tranklements

Across the sweaty mass of faces in the club my eyes land on his.
My body stalls.
I haven’t seen him for a year, not since he broke my heart.
“Do you want to leave?” asks Lisa, reading what is written all over my face.
“No.”  I want to look again at that face that was branded into my memory.  That face I had studied for hours so I wouldn’t ever forget it.  Hear his voice again.  Look into those blue eyes again.  His hair is cut differently, he never used to wear checked shirts.
“He’s coming over”, whispers Lisa.
We say hello.  We deal with the niceties.  He asks about my degree, I tell him about the first.  He looks like a proud father, “I always knew you could,” he smiles, “I probably did you a favour by getting out of your life.”
“I’m getting married” he fires a bull’s eye into my heart.
Someone he hardly knew, only just met, on the other side of the world.  “When you know, you just know,” he explains, dealing me the fatal blow whilst looking like the cat that got the cream.
“That’s exactly what I thought about him,” I wail later back at Lisa’s house as she puts her arm around my shoulders and tries to stroke away the pain.

I met a grinning cynic last night
He used to be a travel journalist
“Lovely,” I said
“But I started asking, what’s the point,” he grinned “and I got very bored”
“What do you do now?” I asked the inevitable
“Oh I’m in PR,” he said, “it’s equally pointless but better paid”
“Have you got any clients?” I wanted to ask.

Alfie was well-off, loaded, wealthy, privileged; super-rich basically. Lovely, you might think, but the houses, the holidays, the cars, the private jets, the pampering just weren’t giving his life any meaning, you know? He was miserable, there was something missing.
So, Alfie went to live with ‘real’ people on a council estate to ‘find himself’. He didn’t like his neighbours much, but couldn’t really get away from them. He didn’t enjoy waiting for the bus in the rain while the local kids made fun of his clothes because they were different to everyone else’s. He couldn’t get a job and, against his better judgement, started watching daytime telly.
The cheap non-organic food and lack of skiing and diving was playing havoc with Alfie’s skin and making him fat and he became depressed.
At least Alfie had discovered one thing, how it really felt to be miserable.

Scott is my perfect boyfriend; tall, dark and handsome. He buys me flowers, writes me poems and never leaves the seat up.

On Valentines he filled the house with paper love hearts he had spent all week dying various shades of pink.

Last weekend he took me out for an Indian and told me how boring I was and what a mistake he had made by loving me. To avoid a scene (which would have embarrassed him), I went to the ladies where my heart quietly broke.