LUST IN LA
DOCTRINE. ARMOUR. FOOL’S GOLD.
An ex-friend bought me a little green pin that says ‘picky’. I made a fuss, because they thought of me, but a shot of seasick chased the sweet. This happens sometimes when I realise someone has caught sight of something I was meant to be hiding.
‘Picky’.
How could I hide that? My method of selection.
They said it again, on another evening, laying next to me on my bed. They watched as I was going through Hinge. Swiping left and left and left and left.
“This is why you can’t find anyone…”
Their head was propped on their arm. They told me they wanted to fuck a cis girl some time. To see. I guess that was an invitation, their elbow touched to the meat of my upper arm. I ignored it and kept swiping.
The odd time I swipe right, it puts me in situations.
Artists are the problem. The appeal, I guess, is their intensity. And I am nothing if not willing to grasp the monkey’s soft, cute little paw.
So I sit in the dark looking up at them as steam pours unmistakably from their nostrils, vapour milky under the Lights. It’s not that the AC is so high in this 50-seat theatre, it’s that their fire is so hot their organs have moved straight from solid to steam. Who am I to squint into a cloud and approximate the new location of a stranger’s Heart and Lungs?
Seasickness back, because I leak like this, too, now- with a cloud which becomes more opaque (less forgiving) by the day.
Predictive text flashes at me when I begin to type faster. New keyboard, squares matte, un-shined by the repeated press of my fingertips.
My computer knows sometimes what I want to say before I say it. Other times it throws a rogue noun out. One I would have never thought of. “Tetanus shot” as I was aiming for “text”. “Technology” when I was writing ‘to’.
On a more positive note, I am learning to Take In for longer. I can’t do it in all the ways I used to. I still think of it sometimes.
Thinking about To The Hilt. Missing it a lot.