I never cry if I break my heart, I only cry when I watch sad movies or the news. Sometimes I even cry over a book, but the last time I was crying over me I was in considerable pain in my hospital bed.

I try; maybe I manage a couple of forced sobs, dry ones, like I’m faking it and maybe I am.

But somebody else’s love story can through me into absolute fits of hysteria.

If my internet fails me I watch “the Way We Were” on dvd, (though I never showed it to a friend who liked it… too sentimental perhaps). To me it’s the saddest story ever told, and it always makes me cry. It’s the scene where Katie and Hubble break up the first time that starts it. She calls him because she’s so heartbroken and need to talk to her best friend, and he’s it. Then he comes back to her (tranquilizers in hand), and it’s pretty much all crying form there.
I think that’s the way everyone feels when they get rejected; like there’s only one person in the world that could comfort them, and that’s the only person who won’t, shouldn’t, or can’t. (Almost too universal to be relevant, isn't it?) I literally cried all evening when I last watched it over Christmas, I wasn’t even thinking about someone, just fucking Barbie Streisand and Robert Redford… but that’s so me; all desensitized to my own existence.

Last night I dreamt I met an old friend and told him “you have to meet my boyfriend”, I then promptly showed him to a toilet filled with cigarette stubs.
(I find my subconscious most hilarious.)

Yesterday I heard a song that brought me straight back to my 17th birthday. I remember the clothes I wore in detail, a black laced skirt, and this midnight blue velvety hooded thing, that almost matched my slightly to big blue doctor Martens boots. I had just recently persuaded my mother to let me dye my hair truly black, (up till then I’d only gone very dark brown). My skin was white, my face powdered whiter, and in one ear I wore this on clip on earring, thrifted for nothing in the dirty dusty shop, run by a very old, very eccentric lady, and located in a street only frequented by prostitutes. The earring was a single hanging tear shaped in glass, I suppose looking back it was really nothing special, barley noticeable to anyone but me.

Though this if off course only an estimation of the reality, I can only say for certain that I wore this specific outfit at one point during that month, or that I probably almost wore this particular assembly of clothing when I trampled in from the cold, for some Christmas what ever in my school’s cafeteria. I had gotten the album with the song that triggered this memory, a birthday present from my mother, earlier that morning and was listening to it on an old discman. The music somehow made me feel important, privy to something not known by all… or maybe this feeling of singularity that was all down to something ells. What I felt specifically in the present day, listening to that song again was the memory of a frenzied excitement, and a slight smugness in having acquired a sort of boyfriend, my first one. Most importantly I can still feel a remanence of that haze; the glory of obsession, what I can only describe as being in love. My only thought was of his naturally black mane, and that one lock obscuring his left eye. I wrote his name on a green desk and framed it with tiny neat flowers, I had his actual picture in my actual locker.

But with this memory of first love comes first loves subsequent first betrayal, and the memory of only one day is truly the memory of an entire era or maybe just four or five months of my life. When it was over came the humiliation and the certainty that this year would be no different than the 16 that had gone before. All that dreaming and scheming had been for nothing. I crossed out his name on the desk, and ripped up the photo in my locker.

The roll of toilet paper at my bedside
makes me feel like a wanker.