Recent fragments / Memory full

At London Fields, my air pods unpair, because I’ve left my iPhone on the overground. I’m swept by a kind of panicked relief, but take steps to get it back and get it back, though not without a cleaner teasing me to tears at Liverpool Street—they creep out from under my big sunglasses like furtive children after bedtime.

…

At college, I had wanted to study Art at A Level but was encouraged to choose between art and theatre studies. And because I loved Antonin Artaud and Sarah Kane and Katie Mitchell and Shakespeare and Martin Crimp and one day hoped to write, direct and star in fucked up plays just like them, I was determined not to give up theatre. So I spent lunchbreaks in the art rooms eating sandwiches and envying my friends who were getting to make art in the style of Robert Rauschenberg. Robert Rauschenberg. Even his name sounds ripped from a billboard. It took me a while to work out that you can make art outside of a system. Love beyond convention.

…

I delete hundreds of videos without even watching them. I’m probably deleting high-value footage, yet nothing prevents my phone from showing ‘memory full’. My phone is hot. My phone doesn’t have enough memory to delete its own memories.

…

Inside the Richard Dadd exhibition at the Royal Academy, I notice a man staring at me. I look directly back, gazing blankly through him. It doesn’t work. We make small talk. We last saw one another five years before. Later that afternoon, I receive an email.

…

Scrolling story views, I notice the man I met when I was nineteen still sometimes looks. I fell impossibly in love with him that first night. His dry humour and tragic eyebrows, his kind eyes and lurching gait. Spooning in a friend’s bed. The dream of our togetherness that convinced me to break it off with the man I was seeing, searching for something better, which turned out to be nothing. Still searching. Our imaginary children would be teenagers by now.

…

Friday nights in London are the loneliest nights to be alone, which is why I always wanted to go out when I lived there. Which is why I realised I needed to leave.

I have a ticket to an event but my body is protesting against going; anxiety holding it hostage. I decide to be solo instead of alone. I locate a friendly pub and order steak and chips, feign reading while I eavesdrop and eat.

…

On my way to a gig in North London, men in the street offer unwanted compliments. My pace quickens.

…

In a French village, I asked my mother what the strange green fruits hanging heavily from the tree were. A man appeared from behind the high, dry stone wall with a knife and cut one down, slicing it in two. He handed me the fig halves and I tasted its ripeness. My mouth remembers its shape.

…

There’s no melodrama, no Almodóvar, barely any mellow drama to a laptop café playing slowed down club anthems. Only tapping and sipping. I remember the old Foyles Café, where horny literary men went to chat up women. The time one man told me he could be the love of my life. Was I just going to walk away from him, from that? I walked all the way to the Tate Modern, locked myself in a toilet cubicle and masturbated there, picturing Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Secretary. I had just found out that morning my grandmother had died. It was the first of many deaths that were to follow.

…

I used to think I’d do anything for love. I’d always wanted to meet someone who made me want to offload my worldly possessions. Become unworldly. Move to a mountain. I remember being given a pair of binoculars when I was ten years old. I have always felt closer to things than I actually am.

…

The sunsets have been new scales of sublime lately, which makes me picture hundreds of verdant limes bobbing just beneath the surface of the water, anticipating the second they can release their mythical green flicker.

I have thousands upon thousands of photographs of the Margate skies on an orange rubber-padded hard drive and no sense of what they’re for.

I ran into someone recently who rhapsodised about my sky photography, said I ought to make a coffee table book. I can imagine it being a nice object, but the idea of selecting which skies to include seems impossible. The book would have to be called ‘Devotion’.

…

My phone won’t take any more pictures.