Hum-Stranger

She begins a (probably pre-prepared) homage to the literature on my bookshelves, and the albums and movies cluttered in every corner.

"I would like you to describe something, anything, in my bedroom without using the words, "most..." or "best...". The superlatives stream out of you like piss. I keep this second thought to myself, and pat myself on the back for its secretly brilliant articulation.

"Tim, I'm sorry, I'm just not very good with words".

She fingers through my DVDs and picks out Good Will Hunting. When the credits roll, she tells me she "thought it was really great, especially the cinematography" but that "there's too much talk about the word, intelligence", and I ask her if she knows how it feels to be a young adult in a quiet room filled by other young adults, and she just says, "Of course. What do you mean?".

I fuck her, go back to Mozilla, and refresh facebook in my sweat, yelling to her, through two barely open doors, which draw the cutlery is kept in, because she is making a salad and I can hear her humming I Am The Resurrection downstairs, to mollify her fear of calories, and all those numbers. I try to remember what her favourite colour is but I can't, and I immediately regret asking her that dumb question last night in that squalid nightclub, because now she's smile-staring into my eyes, across the kitchen, eager for conversation. I haven't shaved in weeks. There are no words in my mouth. I don't know who this woman is.

When she (I can't remember her name) leaves, I wash my hands several times, and return to my bedroom where I go straight to the wardrobe, rummage through birthday-pullovers bought by family-friends, and rescue from the darkness a VHS. It's September, and I'm watching The Snowman, by Raymond Briggs, in a living room that reeks of memory. On a cartoon morning, when it's all whiteness and silence in the Christmas countryside, there is a scarf. Something like a funeral, and a scarf; a perfumed, woolly corpse of a cloth in animation. This boy is dying. There are footprints, a scarf, piano keys, then adverts by Rover, Sega Mega Drive, Woolworths. The recording breaks, breaks into white noise.