Features Editor RORY PATRICK GRAHAM presents a personal essay on love.
I ditched the after-after party for the play I had just finished to go to a rave in N7 to ‘end the night’ with a better friend. As is the way with the debauchery of celebrations like these (seldom but punchy), the next thing I knew, that group of friends had long gone and it was 5am and I was dancing in a half-empty room with a guy I had been Instagram mutuals with for 2 years and had made out with at various club nights over the past 6 months.
He’s big in ‘the scene’ (East London nightlife — he always said that there was even really ‘a scene’ and that it was an amorphous idea that was always changing). But, he is big in the scene, so I found myself tweaking around this warehouse with a wristband and was going back and forth to the guarded green room all night. It’s funny to think of that now — I had just spent a week in a different green room, in a theatre, sold out every night to a crowd of 500, for the show that had given me more happiness than any of these concoctions ever could (and that’s saying a lot, because that’s all they’re designed to do, and they do it very well).
I suppose this little entry is about this man in question, but, as with everything, it is a proxy to think about myself. Let’s call him: Jack. The reason I got the wristband in the first place (though my serotonin and dopamine was maxed out to the ceiling, so 1am-6am is a blur) is because Jack’s ‘ex’ is the founder of the party we were at. I remember asking Jack what exactly ‘ex’ meant, because he said it so strangely, and he said something about how him and this founder were both very avoidant and that it would never really work out. But then he said something about how he didn’t want to ‘fall back in love’ with him again, because it wouldn’t work out. He probably did explain it well enough but I just can’t remember the details so it comes off as sinister.
It’s important to know that Jack and I were never dating or emotionally invested at all. We met on that grey-and-orange app I’ve been off for about a year now and then became Instagram friends. We went on one date about 6 months ago and then kept running into each other at events where we would make out. He always wanted things to go further but I don’t want sex these days I want intimacy, and those seem to be opposite spheres nowadays (I don’t say that in a boomer way but in my experience it is just observably true). I’m kind of indifferent towards it.
The reason the very basic, mundane and, to be honest, rather unsatisfying relationship between me and Jack is important is because he told me about halfway through the night that he was going to ‘have to make out’ with the founder to continue to get us free green room access (etc.). He did end up doing this and told me not to be jealous or worry. I was neither of those things and I just told him ‘as long as I end up going home with you, I don’t care’. He had asked me earlier to come home with him and I said ‘no sex. just cuddle… but, of course’ and he had cheerfully agreed. He replied to me and said: ‘you’re 1 million percent coming home with me’.
The rest of the night is blurry and boring. We got an Uber at 7am to his place in West after I fearfully put forth the question: ‘I don’t know, I might go back to mine’ and he replied ‘Nooooo, I just left my friends for you!’ I grimaced and thought ‘I really shouldn’t do this, should I?’ and he must have sensed that because then he reverted to a nice double-speak and said ‘But don’t feel pressured at all.’ I started sweating profusely in the Uber and we had to get out 5 minutes from his house because I almost threw up three times. He had his hand on my sweltering, sweating head and just said: ‘you’re sweating’. He put his arm around me and I put my head on his lap and I saw the passing streetlights and felt my stomach churning and turning and my mouth was so dry and my throat was so sore and sticky and sharp and I think, looking back, I wanted to cry but was too nauseous to even register that feeling.
We got back to his. He had forgot his key so he kept buzzing on the door and his sister angrily let him in and said ‘you can’t keep doing this. I’m not going to be awake at this time, you know’ with a husky scowl that indicated she had been asleep for hours. I didn’t even see what she looked like and went to his room.
Chugged some water, blew our noses, pissed and pissed again. I couldn’t flush the toilet because he said it made a super loud hissing sound for 5 minutes and his sister was already angry, so I left the bowl hot with honey. Gross, I know.
We cuddled in and out of consciousness and I kept waking myself up because my throat would close and feel so sore. Now the roof of my mouth was hurting and I remembered why I never go home with people: I want as much water as possible and to get up and pee as often as I wanted without feeling awkward and to roll around in the bed and sigh and turn — I don’t feel emotionally safe, right now. He was not harming me consciously, Jack, but none of this meant anything to him, and that was very clear. I liked Jack. He was a cute 5’9” but muscley and solid with beautiful bright eyes and dark features — stache and stubble to match. But his scene was not a life I could live with: 3 day benders and chemsex.
I knew if I pursued him I would just want him to change, and I am old enough now to know that love is not about changing people or even pursuing them at all. Love is this kind of gentle mould you make with four hands and it is boring and calm.
We decided to start speaking at 2pm, wrapped in each other’s arms. The mesmerising thing about cuddling as 2 muscle hunks is that it is the most comfortable, plushy, warm experience in the world and I don’t want to go back from that. He made a joke: ‘Happy Valentine’s day, babe’ (‘babe’ in the London way not the American TV show way) and I replied: ‘It’s the best one I’ve had’ and he replied ‘It’s the best one I’ll probably ever have’ and we chuckled even though or brains were empty and our mouths were so sore. Beneath that little laughter, what we meant was: ‘Isn’t this just what we have to work with? There’s pain and shame, but this is where we are in the world. This is the blueprint we have to (maybe get to) run with.’ I think it hurt me more than him.
Jack’s flat was very nice and his kitchen had big windows and it reminded me of someone I fell in love with very briefly a year earlier, whose bedroom window was huge and lined with empty coffee cups. London was less grey today because spring was starting to turn, but it was colder than it had been, and I felt that terrible feeling that I wanted to go home and be alone and that the sleepover had lasted far too long and I wanted to be under the covers and watch a movie and just cry and cry and cry. I didn’t end up crying — such is the chemical acrobatics that were going on — but the underlying feeling was the same: I didn’t really have ‘fun’ last night or this sleepy morning. It was just something I did, and I don’t think it’s for me.
Me and Jack had bad conversation over morning coffee. He is way more practiced in speaking to people in this way than I am — that is, having someone sleepover and entertaining them for just the right amount of time before sending them on their way. He is 24 but so precocious, probably a product of the early 30-somethings he parties with. He is at once enviable and admirable and deeply sad to me. I want him to kiss me and look at me and ask ‘can you save me, Rory, please?’ Because I think he’s beautiful and I want him to myself, even though our conversations are so dull that they make me sad — the type of small talk so miserable it makes you misanthropic.
I could see in his eyes as I was leaving through the door we weren’t going to talk on WhatsApp again, as we had been intermittently through the months — things like ‘I’m watching Hamnet, I’m so gassed’ from him and ‘Are you out this Saturday?’ from me. We are both intimate and distant in the way you are with people who you find attractive but know you aren’t compatible with, people you like but not really enough, people who you want to be around but then when you are you just feel a little emptier. I walked down the concrete stairs of his flat, huge, light-filled window to my left, and it reminded me of my B&B in Berlin in June and he said ‘Ciao’ which reminded me of the way they say ‘Tchau Tchau’ in Berlin and that felt like a good way to end it: the city of hedonism and this moment of despair. I think he wants to move to Berlin, he has a lot of friends there (I only have 3) but I want better for him. But that sounds rather rude, and it’s really not my place.
I’ll see him next Saturday, I know that for a fact. There’s an event that all the fags will be at. Why did I write this little entry? I think it was to tell myself that finding the things you want is actually really hard and that I am old enough now to know that if things don’t fit that there is very little reason to try and squeeze them into shapes that don’t seem right. The last person I vulnerably admitted to that I’m not feeling sexual these days took it the wrong way and said he felt that I felt I was better than him for not being as sexual. I don’t see how that can be anything other than projection, and yet he was the therapist.
So I think the title isn’t true, actually. I’ve always spent Valentines alone. I spent it with a boy I think is beautiful this year but he made me feel alone. This is really because of me and has very little to do with him, though, and that realisation is fruitful enough. I went to a cocktail bar near my place in central that night with 2 best friends, and we laughed into the evening and my martini was filthy instead of dry as I like it but that’s because my friend bought it for me as a belated birthday present (it was 2 days before) and I didn’t specify the order. There is a metaphor in there somewhere, you know, about knowing what you want and making it clear. Not in the sense of relationships (that is too small) but in the wider sense of what God and Spirit and Soul and Universe might mean to me; that is, I will keep looking as I have been.
I carry these memories with me wherever I go and it is beautiful in that melancholic way — melancholy is sadness but made artistic and good to look at. The olives with the martini, there were 2, were eaten by my two friends because I could tell just by looking at them they weren’t going to be good. One of my friends winced and said they were disgusting, the other smiled and said they weren’t good but they reminded her of home.