Knowing You

Knowing You

written by a friend, who sees beauty along the cracks of life

Inspired by someone who is very dear to me.

Also, if you’re reading this and thinking
Spektor, The Little Prince, Von Teese and Taylor –of course you’re right.

It’s 11:15pm and it’s the first time I’ve ever been this drunk. I’m fifteen and being this fucked is my fucked up idea of adulthood. At fifteen all I want is to be treated like an adult, is to do adult things, is to just be an adult. That word. Adult adult adult adult; I toss, tease and drag the syllables across my tongue until the words feel like a mantra you might murmur to keep the bogeyman at bay. I was naïve back then. Things have changed, though not in their entirety. Tonight, I’ve ended up at this party full of kids with ideas just like mine because it’s your birthday. But I don’t know you. Not even a name. Just a friend of a friend of a friend; three of the six degrees of separation. But the three degrees keeping us apart minimise to zero as we meet. I wish you a happy eighteenth and then, we begin. Later I will discover how you are full of firsts and, to this day, remembering those feelings still cause quivers in my usually calm composure.

Can I know you? I wonder to myself. Let me know you, I pray.

At first I am clumsy around you, trying to be like Dita and Elizabeth, yet instead I come across awkward and teenager. You call me out on my pantomime, so I loosen up and exhale. Icy jack-frost winter arrives and we spend it memorising each other. I had always loved your well-worn hands; lasting remains of a passion for taekwondo. Each callus a tally, each bumpy grain a reminder. I remember thinking if even a shadow of that fire could flicker for me then I would willingly drown in your sweet supple ambrosia. This was me lying to myself as if I had a choice. But you managed to show me how your passion had more than one driver. So I revelled then I drowned. You also teach me that the bodies I love should value actions over words and I show you the joys of loving someone so trustworthy. We leave our marks on each other like dry hands on wet concrete. Deep, permanent and like no other. Summer is hot and sweaty and now we memorise habits and nuances. I think you’re wise, you say I’m interesting and my stomach flutters when I think of your hot hands cupping my always frozen ones. You are new in all the right ways. I smile to myself and release a breath because this surrealism feels so good.

We have fallen in love. I tell myself; I think I know you.
I’m smug and satisfied because I think I know you.

We wind up, and then we wind down after a year. Only I wish it were as graceful as that. If anything we were more like fireworks; hot beautiful reactions which suddenly fizzle out and combust at their peak as they come crashing down much faster and more aggressively than they ever could have hoped to rise. The arguments are bad, the stale tense moments in between worse. I cry. I cry a lot and I cry often. I selfishly fool myself into thinking that nobody has suffered heartache as bad as mine. I feel confused; I don’t understand, and begin to think maybe we never were in love. So the tears continue. I then hear Regina tell me that even mothers who have lost their children don’t cry forever. So I stop. This line becomes my go-to escape from every visit to the land of tears.

I tell my best friend I wish I never met you; I wish I didn’t know you.

But secretly, even more so, I wish you didn’t know me.

I hear stories of you doing x, of y occurring, of z happening. Some of the things during our icy Jack Frost winter and hot sweaty summer. The news reverberates deep because this you doesn’t match the image etched into my brain. I once read somewhere, sometime, that we create illustrations of others based on what we know and fill in the gaps with the assumptions that make us happy –regardless of the fact there is very little evidence to support them. So I begin to wonder whether you were a blank canvas and did I foolishly project my Adonis onto you? Or are these stories simply hollow grains churned through a well-worn rumour mill? But of course I don’t even consider asking you if they’re true because we don’t ask anymore. I’m also gripped by fear; I’ve grown attached, miss and love this echo of mine; so much so that I almost refuse to pry my fingers off of it –even if it means feigning ignorance. However, I tell myself that I am a wise adult now and whilst surrealism is what comforts me at night, reality is usually what’s left standing.

I accept I don’t know you anymore. Screw this. Perhaps I never knew you at all.

We talk on and off over the next 4 years. The first conversation was strange. The second was less. The latest wasn’t at all. You begin them and you end them. Our conversations peak when we are both loveless, and plummet when our hearts are focussed on the promise of something new. We fall in love and out of love like before, but with different people. Different people, different love.

One night it’s 3:28am where I am and 7:28pm where you are and we talk about us. Us now, us then. In previous conversations we have skirted and flirted with the subject but finally we face it. I ask you about tales xyz and you ask me what I loved and hated about you most. We are honest and raw so we resurface sated and reborn. Our conversation continues humming along to this tone of familiarity and nostalgia until my eyelids are weighted with lack of sleep and become too heavy for me to raise. So I say goodnight and end it with an extra lettered kiss (x).

Before I fall victim to sleep I realise that I love you, and that you love me too. But not like when I was fifteen and you were eighteen. No, not like before. I may not know what you do at 9pm on Thursdays anymore (Taekwondo, I hope) but I’m willing to bet that you’d still squirm if I brushed my lips against your neck and that you still pronounce ‘church’ as ‘charge’. Because those are the ways I know you and they are unlikely to change. As silly as it is, I think we are like the London Underground. We are on different lines of the tube and it is as if right now we are at different stations too. At fifteen and eighteen, when we were in love, our lines were intercrossed at the same stop. And as they diverted we fell out of love, bringing us here. And in the future, when they meet again, we will fall in love for a second time. In some ways we will be different people, but we will be the same in the most important ways and that is why we will be able to cast new, more spectacular, unalike fireworks. Who knows, it might be our final stop so they may not come crashing down this time round. Alternatively, we might be the same in all the wrong ways, and instead they will plunge through the air, perhaps more vigorously than the first time, leaving possibilities open for a third, fourth, and fifth time. But it’s OK because I’ve come to realise that both outcomes are OK.

I am on the brink of sleep now. I am content. I know you in all the important ways.
I knew you before and will always know you.
I know you so I can sleep.