I Didn't Even See The Snapchat (a poem...?)

You forget that humans have so much blood until you see it.

Lines of it, horizontal and vertical and sideways and diagon-ways, slant-ways and knife-ways.

He doesn’t show you, doesn’t try to hide, merely exists.

Your mouth forms words over and again that stick, pebbles in your throat. It’s a 99 pence plastic stocking filler toy that’s gummed up and broken before you even start.

“What happened?” (The “again” is silent.)

He answers in shards of light. They said, they said, they said, he said. So many third persons. Are they all the same one?

He rips the bandages off and tells me to smell the iodine. Hospitals and childhood and hostels come back to me, become me. I portrait myself, paint my face into being a deity of indifference.

I cannot meddle.

He was worried, that he got blood on his sheets. Angry that he ruined his favourite pair of jeans. He has to wear shorts now, the bandages poking out from underneath them. Glowing ghostly white, and the plasters are pale too.

Literally, he was sewn back together. We have the technology, we can rebuild him.

He had a friend with him, waiting. Who came, because he sent an A&E selfie. I can’t believe we snapchat fragility now, hashtag wrecked.

When he goes to pee, I see it, on his desk. Such a tiny, innocuous thing, this snap blade of his.

I pick it up, carry it with me as a token with a smear of his blood still on it.

I recite voodoo spells, wrap it in chains and tie it to a cinderblock, throw it in the poisonous lake that bubbles away in the centre of our campus.

(How strange, to have a university with a toxic centre. It’s a metaphor, I’m sure of it, it must be.

I just don’t know what for yet.)

The geese flee. Flapping, squawking refugees from that slither of metal and cold.

I take all the sharp edges from the world to my power-sander gaze, scratch off the sharp corners, marshmallow the steel.

I hear him come back and put it down.

He cleans the wounds, airs them out. Hanging them out to dry, like laundry. A clothes horse of himself.

He says he keeps the blade as it is safe. Safer that burning his flesh or snip-snipping arteries with scissors. There are only two scratches on his wrist, tiny and parallel. Tally marks?

There is no desire to die sooner than natural. We both want him to stop hurting.

What scares me most of all is how sensible he is. Rationality, parceled up with curly hair and a firm grasp of logic. 

He is too sensible to really hurt himself, I say, when I can't sleep.

If he did die, I would sob bitterly. Should have done more, said more, hidden Ninja-like behind his door ready to protect him from himself. Should have Big Brothered his medication, strung him up in Spiderman silk so he could not move.

Worse still: one day, it would stop hurting. A person, reduced to a blip in my life, anecdotally.

Self-harm discussed over tea and toast. Pass us the butter, are you okay, one time a long time ago my friend died. Well, obviously.

I mean – the “one time”, that is. Obviously. Death is a pretty one-time thing.

Anecdotally... 3: I hated school.

I can hear my mother on the phone at the moment, talking to my cousin. My cousin is ten years older than me, married with children, forever involved in the dramas that come of growing up in a middle-class world and suddenly finding yourself shut out from it.

My mother is talking about my cousin's kids, and what they'll be like when they grow up. She recommends waiting for something until her oldest is 12.

"By the time he's 12, he'll be out playing with friends," she said.

That assumes that, at 12, you have friends.

Friends probably come from school, when you're that age. At 12, in my first year of secondary school, I hated it. And I'm not saying that in the way that everyone hates school at 12 years old, when they resent the idea of being kept indoors on sunny days and having to give up Mondays in order to learn long division.

I hated school in a real, visceral way, that manifested itself in aches and pains and dizzying headaches. I hated the institution, the stuck-up natures of the people there, the unsympathetic teachers and the boring, banal homework we were given every evening. I hated the cliques, the childishness of everyone trying to act grown up, the forgotten invites to parties and the over-reactions to harmless remarks.

School is not a place for the strange. School, at 12, is not a place for the make-up shunning sports-failing sarcasm-dripping misfit. I excelled academically, hated every minute of it, and was too wrapped up in my own misery to try and reach out and make friends. Self-pity enveloped me. I hated school then, but looking back, I hate Past Me just as much. She should have tried harder.

I would go so far as to say I hate most of my past selves, and everything from 12 to 16 should be destroyed, erased from my past. I cringe when people bring those years up. Then, I lived for music, and gigs: they were a driving passion which obliterated all other thoughts from my mind. I fiercely defended friends I made through them, but now we've drifted so far apart I can barely remember their names. Some have changed so much that I wonder why I liked them in the first place, and conclude it was the mutual sense of not fitting in. Society had abandoned us, so we in turn cast out the conventions we were meant to adhere to.

School is the best days of your life, according to my mother.

I have no doubt that was true for her, affable and small and pleasant and good at tennis. An in-between sort of girl, not too cool or too clever but just enough of everything to be generally likable. She had part-time jobs and friends and a place on a nursing course before she even sat her A-levels.

I think adults misrepresent school. We're fed this bullshit from such a young age - that it is the best time of your life - that I felt guilty for not liking it. I felt like I was wasting a valuable chance, spunking away a childhood of youth and freedom on things that did not matter. Even now, I get jealous when people talk fondly about their early teenage years: I hated everything up till 17, when I shook off the loner victim mentality and proclaimed introversion to be too emo.

We can't put youth on a pedestal just because we retroactively yearn for it. Sure, sometimes I miss school, but only as an abstract notion. I miss the concept of playgrounds and half-terms and being with your friends five days a week. I don't miss the reality of backstabbing bitchiness and chronic sick-days due to my total, actual inability to face the world some days.

University was what kept me going. The prospect of it, golden and radiant, and predicating a good school education to get there. I got there. The institution of secondary school was worth it, and I am truly genuinely happy now (or, at least, working on it). I only hope to get happier.

I hope my cousin's son is happier at 12 than I was. I hope I am never that miserable again. But I take issue with all blanket proclamations that school years are the best years of your life. You can't spend life assuming your best days are behind you: all of my best days are to come, and will still be to come, for as long as I live. What's life without something to look forward to?

Anecdotally... 2: The manwhore

"There's one thing I should make clear," he said. "I am a total manwhore."

I couldn't see why he couldn't have just said whore. The gendering of it seemed frivolous, surplus to requirements. The effect would have been the same.

"What else?" he asked. I looked at him blankly. I didn't know what else. It must have been a rhetorical question, because he continued without waiting for me to answer. "Oh yes. I'll try anything one. Or anyone."

That was definitely more than one thing. That was three things which he had clarified. He couldn't count. That said, if a pretty girl was lying in my bed making very clear she wanted to kiss me, I'm not sure I'd be able to count either.

Our protracted make-out session lasted several hours, but there was surprisingly little kissing involved. They tended to happen in short bursts, interspersed with long lingering eye-fucking, and bizarre fragments of conversations. We discussed his scars. He had one in the back of his leg from an air rifle. The result of growing up in the countryside, he said. He told me about the girl he'd met on a night bus in London while out of his skull on champagne, and the holodeck he was building at work. I offered stories about my parents' education and why straight vodka was always a bad idea. We had an argument over the ambiguities of the English language which ended in stalemate.

He was a self-described universal pervert. I was an unspoiled flower. It was something he would "bear in mind". It must be strange, the inequity in sexual experience. I wasn't bothered, but I wondered if it made him uncomfortable.

"You are a universal pervert," I said, quoting his own words back at him

"I resent and resemble that remark."

"If you're a manwhore, I suppose there is hope for the least of us yet."

"I'm not sure how to take that. Are you calling me easy?"

I wasn't sure how I'd meant it either. It was more an observation. He was not the epitome of attractiveness, coventionally speaking - and yet, he was rolling in women. It could be lies, but I doubted it. There was no air of boasting or arrogance to his words. They were just words. Really, I had meant it as something of a comparison. If he managed to have lots of sex, then I figured my prospects were also fairly good. If I felt that way inclined.

We were awake most of the night, but he never tried anything untoward. He didn't push or make me uncomfortable. He dozed off with his hand on my thigh. Later, he turned over, and I spent a long time with my face buried in his bare back, breathing in his scent.

I had problems with trying to be sexy. Make out sessions inevitably involve me dissolving into a fit of the giggles (though whether out of amusement or nerves, I could not say), no matter who my partner is. Often, he would stop, and look at me.

"What?" he asked, and I would laugh and tell him the random, inane thing which had triggered my giggling. Sometimes they were to do with him. Sometimes they weren't.

At one point, he had broken away trying not to laugh.

"What?" I asked, a parrot, reflecting his inflection of the syllable.

"The things parents say," he said. "About not getting into strange men's beds."

He's right, I suppose. He could be a murderer for all I know. He could have chainsaws in the oven and an axe stowed under his bed. I said as much to him. Why else would he have two sheds, unless one was for storing corpses? But I also know that he drives a vintage MG, which doesn't have the boot space for the discrete transport of dead bodies.

"Hasn't done me any harm so far," I said.

I wondered if he was upset by my lack of reaction to his promiscuity. Whether he had thought it would phase me. If anything, I felt reassured: he was a safe pair of hands. He knew what he was doing. I supposed I trusted him, at least a little, or I wouldn't have been prepared to share his bed.

In the morning he woke up for work and had a shower. I lay in bed a little longer and wondered if I would do this again. I drove home, dropping him off outside his work on the way, and he pecked me goodbye in the traffic jam.

I wondered if I would see him again.

Anecdotally... 1: Smiling at strangers on trains

Welcome to Anecdotally..., another semi-regular column. But rather than calling bullshit, this is just going to be me telling you stories. Anecdotes, if you will. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then we shall begin...

It had been a long, mostly enjoyable day. I had wandered around Hyde Park and drunk chai lattes in a coffee shop, crossed to the East End of London via the Central line and DLR, watched a band I love play a show, and then sat in a pub with an old friend drinking and laughing. By the time I got on the train home, at just past midnight, I was starting to fall asleep.

Instead, I got out the book I was reading, which went by the unwieldly title of This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You. It was a collection of short stories which I had taken from the Bloomsbury marketing room on my last day, and after slogging through a 500-page novel alongside my exams, I fancied reading something a bit lighter. Everything was ready for a normal train journey home: I sat down in a window seat facing backwards with my iPod in my ears, a book under my nose, and the rest of the world blocked out. Someone sat down opposite me, but I didn't pay them much attention.

About five minutes into the journey, I heard the drumming of fingers on the train wall. I saw a hand just beneath the window, on top of the "no feet on the seats" sign. I glanced up. I checked my feet weren't on the seat.

The boy opposite me raised his eyebrows. He was too old to be called a "boy", really: in his early 20s, I thought, with dark hair and thick stubble. He wasn't quite attractive in the conventional sense, but there was something interesting in the way his face was arranged. I smiled slightly, shyly, the way you smile at a stranger who is encroaching your personal space when you want them to stop.

I looked back at my book, and he drummed again. He motioned with his hands, and I realised he wanted to see what I was reading. I showed him the cover wordlessly, but my attention had been diverted from the paragraph I was staring at.

"That's in my pile of books to read," he said, and I was taken aback by how nice his voice was. "Though, the pile is about this big," he added, and held up his hands about two feet apart. Before I could stop myself, I laughed.

"I have exactly that problem," I said. "I just picked this because it was the smallest book on my list."

"That's the smallest? Then what's the longest?"

"Probably A Dance With Dragons," I said.

I couldn't help it. I'd been sucked in. We started talking about Game of Thrones, and science fiction authors, and how trains were better than buses. After a couple of minutes, I took out my earphones. After ten, I closed my book and put it in my bag.

I could remember two other times in my life when I had engaged in long conversations with strangers on public transport. The first was when I had been 15, on the day of the General Election, when a handsome bartender had spoken to the guy next to me and swapped seats on the crowded tube, purely because he wanted to speak to me. He'd mentioned his job. He said that talking to strangers was how he amused himself on his commutes. I thought him incredibly brave. He'd asked who I voted for, and I lied and said Lib Dem, flattered he thought me old enough to be able to vote. I was sad to get off at Chalk Farm, because I had to leave this interesting conversationalist behind. His name had been Robert, or Richard. He had smelt of cinnamon.

The other time had been on the train home, wedged in a table seat opposite two American Football fans who'd seen a game that day in London, and next to a Canadian on his way to the airport. Once the football fans had left, I'd talked to the stranger next to me: he had been from the Yukon. He was catching a flight to Portugal, where he intended to pick fruit and then catch buses across the country. He had lived on his own since 13 and had hitch-hiked from Germany to India (or possibly the other way round). He features, occasionally, in conversations: I contribute his existence whenever the subject of hitch-hiking comes up. I don't remember his name. Perhaps he didn't tell me.

"I'm V, by the way," I said, feeling emboldened by my drinks through the day. I'd had three in the last few hours, which - on an empty stomach - had the effect of making me giggly and confident.

"Oliver," he said, but I heard it as Holiver. We had a long conversation about this, our hands still clasped. "Oliver," he said again, "like Twist, the little street urchin. All-singing, all-dancing crooks. That's me."
"Yes, I know," I told him, "I just misheard you, added an imaginary H. Very cockney."

He had moved to the same town as me - counting on his fingers - four days ago, as the office for his job had moved. I let slip I was 18, and though he claimed he'd had me sussed, I was pretty sure he'd assumed I was older. People always do. I guessed he was 23; he was 25. His favourite band was The Eagles and he worked in 3D modelling, which sounded terribly interesting but had little to do with what his degree was in.

"About a year and a half ago, when all the stuff about Blackfriars 1 was on the news - that was our company."
"I don't remember that," I told him.
"It's a weird building. A skyscraper. Looks a bit like a thumb."
"A thumb?"
He demonstrated what he meant by half-bending his thumb. "Yeah, it goes up, and then it's got a kink in it."
"My thumb kinks the other way," I said, because I quite like showing off my weird hands. I have a thumb that, when straightened, bends back at about fifty degrees. Everything about my hands is weird: the tips of my index and middle fingers bend off at angles too. My peace signs have a definite tilt to them. He laughed, and pressed the ends of my index fingers together, the way I always challenge people to do, and laughed more as they sprang back and I told him that no, it didn't hurt at all.

As the train approached our stop, he stood up and I realised how tall he was. I also decided that I wanted to keep talking to him, this stranger who had started a conversation with a girl with pink hair based purely on the book she was reading.

"I kind of want to have lunch with you sometime," I said, and his wallet was out. He pulled out a business card, with his number on it, and a QR code underneath, in case I was "that kind of geek".
"Consider it done," he said.

My dad was waiting in the car for me outside the station. I texted Oliver once I got home, with one kiss on the end, and he said he'd "been about 15 seconds" from asking me out too.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. It's not often you end up organising dates with strange men you meet on the train. He doesn't seem like a potential murderer, but then again they never do. Still, I'm intrigued, but mostly amused. And if nothing else, I have a vaguely interesting anecdote to tell my friends.