/Afterglow-
Over, the whole three years over in a twelve minute rant a quarter bottle of wine.
People laughed and cheered and loved my musical choices. . I would love to say afterwards I jumped up and down and was full of pride, but more of a cathartic feeling came over me. . I was done.
It dawned on me this would possibly be the last thing I ever performed.
/Quentin Tarentino says when he sits down to write a film he chooses the music first and makes the piece around that.
Me and Quentin apparently have something in common.
I walked to university today listening to Rumours by Fleetwood Mac and realised ‘Secondhand news’ was written for the kind of piece I wanted to be doing.
Funny, this formed my style, my movements and my presence.
Lets skip to tech week. .
I had no clue. .
I had these images in my head that I wanted and I knew the stock cupboard wouldn’t suddenly present them to me in all their glory like I wished it would
I wanted to create the most intricate kitchen possible, the stuff of naturalistic professional theatre companies.
Didn’t happen.
I then thought, lets move this into a bedroom.
Didn’t happen.
We stuck to basics, mirror, chair, wine spotlight.
After I set up, I was asked
‘Let’s hear some of your material’
I froze.
I’d written this beautiful, poetic piece about love but it was fictional and I couldn’t remember a thing.
Two days before my show I was told. . .
‘just speak’
So that’s what I planned to do.
/It was never going to be enough, I’d brought the coffee maker as a birthday present to mark one of his big birthdays. He was happy about it actually, we’d both always wanted one but the money was too tight. However this time, i threw caution (and shopping budgets) to the wind and brought it, knowing full well it might be the last present.
Funny, anyone that thinks a coffee machine could save a marriage shouldn’t give advice on how to save a marriage
Divorcing is a lot of time, money and effort. Maybe we should just carry on and have affairs, always sounded glamourous.
Of course I didn’t dedicate my life to him to leave him. I didn’t stand there awkwardly all day in front of my family and friends waiting to get drunk to one day turn around and leave it all.
It’s not that this man turns and calls me names and swears and curses at me and hurts me. It’s that sometimes I wish he would. I was always cautious of couples who smugly proclaimed ‘oh, we never argue!’
Well, you’re missing out on make up sex then aren’t you dears.
If you don’t bicker about what to watch on television or where to go to eat then you’re obviously not too bothered are you.
Them blazing rows where you think they’ve been stupid and they think you’ve been stupid and you’re shouting and saying things that would make a sailor blush. But then you’d call me something like a angry mong and I’d laugh and laugh and you’d laugh and laugh and I’d put the kettle on and we’d leave it there. How many times have to had to say ‘I don’t know what we were arguing about’ that was then when we would fall into bed and sleep it off.
Never go to sleep on an argument
I told our children that last week, we’ve done it three times since.
I’m quite sure my mother told me that too.
Dating again, Christ.
That’s what I’m doing now, getting ready to go on a night out with the girls. Painting on a face to match the falseness of the situation, I’m sure I didn’t wear this much makeup when I was younger, maybe I felt I didn’t need to, this glow must have come out of me then, proof that nothing mattered, none of it it would all come to pass and I would never age, I would never be alone because I was fun and relaxed and I was exciting and I was happy to let it all slip by knowing I would be okay.
Now I’m sat here feeling like a snake who’s mouse has just been stolen off her by a swooping bird, happy that the little rodent has gone but twisted and bitter that I was not the creature to do it.
How disgustingly brutal.
I curl my hair and add several more strokes of mascara, I will conceal my eyes because of the aptly named crows feet, my dress will remained high necked because of fear it’s starting to look like a turkey, always birds with women, ironically seeing as we are far from free.
Constrained by the constructs of what we set ourself
We settle, I have settled and now I am unhappy,
Well, no, I have my health and a house and a bank account but I am not happy, possibly at some points I am content, when the day is at it’s birth in the morning and I’m sat with a peppermint tea and a book, something that hasn’t changed since I was younger, in that moment the world is still, then the memories creep in and I am sad again, the strokes come on the radio
‘In many ways, they’ll miss the gold old days, some day, some day.’ ‘And now my fears, they come to me in threes, always’
When I was younger tidying the house seemed so mundane and pointless, now I sit at twitch at the soup stain on my counter.
At least we’ll always have the coffee machine.
Maybe that was the problem, aiming for an expensive gadget instead of aiming to keep the love alive.
I suppose I could try harder, we could create the typic rom com scene and find eachother again on ok Cupid and drink gin and fall back into each others arms once again destroying the children and ourselves.
I remember being naked, sick in your bin two weeks into the relationship and two minutes into sex.
You said ‘it was strange, because you were being sick but you still seemed really happy’
Well yes, because I was with you and you were looking after me and it was the perfect end to the evening.
Now I’m lucky if you buy lemsip for me during cold season.
But maybe I’m being too cold on you, maybe you’re struggling with an ageing stomach and losing your beautiful hair, feeling tired all the time and feelingn twice your weight on your limbs on shoulders.
I remember that time when we were fresh and new and we got high and pretended to be dinosaurs in your garden and we looked at eachother and knew it was love
Have the feelings changed or have we?
Tonight wasn’t too painful but I was disgusted on how I valued my self worth and the success of the night. In my mind I had that if I didn’t get male attention I would go home disappointed, the pressure of this aged me twenty more years, not a look that would work when the men in here we’re already twenty my junior.
What do I want
What did I ever want
I’m wanted you so much
I still do, but the old us, the us we were when we spend £120 in one day in Leeds and had nothing to show for it afterwards
I miss the self I used to be and I don’t know why I’m no longer that girl
Now a woman with a back begining to ache and the occasional grey armpit hair, I want to look inside your mind and know if you’re writing the same letter to yourself or wether you’re done too.
Maybe we move on because we want something new again, we could change jobs and never speak to old peers again, we could be treated in a new relationship and that’s easier than keeping a long one.
I don’t know, do any of us know?
All I know is when looking into your eyes and rubbing my hand down your side which was the only bit of your skin not covered in hair I never expected to not be with you
I never wanted to not be with you
And now I’m stood in a bar wearing hold in pants and a tena lady just incase and I am thinking about the fact we never upped sticks and moved to Australia and opened that bar
We never stopped smoking to afford it
We never joined couples yoga
What if we did? What if we did now
How wrong and right is the concept of too late.
Talk to me, pour it out to me, open yourself up and hold my hand and cry like you did when we were twenty and I will still guide you through the bad
I will tell you when you look terrible and you will remind me that I’ve not shaved my legs in three weeks
Why have I stopped doing that? I value things more important but if it keeps the love Alive then fuck it I’ll wax every day.
Or should you love my legs fuzzy or not?
I’d tell my old self to live and love like I was going to get old
I lived life in the moment thinking that if I didn’t change nothing would
We should have adapted
We could adapt? Or is it too much
Has the silence in bed making the night last ten times longer become too killing
Has the sex without kisses become a form of disappointment competition
How can we not give up on love when we have given up on ourselves
I crossed my fingers
And i was one minute away from forever
I made little promises and bets
I said if I could get through this album without skipping then we’d be forever together
I had thirty seconds left and counted down one by one
I got excited because I thought that meant it was certain, a promise, set in stone and to myself, I’d done it
We’d never be unhappy now, no, we’d be unhappy but never with eachother
You’d come home and complain about work and so would I but that was okay because as you were doing it is flick the kettle on and smile and nod and I’d admit that Vanessa was a bitch even if I didn’t know her and I’d not even question the mistakes you’d made because I’d be on your side and I’d agree it was everyone’s fault but yours and I’d believe it because I adore you and that’s okay, and that’s it
And you’d say that I could completely appeal that parking ticket and the attendant was a cunt
And maybe we’d both know that it was our faults but nobody messes with the other one
I don’t care if you smashed a plate in front of a customer and you’d be on my side when I say I got caught on Facebook at work, you slipped?! What’s the issue
I deserved a break
Then you crack open a bottle of Merlot and I find something awful on television and our ankles entwine and then it doesn’t matter what happened at work because the fire is on and the lights are off and we open another and that’s okay because it’s Friday and we make plans for tomorrow that we can’t keep and we say we will make a nice breakfast but we won’t see the day until three
Maybe we can go for dinner instead
Maybe we can go for cocktails
Crushed fruit and ice and mint leafs and big fancy glasses or plant pots and we’ll laugh and go home and you’ll nod off before me and I’ll watch you for a little
Stop kicking me in the back
You might be asleep but it’s still annoying
We’ll have a quiet month then splash out on a gram and it will be nowhere near as fun and cool as it was made out to be but it doesn’t matter cause we did it together
Say we’re sixty
We’ll still have them memories and I can turn to you with a croaky forty a day voice and go
‘Remember when. .’
And you’ll laugh and go, no I can’t! But it sounds like the kind of thing I’d have said
/We laid out chairs today; three.
One was where we are now
One was twenty years time
One was another twenty
Peers saw themselves with a dog,
With a life
living the perfect married life
they saw kids
they saw joy
one baby girl
one baby boy
I saw wood and marble and stone
I saw me, drinking coffee alone
They saw houses, neat and trim
I saw wine bottles and a recycling bin
They saw colour, life, love bitten
I saw a perfect new fitted kitchen
They saw smiles and laugher and fun
I saw two ready meals for one
/Todays presentation was on Spaudling Grey; a performer who captivates his audience so strangely and so intelligently. Here we have a man who can mix in jokes about living in new York and his mothers suicide; I want to be Spaulding Grey.
The intense stare, minimal set and perfect timing and accuracy of his material made me somewhat captivated by his stage presence, an often even a little scared.
Is he dark, funny, bitter, putting a light hearted twist on the world? I think all of them.
He has this certain element of intimacy without even touching his audience. He does not need to be cut open like Marina, he does not need to touch you like Adrian; because, in a way, he does still do both these things purely through text and voice.
I’d found the style inspiration I was looking for, I wanted it to be me. My text. My words. My stage. Me.