Pride

David and I used to sing Barbie Girl by Aqua in our final year of primary school, the local KFC close to his place had a jukebox and whenever we’d go for a meal, we’d put the song on afterwards and sing and dance about, because we were shameless back then.

He’s the only person I’d ever dance with at parties until about year 9, whilst I was going through that boy phase of being too cool to dance with girls, he was my go to guy, David and I would take each other in our arms and march about the floor with purpose, we got quite good, to the point where by about year 12 at parties we’d have an instinctive feel for certain songs and we’d leap through the house calling out each others name till we found each other and then pulling the other out to the dance floor.

I think that’s how I ended up in these long ridiculous professions of love to a guy I knew in high school called Simon, he and I were bound by the red string of fate you see, we weren’t close enough to see each other outside of parties, and we didn’t spend that much time with the same groups, but once every couple of months we’d run into each other and after a while that just became an excuse for us to go through and think up some new lines, improvisation is best because you can play off each other, he’d take my hand and hold it to his chest and I’d get down on one knee to profess whatever nonsense I could think of, how the waning of the moon led me to him there that night and how in the cold of the night I’d stare up at it from my room and images of his body glistening in that sweet pale light would flash in my mind, each passing by as quickly as a petal carried off in the wind, with the words ‘my heart’s prince’ sounding again and again in my head, echoing about, lulling me deeper into a hypnotic state of etc etc etc, cliches are the best for that sort of thing, if you take too long to think about the line it either has to be profound or deliberate, everyone can run with cliches if they try, I don’t know why, but I’ve never met a person who can’t, I guess it’s that shared wisdom thing. Beauty is fleeting, the night is lonely, the moon is constantly changing, everybody has heard those tropes enough for them to be natural.

The red string of fate is actually quite beautiful though, the idea is that there is someone else intended for you, and tied to your pinky finger is one end of the string and their pinky finger is tied to the other end, the string is vast and winding but the movements and actions of each other pull you towards one another, although faint and obscure at first, slowly becoming more and more obvious and distinct up to the moments you meet, so when you meet this person and you tell them of the events from your past, and they tell you the events from theirs, all of it then makes sense in the light of the other, because everything was leading you, pulling you, towards this person, even though you might have come from vastly different walks of life and place, everything is explained, and given reason, by the string.

See, I told you it was beautiful.

I was asked the other day whether or not I was a university graduate and I replied to assure them I am not, by saying ‘Nope, I’m not eduversitally unicated.’ Does that qualify as dyslexia? I do that a bit, once or twice a week. Also for some reason, when I can’t remember the name of something, I’ll usually call it an umbrella. Whilst looking for coke in the fridge I’ll yell out ‘Have we run out of umbrella already?’