A Shrine To Futility

When you lie on my bed and you label me your friend
Don't you know how much that hurts?
You could pretend and I wouldn't know
I could be who you wanted in the dark.

"Girls Who Play Guitars", Maximo Park

There's this girl.

(As a wise man - actually, it was me - once said, there's always a girl.)

So there's this girl right. She comes into the shop quite often. Always polite to me. Nice looking. Slightly older than my last doomed obsessive crush, which can only be a good thing given Stef's youth. The thing is, I don't really know her and therefore there's not been the time for this whole obsessive crush thing to start like it did with Stef. But maybe that's a good thing, because I ended up going to a very bad place because she rejected me. You know, I'm enough of an amateur shrink to know how fucked up my own head is. All my life I've been getting obsessed over girls and making a tit of myself when they don't turn out to have the same feelings. I mean, god, I spent over a year writing Snowglobe, a novel which, underneath all the death and pornogrpahy, was all about unrequited love and how it reallys kills you.

So I don't really know her. I just happened to comment to one of the girls I work with on Saturday night that I quite fancied her and the next thing I know, she's out on a fag break asking Natalie for her number. Jesus.

This was at about four in the afternoon. I spent till eleven when we shut thinking about what I could text her. Don't text her tonight, Teri said, because she's got no money on her phone (coming soon, my ruminations on how society survived before the mobile phone). So I waited until this afternoon to text her. She's probably still got no money on her phone. I just said, hi, do you fancy doing something sometime. Nothing overly aggressive or (hopefully) definitive. Just a polite asking of whether or not she's interested. That was at five this afternoon. It's now four hours later and she hasn't replied. But it's okay. I'm not going to go into an apopletic fit like I did that time I texted Stef and she never replied so ended up tramping through the woods out the back of Penshaw Monument in the pitch black night. No. She may not have any money on her phone still.

There's always the possibility that she doesn't like me, though. I'm terribly fond of that idea, because I suffer from a terrible case of self-loathing and if I make a move and she doesn't respond, it's out of my hands. There's nothing I can do. It's like the brief but intense relationship I had with Alison. She dictated that relationship. The only input I really had was the first time she called it all off, claiming I was too young for her and Andrea insisting I kept on texting her, which I did, which eventually rekindled the relationship for another couple of weeks.

I think it all stems back to that first relatiosnhip. There was me and this girl, Sarah. She asked me out (again, my reactive rather than active personality). We went out for about a month. In the end I called it off. Why? At the time I thought it was because I didn't love her, which is still kinda true. I only really knew her for the time we were going out, which wasn't enough time for me to fall in love with her, and I was kinda obsessed with someone else at the time. But had we continued going out, I may well have loved her. So it wasn't really that.

No.

I was scared. That's the plain and simple truth of it. Here I was, a seventeen year old with no real clue about real life - I'd just started my first job only to develop and ulcer and quit three days later - and self-esteem so low that it probably stole lollipops from babies. All through the time we were going out I was asking myself, "Why me? Why does she want to be with me of all people?". I simply couldn't comprehend that someone would want to spend time with me - and more importantly do the things with me that we did. I was the same with Alison (eight and a half years of being single will do that to you). She was forever complimenting me and wondered out loud if Stef was gay when I told her that Stef didn't fancy me.

So I ran away from Sarah. I was scared. Of what? Of a thousand things. But mainly, perhaps, that I might actually be happy.

Shit. This was supposed to be slightly less depressing than it's turning out to be.

Okay. Back to Natalie. Well, not Natalie specifically. More like girls in general. Because girls in general don't like me. Not in that way. They think I'm "funny" and "sweet" and, if I ever dare to suggest anything more, they "don't think of me in that way". Which is always nice to hear. It's like being called someone's brother. And the only way that comment could get any worse is if you substitute "sister" for "brother". The end of last year I was told by someone who I really liked that they liked me (but not in that way) but that they weren't ready for another relationship anyway, having just come out of a long term one only a few months previously. Which is fine. Only a couple of weeks later - on Christmas Eve no less - I found out that this other guy she knew who fancied her and who had been given exactly the same speech and I had received was now going out with her. It didn't last long, suffice to say. I think it was more the result of a drunken fumble and a "well, let's see how it goes" than anything else. So she's now single again and like an idiot I once more attempted to fix myself in her affections. For a while it seemed to work. We would go out (with her friends, admittedly, but it was to clubs and stuff) and I would get a little drunk and so would she and I would grope her slightly and she wouldn't complain. (Also coming soon, possibly, a discussion about why I grope people when everyone else just seems to get off with them.) But again, it wasn't to be. And maybe it's not a bad thing. Emma and David are always saying how I need to find someone with the same interests as me. I'm not so sure. Because, aside from music and a few films, what do Emma and David have in common? Not much. Certainly, most of what they tend to enjoy together now are things that are a compromise, things that one of them likes that the other has grown to like. When they first started seeing each other - nearly nine years ago - I doubt they had much in common. As Paula Abdul once sang, opposites attract. Certainly there are qualities in myself that I look for in other people, but an obsessive love of Doctor Who and Buffy The Vampire Slayer isn't one of them.

I think it's because my own fandom has tended to be a solitary pursuit in real life (online is another matter entirely) it has become something that I am very possessive about and, knowing my own obsessive inclinations, I don't expect other people to share my passion. Everything I look for in a partner - intelligence, humour, compassion - are things which anyone can have. And besides, given my unhealthy collection of pornography, I think I'd be hard pressed to find a girl who was as enthusiastic about looking at pictures of naked ladies as I am.

So, here I am, waiting for Natalie to text back. Will she, won't she? It's the same damn question I've been asking myself for the past twelve years. And it hasn't got any easier with time. If anything, it's getting worse. Because I am very painfully aware that I'm not getting any younger. My friends are getting married, having kids, getting mortgages. Being responsible. And here I am, still living with my mother obsessing over the same things I was when I was sixteen. Progress?