exploits). Surely, if I'm still mourning
the loss of the last glorious touch from a heaven-sent sweetest and
beautiful boy, then her touching me like this is fine? Sexy, even,
and why is it such a violation of my boundaries just because the
pretty French-girl hasn't even told me her name?
My train arrives at Stockwell before I
come to a decision, and I still can't decide if I'm a fool for
letting my old lovers touch me or if I should have just asked her
fucking name.
