This love felt frightening. This love felt dangerous, even. And gambling everything for it – including my own life – felt reckless. But still.
As I pulled up to the Astor cinema and circled around for a park the band’s Everyday Formula reverberated through the tinny stereo system: My whole world's cheap and phony/ Dear hearts get lost and lonely/ I'll get what's coming to me soon.
I wish I could tell you that it was our differences that eventually tore us apart. Her love of big hair and the power ballad, my love of The Residents and holding my mohawk in place with airplane glue.
I thanked her for taking the trouble to find me and silently wondered if her seeking me out was a country-town courtesy, a form of hospitality that may not happen in the hustle and bustle and traffic of a city. I did not flatter myself to think she may have seen more in me all those years ago than I’d realised.
In that dark small house for two single souls I found that I was in love. It had taken three years of house-sharing for the obvious to dawn on me.
Clawing for the echoes of what was; an ode to imperfect romance...a short film by Jesse Maskell
Over fifteen years, brick by determined brick, we built a life out of thin air and intentions. When I first met you, my mother could not tell her friends her eldest daughter was a lesbian. Talking to her friends, she would shorten my girlfriends’ names to androgynous mysteries. Jo. Nic. Lou.
I was like another brother to Jessica. She fancied my band mates more than me, so that was bit of a drag. We did share a love for one particular song, though.
If we had hours rather than minutes, we would listen to music through the tinny TV speakers, tucked up together under blankets on the mattress, arguing over the best of British.
You flick through my CDs with the kind of thought and care people put into choosing a name for their child. An appreciative smile rests briefly on my lips as you insert the disc into the car stereo. I don’t even care what you’ve chosen, I just love that it took you so long to choose