text: \[First chapter of potential novella, 'Boy Pink'\] \[Inspired by my favourite writer, J.D Salinger\] \ There were precisely twelve loose threads hanging from the left sleeve of Anna’s marlin-blue Yves Saint Laurent cardigan. It was a high-neck in a sailor knit - should that mean anything to you. An unfortunate state of affairs for a woman who, without a moment’s hesitation, so adamantly looks down on another for something as silly as their haircut or their social class. Anna is the type of woman who would not just deny a man with no home her loose change. She would then too deny him his dignity and his pride in so truculently telling him that she did indeed have some change, but its nature was not loose. It was bound to her possession. It was rightfully earnt and that she would sooner be dead than to blindly hand it out to society’s freeloader. She would tell him that he ought to be the own means to his end and that his circumstance will never change from being sat on the pavement of a Manchester alley with his hands cupped together, extending themselves ceaselessly to the ankles of the proud men who stride past him. They will never stop for him and kneel at his feet. For that stride was one of pride and purpose. The stride of a man who is something and is going somewhere. A man in which he, the Homeless, could not form a common bond. For the Homeless has no purpose, no pride; he just exists in purgatory between his birth and his death. If Anna were to be right about any one fact - and I say ‘if’ in its utmost conditional form as she is so often confined to the boundaries of her own ignorance - it would be that life is purgatory between birth and death. Existence is just a matter of purpose and lack thereof. We are born and are taught silly little things about how best to go about this existence that we call ‘life’. We, universally, have come to a more-or-less unanimous interpretation of the routine. We go to school and learn a whole myriad of things that we have no real care or use for. We then enter the working world where our worth is ruthlessly categorised based on skill and paid by our merits. The more valuable your contribution to society, the more keep you will earn. We then simultaneously go through a series of failed romantic interests, pursuing ‘the One’ who we shall inevitably marry - share children, a home, a dog and our memories with. We will explore the world with - which, and let me tell you, is full of people subject to the same customs as us, but any petty nuance you could possibly pick-up on is described as ‘culture’. Then you will retire. You will die. Your children will carry on your name and they will live in the same way. It is an infinite regress. And dare you disregard or wayward away from this existential routine then your life will be judged - often and harshly - by others. The boy who does not go to school is rough, daft and uneducated. The man who does not work is nothing short of a societal thief and a scrounger. The girl who does not marry is to become a spinster. The woman who does not bear children is most likely baron and, oh, how sorry we are to feel for her and to shower her with pity for her profoundly empty and meaningless ‘life’. Certain things make this routine easier. Such as being conventionally attractive. Rich. White. Male - a straight one, might I add. This routine has been easy for me. I guess I merely appear, in this existence of absurd futility, to be a sum, or at least one, of these conditions. “Well then?” said a voice with a very blunt inflection, almost without inquisition at all, rather, a demand for the unwavering attention of its recipient. “This one.” My eyes followed a set of beautiful hands as they, unfortunately without grace, grasped a satin Lauren Ashley dress. Oh my, how Anna had the most undeniably beautiful hands. Her smooth, lightly tanned skin remained balanced in both tone and form from the top of her wrist to the tip of each finger, meeting her perfectly manicured nails. I sometimes thought that she was so undeserving of these hands. Well, it was not so much that she didn’t deserve them. There is not anyone I can think of - perhaps except rapists, thieves and murderers of children - that don’t deserve hands. It was more that she didn’t really know how to use them. They were quite misplaced on her as you would think a Banksy scrawl would be in the Lourve. “What of it?” I asked, subtly clearing my throat before speaking. That happened often. I would go for such a long time, engaged in my own thoughts and not in discourse with Anna, where my mouth and throat would become almost completely dry as though I had not spoken for days or smoked an entire pouch of Amber Leaf. “Oh, for fucks sake, Louis. Snap out of it!” she hissed venomously - although with otherwise limited expression - as to not make a scene in an up-market shop, still clutching the dress to visually inform me of her frustration. “You said you’d--. Nevermind.” She turned away from me and slowly walked ahead, carelessly scanning the dresses with her finger. A weak analysis. Just to distract herself from her own upset. I would often linger three steps behind her. Not because I was embarrassed to be with her or anything silly like that. She was a beautiful woman. Not intrinsically. But that didn’t matter when it came to being in public with someone. You cannot be embarrassed because someone isn’t beautiful ‘on the inside’. I was certainly ashamed of being with her. But that’s different. Shame, I find, is a much more private affair. It’s something you feel because of something you’ve done that defies the common conception of the good. It eats away at you and makes you recoil in disgust of your very being. Embarrassment, however, is felt when you’ve done something that casts you as an outsider - defying the norm. For example, shitting yourself of a Magic Bus, as I watched a young man do yesterday morning, was embarrassing for him because it is not normal to shit yourself on a bus at the age of twenty-two. He, in that moment of losing control of his rectal muscles, was cast as an outsider. Cast as an outside by the general population of the Magic Bus (approximately some twenty-five commuters who saw it - perhaps sixty who smelt it). But this is not the same as shame as it doesn’t defy any moral construct. It’s just fucking weird. Had this tragic gentleman shat himself in his own home, the event exposed to the witness of only himself, he would certainly not be embarrassed. He would not be ashamed either. “Louis!” Her voice was piercing. I suppressed myself from jerking upright to her attention. “Look”, she said, slowing pulling down on the loose threads of her Yves Saint Laurent cardigan. “When did this happen?” “Oh dear”, I remarked, offering a cheap glance and a faltered expression of concern. “I hadn’t noticed” “I’m sure everyone else did”, she murmured, caressing her arm as if to provide herself with some level of self-comfort, whilst concealing the wound of her garment from the ever-judgemental peers of her world. She blinked rapidly - as if to hold back tears from spilling over the lip of her bottom eyelids. Turning-tables are a funny little phenomenon. I carefully stepped toward her - almost silently - as a predator in the wild steps towards his unsuspecting prey. I exhaled deeply. She looked up at me, her beautiful eyes glazed with water, muddied by a thick layer of mascara. She looked down, head hung in discomfiture, enclosing her body in her arms, as a shell of console. I gently took her hands, slightly trembling, and brought them forward from her back. Her head was perfectly nested in the bay between my chin and my collarbone. She released her tears, inaudibly, as if she couldn’t possibly hold her composure a moment later. They collapsed down my neck and into the collar of my shirt. I repositioned my head - slowly, as to not disturb her position - and lightly kissed her forehead. “I know”, I spoke to her with tone of the utmost retrospective prudence.