brightlightsbookpage

[brightlightsbookpage]

Chapter Two - Verisimilitude

For Giles, it was all real. The great romantic life, the love and the loss, the laughter and the pain, the fighting and the fucking. It was all a part of being connected to something transcendent, something beyond the daily grind. Of course it was also all bullshit and just a way to escape reality and focus on introspection. And it worked in some ways. This mindset kept him from having to realise that he was actually destroying the house he had built. There truly was bliss in his ignorance.

“I wrote you a song”. Giles did this on an almost weekly basis. Sometimes it was a great love-of-the-ages epic, and other times it was a heart-smashing, melancholic diatribe about fucking, narcotics, and woe. But it was all simply to keep the romance alive.

“Would you like to hear it?” he asks, with a prideful, resonant tone. “Not right now”. This response was justly deserved, as the previous evening she had asked him to listen to a story she wrote, which he had turned down. Giles noticed in her writing that she too takes great inspiration from her life and crassly exposes her feelings on the page, thusly presenting a linear collection of words that don’t really need much creative license to be considered interesting.

“What do you want to do then?” he asks, this time with a sort of nervous trembling. “I’m busy right now, I don’t really want to hang out”. Her voice sounded a little impatient, not angry, but definitely in no mood to dance.

“Okay, I guess I’ll go away”. He knew he had no right to feel shunned but his denial was loud enough that he couldn’t hear sense. He left the room in retreat, forgetting all about the song he just finished writing. He had a real issue with abandonment, an irony that was not lost on him. For the next few hours he did the dance of walking into the kitchen, finding something to snack on, back to the bedroom, sifting through the same websites like they might one day reveal a secret, to the bathroom to look thoughtlessly into his reflection in the mirror, to the balcony for a cigarette and a moment of peacefulness he was desperately searching for, and back to the kitchen. Rinse, repeat. Once this cycle tired he went back to the kitchen, this time with a choice, was he going to make himself a coffee or pour himself a drink. The answer usually depended on the events of the day. He chose this time to take the drink, which today was vodka orange. Cassie was unavailable, or so he thought to himself. He reached up to the cupboard and pulled out an old jar that they used for drinking, spilled in some vodka, and then the juice, and proceeded back to him cramped room to hide away. For Giles, if he couldn’t make of an evening what he wanted then he would drink until it was over. It seemed like a fair process.

Cassie came into his room around 1 in the morning looking for some affection, and she found him laying in bed in his underwear, ukulele beside him, and Rick and Morty playing on the laptop on the table in front of him. Again he wafted the smell of booze like it had now become his aftershave aroma. She said nothing about it, she just climbed in next to him, moved the ukulele off onto the floor, switched off Rick and Morty, went onto YouTube, and put on the videos in their subscription list that had been released that day. She turned off the light and crawled into her usual space in his bed and he placed his leg on top of hers and his head between her shoulder blades. They barely said words to each other before falling asleep. The comfort of having someone beside you while you sleep was communication enough.

The sun came in through cracks in the curtain. It hadn’t quite reached them where they lay as the bed itself was hiding behind the largest wall. However, it was the sound of the letter box slamming that nodded them both awake. The lack of knocking made it obvious that it was just the postman so neither of them needed to get up. During their sleep they had managed to curl their limbs around one another in some sort of plait. It’s a pleasant way to emerge from sleep, to be connected to someone, filling yourself up on oxytocin right at the start of the day.

They had more to say to each other in the morning.  Cassie swung herself around so she was now facing him, her eyes still blurry and voice a little coarse. “Are you hungry?” she asks with a cheerful whisper. “Yes, but I don’t really want to get up just yet”. She smiles at this response and turn herself back around to grab the laptop. For the next 30 minutes Cassie scrolled through messages and posts she had received previously and had ignored. Giles just remained cocooning her from behind and passing the occasional comment in response to her talking to him. It was easy in these moment to pretend that they were happy, as in these moments they truly were. She turned over to get up and Giles grabbed her, pulling her towards him, and kissed her on the nose. She smiled, climbed out of bed, and walked into the kitchen to prepare breakfast at what appeared to be midday. 

[brightlightsbookpage]

Chapter One - As The Wheels Turn

He stumbled in through the front door followed closely by the stench of gin and cigarettes, which he had tried to mask with half a packet of sugar-free polos. He threw his jacket over the kitchen chair and his boots in the hallway and then proceeded into Cassie’s room. As she is laying in bed, laptop beside her, she looked at him wandering into her room with a familiar disappointment and resentment that seemed such commonplace these days, and as he walks over to her, climbs onto the bed next to her, and throws his arms around her, a resigned sigh sounds from her and the glimpse of a smile cracks on her face. It was bitter and caustic, but for a moment it was comforting. This was the cycle that they shared, a dysfunctional web of love and resentment, and one they couldn’t bare to part with.

Giles had spent the better part of the year studying, he dreamed of becoming a composer of sorts, head in the clouds and feet in the proverbial mud that seemed to keep him from moving. He was surely ambitious, but terribly lazy and not remotely driven by his motivation for success. This became his greatest ailment as it was for lack of trying that friction came between him and Cassie. The two of them had spoken of their plans for the future, the beautiful house dotted with plants and pets, the children they would one day have that had their names already written in order of appearance, what they would do for work, what they would do for fun. It was a perfect dream they shared. A beautiful life.

When Giles had almost reached the end of his studies there was a break in the cycle. His dreams were no closer to him and time was running out. He soon had to go back to reality, find a job, live in the real world again. Of course he was in no way ready to face this so he began to react.  His aims for composing swiftly turned to songwriting, and in this he found a way to escape reality by writing himself into these songs of pain and adventure and loss and connection. But as he started to live like an artist, the relationship began to fall apart. His lack of responsibility eventually broke down the core of their cohabitation. Essentially, his art was a trade for his future.

Giles decided in this time that he wasn’t cut out for a life of responsibility and planning. With this he became neglectful of Cassie’s wants and needs, he became careless with her emotions, and he began blaming her for asking him to take on some responsibility. To him it was a burden, which in turn became his guilt, and the guilt to him was unbearable.  They would break up sometime between the end of his studies and graduation day, which was sometime in July. It was a long and emotional split, with weeks of not communicating, which sounds like a good idea in theory, except they were living together.  Luckily though, they were already in separate rooms.

Months into their split they would spend time together, behaving as they would when they were together. Curling up in bed together, watching nature documentaries, holding hands, and laughing through the pain. For the most part they had the same relationship as they always did, for Giles, this was comforting to have, but it would be unsustainable. The responsibility to each other’s feelings had been removed. It was unclear to them how they would move on from this, whether they would find themselves getting back together, or fuck it up somewhere down the line and break apart. There wasn’t much room for anything in between, since they clearly struggled to separate sex and friendship.

Cassie had been learning Hebrew in her spare time. Being Jewish, she had always felt a connection to the culture and religion, but was raised secular, and without the community. When she first moved to London she had discovered her place in the local Jewish community, taking part in anything and everything she could so as to learn more about herself. At first there would be the occasional word here or there thrown around the apartment, a few little greetings and pleasantries, but as she progressed it became quite normalised to have someone rambling in Hebrew in the kitchen whilst they cooked together, or in the bedroom as she practiced her conversational skills.

She was locked away in her room, in bed with the lights off, watching videos on YouTube of Jewish men singing at the dinner table. Outside her room she could hear the rattling of keys as someone was struggling to unlock the front door. It could have been her sister, who was living in the room beside the kitchen, but it was much more likely to be her drunken ex boyfriend who had been working in a bar a few blocks over. The front door sounded and footsteps followed the door’s slam. They led into the kitchen and then softened on the way back. Her door opened and the drunken, smiling face of Giles stood in the archway, looking hopelessly at her. She puts on her glasses and sees his face, a little flustered probably from climbing the stairwell, and he walks towards her with quiet concentration. He climbs over her and falls into a hug. His heart was beating heavily and his hands were cold. She could smell the booze on his breath as he buried his face into her neck. He got up to close the door and then began taking his clothes off. Cassie moved the laptop from the bed onto the chair beside it and layed back down. Giles climbed under the cover and started to kiss her on the neck. She knew this was always a bad idea but the moment came over them both before they could make sense of it. He removed her clothes one by one as though they were petals on a flowers, he lowered himself under the covers, moving his head between her legs and began fucking her with his mouth. Just moments in, her back begins to arch and a whimper eeks out from her lips like a swelling sigh. “Just fuck me” she begs him as her eyes unroll themselves.