Yves. Today is the beginning of the future.
Just like yesterday was. And the day before that. And the day before the day before that. But that’s irrelevant, because today feels different. It’s not technically different in any way so far, but this morning I woke up with the sun in my eyes and the sound of some skewed version of hopefulness in my head. I’m one day closer to escaping, and that feels good. Maybe today will be good. I’ll leave this transitory state behind me and move my mind to the future, the future, the future. I’m going out, and I expect to be impressed.
Anne. Today feels even more bloody depressing than yesterday did. I’m looking at suburbia through grey-tinted glasses, it’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. I woke up hoping for hope; I left the house and was faced with what I should have been expecting instead. Everything in this life is fundamentally disappointing. The beautiful people I see not enough of will all end up disappointing me. The beautiful places I have never been will end up disappointing me. I need to learn not to expect, but it fills the hours I want to kill so I cling to it anyway. I’m thinking this feeling of grand disappointment, disillusionment, and detestation of most things has actually manifested itself in me physically. It feels like if I stand up I’ll fall over. If I open the curtains I’ll collapse. I have to drag myself out of this daze and face the day.
Years later, through year long corridors, up year long flights of stairs, I’m here, in front of a door I’m supposed to be in front of. I knock on the richly stained wood and it feels like my bones are made from fragile glass-each connection with the door causes the glass to splinter into my flesh, and the shards shoot up to my mind and I have to close my eyes because it hurts so much. At this point I’m very tempted to turn around and go back down the stairs to avoid having to force sound from my reluctant throat, but my feet are stuck to the floor, my muscles cemented to prevent me from going anywhere. It’s a case of choosing the least painful pathway. It’s not like it’s that bad anyway, when I consider it. It’s not the end of the world, just another shaken morning. Just another routine. It’s not bad, it’s just not good. I think it’s nothing. I think it’s tiring. I think I want it to go away.
The door opens after centuries. A welcome interlude, as I feel my head has been, thus far, a debauched creature of a twisted underworld- revelling in its own filth, made up of self-pity, self-loathing, self-obsession, self-love. It’s sickly, and addictive. It’s unhealthy to stay in this place.
-Anne. Good to see you, love. Are you alright?
She doesn’t wait for a response, which is fortunate, because I didn’t intend to give one. I reluctantly follow her into her flat, which is confusing because I’ve only just noticed how exactly the same it is to mine. I’m worried I never stepped outside my front door, after all this trauma. This petty, insignificant, indulgent, trauma.
-Here. Take them, read them, and give them back when you’re done. Tea?
I collapse slightly under the mountain of folders and paper I have absolutely zero interest in. Tea? I’m dying, absolutely dying, for some tea, but not here, because here is horrible.
-No, it’s fine, I’m in a bit of a hurry anyway, I-
-Oh, okay, don’t worry!
She’s rushing me out the door now, I’m sort of grateful that my significance to her life is this tiny, and I’m also slightly jealous that she can fill her head with things she might have to do. All too soon I’m outside the mahogany stained door once again, on the verge of speaking to the metal numbers nailed onto it. As I consider this, I notice the little spy-hole thing she has, and realise she may be watching me staring gormlessly at the rusted 74b ahead of me. I hurriedly leave, because no one wants to look like a weirdo.
Yves. The edge of the city isn’t too nice, but I’m in it anyway because I have nowhere else to be. There’s a lot to think about here but I don’t want to do that right now, I’m not going to distract myself from my gloriously glowing future with thoughts of how shit seventies architecture looks. Looking down at what fashionable sacrilege has been committed to my person today, I hope to high heaven I look better than the zombies that pass me. I want to see beauty in them, so I try.
A heavily pregnant woman in pink and/or white crimplene, uniform for the overweight and unemployed. I don’t blame her for how she looks, but I do find it disturbing. She’s smoking, too. Killing off the cells of everything in and around her, sometimes I wonder if these people are trying to shorten their lives on purpose. Sickening, I suppose, but a little understandable if I’ll credit them with that intelligence.
Who really knows about their situation here? It’s a curse of the country, the way that people are born into living for their death. I guess it’s just humans at their most primitive, in some ways- two aims: survival, and continuation of the species. Once your duty is done, you can do what you like. This woman’s duty is done; she’s managed to procreate this early on in her life, what an achievement. She has reproduced. Spawned. Given something utterly (relatively) useless to our society. I want to love her for it, but I just can’t. It’s hard to dwell on these sights for long, in this city, so I’ll leave now, and erase this picture from the increasingly distasteful mental photo album I’ve been creating.
It’s all okay; it’s all fine- I leave this area today. To start afresh, a new career in a new town, as it were.
Anne. This apartment block is a dreadful place to be, with dreadful views outside my window. Actually, the window leads to other windows, where sad-eyed housewives lean over the ledges and smoke secret cigarettes, looking somewhat enviously at the pigeons around them. Personally I’ve a nihilistic attitude to the notion of escape- if I was really that bothered, I might have done it by now. I’m not stupid enough to not realise that I’m one of those people who could only possibly be this happy while thinking about myself.
When you look at the world, my logic is perfectly reasonable. There is no such thing as altruism, it is an absolute myth. The only reason people do things is for their own gain. I know I have pessimistic tendencies, but at the same time, I know what’s right and wrong. I don’t believe in a deity, which means that the only reason anyone does anything is because they think it will make them feel better. Even when they seem totally unselfish, it’s just for them. It’s not a negative view on people- good people can still exist. They just aren’t being good people for anyone except themselves.
When you think about life in this way, it makes perfect sense that I spend so long in my house, thinking about how shit existence is. This kind of thing really does it for some people.
Yves. I’m stunned, amazed, incredulous, in awe, inspired, everything- this is something new. I don’t know where the last week went but I’m somewhere new, and it is beautiful. How I originally intended it to be.
Up four flights of stairs. Predictably the lift is broken, but that doesn’t really bother me. This is my new home, a battered, bruised place, which promises crumbling plaster and rats. It’s the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen, the most welcome sight for years and years. I feel like I’ve found an oasis in a desert. I feel invigorated, motivation renewed, lucky, turned on. I could live here. I do live here.
Flat 146 has a uniform mahogany door, and looks exactly the same and worryingly close to doors 145 and 147, but I enter with all the excitement of a child running into a playground. Stunningly empty rooms. My head feels as clear as they look. I have with me very little, as I wanted to leave everything behind. A suitcase of clothes, a mattress, a box of books, a box of records, a suitcase of papers, and a box for miscellaneous objects that I might need to survive. Life begins here.
Anne. I saw a new person arrive at the flats today. A boy, scrawny looking but still filled with the warmth that comes from living somewhere other than this hell I adore inhabiting. That sense of soul in his eyes will be gone in a week, I have no doubt. I almost want to run down the stairs and tell him to go back to wherever he came from, but that would involve moving. I’m not that morally opposed to seeing another person’s hope sucked into the void that is this area of Britain.
Yves. I’ve settled in. Time to explore. I want to go out, get warm, get fucked, get lost in this place, find out why I’m here instead of where I was a week ago. I want to forget about where I was a week ago. It’s my past now, it’s gone. This is the happiest thought I’ve indulged in for ages, and it brings a smile to my face that hasn’t been there for years. I step outside into the warmly familiar polluted air of a place full of life. It’s about 5 o clock in the evening, and sometime near autumn which means it’s starting to get dark. As the light fades the city becomes clearer, like someone has turned up a volume dial on the whole place. Lights come on, noises get louder, crowds move in wilder ways. I couldn’t possibly be anywhere else.
Anne. Evening. The light is going, I might open my curtains. It’s honestly not every day I do this, sit here and think about how dreadful everything is, but it’s quite a temptation to me a lot of the time. Like I said before, I don’t feel healthy doing it, so I decide to get up.
Forcing myself in front of a mirror, I begin to rethink exposing the general public to the abomination that is my exterior, but then remember that I am completely invisible to the general public, who, in any case, deserve to be punished with my inglorious aesthetic for their mass crime of existence and being generally dull.
I scour my wardrobe for something that could lessen the pain of my reflection to at least myself, and remember that once upon a time I had people who would tell me I could look pretty. I don’t want to look pretty, I decided, I want to stay a portrait of the ugliness I can’t help but feel. I want to wear my tragedy of uselessness. I want to exhibition the lack of a mask, the negativity, the horror. For a split second I’m about to feel slightly more lively, fuelled by that sumptuous mixture of vitriol towards myself and towards the world- but then I give into remembering the nauseous feeling that comes after realising that you can go out, pounding holes in the pavement with the anger and force in your feet, staring every person you see to the ground, trying to communicate with your eyes how little you think of them, but in the end, the only difference it makes is for you, feeling the exhaustion after the climax of the loathing. So I put on the clothes, the face, the social mask, and ponder actually calling someone to take me out.
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