A car alarm blares outside. I’ve only just noticed it. My sense is that I have only just realised it, it hasn’t just started its wailing. I suddenly feel awake. I dont know whether the alarm has been blaring for hours or seconds or years, but suddenly I notice it. I open my eyes, I see a girl. Her eyelids flicker, she is thinking, or dreaming. I notice that I am still inside her. I never know if its a sign of good or bad sex that you fall asleep before you clean up, let alone before pulling out. The deed was definitely done, I think I know that. Even if my memory isn’t;t real I can feel dripping…somewhere. I’ll stop. The blaring car.
The ringing continues. The girl is too in thought or sleep to notice me or it. It’s not too loud, not jarring at all. Simply accompanying my mind on this lucid track, having sent the train on its way. Has the alarm been going off all night? Is there always a car outside this house, blaring and flashing and wailing? The sound is so constant, it merges with my existence. There is no way to ignore it, no existence without it, it…it is simply necessary now. It fits with the flickering of her eyes.
It sickens me; how has it not sickened me before. How have I been this accepting of the alarm until now. I have to get out of her.
‘Sorry,’ I say too quickly as I slip out. Sounds like I’ve planned my escape.
She seems awake too now, not to the alarm but to the absence of me. Her eyebrows thicken and compress, asking a blaring question of their own. I pretend not to see; I see it all clearer than I ever have before. The creases on her forehead do not entice me this morning, they do not seduce, me, pull towards her lips and her body. They are not as…intentional as they used to be, perhaps that is how to describe this picture. They do connect her with my soul this morning. They throw out messages in bottles into the sea between us; I watch from the sidelines like an underpaid lifeguard, watching them drift away. I have no urge to swim out and catch them and read them and know them and fulfil their desires. I know what they want. Somehow it disgusts me. The car alarm told me how.
I make a sorry excuse to go to the toilet. I fill a glass with water under the cover of the car alarm, and pour it into the toilet. Then I run the tap. I want to look at myself, see what I have realised, what I have come to know. See the person I have become.
He looks completely normal. Maybe a little tired. He certainly feels tired. The nodes in his neck look bigger today; he’s surprised she hasn’t commented on them. He wonders if its her inattention or fatal politeness that means she hasn’t. They feel so undeniable, so unmissable. He has to strain with every swallow; he is constantly being choked. That he does know, that he remembers. He knows this feeling of pressure, of dread, of limited edition anxiety. He reasons it away and returns to his face. I suppose he looks worried, or perhaps he just feels that way.
I leave the mirror.
She’s on her phone when I return, her fresh, innocent, beautiful face lit by the morning feed. My disdain rages. I don’t need a mirror to know its my brow that is crumpled now. Her thoughtlessness of me when I leave the room, her quick retreat from the virtual world as she sees me return, shamed and ashamed. I roll my eyes silently, she cannot see my swirling confusion. My disdain is wrapped up in lust. I hate that she does not want me when I disappear, she wants her screen, she wants others; and yet I hate, possibly even more, that she wants me when I return, when I am present.
She cannot have me like that. I impress myself upon her so every minute without my form is filled with perfect intimations and considerations and memories of me. Lovers should be filled with longing. There should be no time or space in her mind for anything else. But now her head is filled with distractions. I must distract her again.
I press hard to be wanted, to be noticed, to be trusted and remembered. A hint of complacency in a kiss, that empty space filled with nothing but saliva, is filled with passion, with more of me. The pressure enthuses her: I want her, I say. She hears me and presses back. I normally retreat there, hearing that she hears me, feeling that she wants me. But its not enough this time. I need to be wanted to the point of oblivion. I should be wanted to the point of total surrender, where I shall stand up and leave and she will be happy and longing and feel my pressure forever, happily, with no phones or need for anyone else.
I feel myself falling into a deep depression. I can feel my thoughts sitting between the atoms of our bodies as they press themselves together. The realisation of all these thoughts disgusts me, revolts me from myself. Nausea washes over me, I pull back so she cannot taste the bitter taste rising through my throat. I look at her. Her eyes open slowly, questioning the space between us. I smile, drawing her lips apart. She smiles too. There is too much honesty in my head. It drowns me. I have fallen overboard from our sailing ship. I hadn’t even notices we were out at sea. I plunge myself under water. I look at her, sitting on the ship, happy and unaware of my turmoil. She hasn’t seen me fall, she still feels me close to her. I look at her from underneath the surface of the water. The sunlight crystallises the surface, now a shifting pane of metallic glass above me. I push hard to stay underwater, or the sea pulls me down. Through this silvery glass everything is clear. She is sat with a man, with that boy from the mirror. She feels his arms, his back, their legs intertwined as legs crave to be tangled. I watch them from my hiding place, the water cools me, slows my heard until everything is silent and still. She does not know I am not there at all, that I am searching for a soul that does not exist.
The car alarm is still blaring. I am with a girl and we are comfortable. There are no truths flying through the air. We have trained them not to fly away.
