2017 approximately

Looking back on this past year of your lord 2017 I come to think how many strange turns it has taken. January was a month unlike any other for a start. Having been found fucking the tea girl, by my wife in fact, at the office christmas party I was divorced by the months end. I thank the new conservative government’s “divorce in a day” legislation for this. It wasn’t so bad. The bitch believed in love once upon a time and didn’t sign a pre-nuptual agreement…so I kept the apartment and she barely got a touch of the, thankfully continuing, royalties from that dreadful novel I got published in the latter part of the last decade. Instances in which i get to see the kids are few and far between, lamentably, however. I miss little Dylan a fair bit. It’s a shame really…i think i was just about coming to terms with what being a father actually meant. The tea girl left in march which was an absolute blessing. I often come to wonder whether it reflects badly on me that I wished i’d cheated on my wife with someone a little more aesthetically pleasing, as opposed to the monster I ended up doing it with. Honestly, there are nights I wake up moist and alone my mind tortured by physical memories of that pimply, leathery hide. Surely only God can understand the cogitations of a man on the other side of a fifth of Jack D.

By June I was fired…or maybe I quit, I dunno. Surely by telling the boss he’s a cuntmunching turkey fucker one understands that they will get fired. All about perspective I guess. This was when I started writing again. I had nothing else to do. My old friend, using the term loosely, Gareth Evans, put me in touch with his agent on the merit of my first, and only, aforementioned novel. But my ideas appealed to him almost as little as the opening 10,000 words he looked at. I didn’t have anything else to do other than write, but that didn’t mean I was going to do it unless someone paid me for it. I would argue that opening section I sent him was better than the tripe Evans churns out, but I haven’t the energy for such debate anymore, not with regars to anything as pointless as ‘literature’….can’t believe that cunt won the Booker.

It’s about now, and by now i mean this past august, having not worked for months, I should say the money ran out and I started living in a box under the Hammersmith flyover, but i didnt. Money isn’t a problem ever since they made that dreadful movie adaptation of that book o’ mine. I suggested Clive owen…but they just went ahead and put that crusty bastard Kurt Russell in it instead. My own fault I guess.

In fact by august I was in France. La rochelle which is by the west coast. I would say “I wonder why I went there” but I know why I went there. I went there becaus eI fell in love with a girl from that part of france about ten years ago now. Her name was…well I guess I shouldn’t say here should I? But then again…I didn’t actually go to La rochelle at all. But if i was to say the real place it would probably be all to obvious to those in the know, so “La Rochelle” It will remain.

I hadnt seen the girl in ten years, but I knew she would be there. I didn’t, but..you know. Sometimes you just have to go. It’s pretty sad of me really. I looked her up again on the IdentiBook. It’s a bit like that old facebook we all used to be on as kids…of course this one is mandatory for all with a British passport and linked up to your identity card. I might have wondered why, since she obviously wasn’t British, she was on there, but i didn’t really lend much time to figuring this out. I looked at her residence…where she goes out from her pictures, not that they are the pictures I remember of sweaty foreheads at that bloody students union, but pictures of her favourite restaurents and areas all the same so that i might get an idea of where i might find her.

By October I had gone about conducting a chance meeting. And she hadn’t changed. It wasn’t the same as meeting an old friend again, it wasn’t so mundane. Maybe you haven’t. But I played a video game once, a game i hadnt played in over ten years and the feeling of doing so..of revisitng a world of which i had long forgotten was one of the most powerful experiences i had even been party to. every contour of her face, the shade of peach pink that coloured her lips and the soft, subtle give that they allowed as my own pressed against hers was, revisiting them, just the same. A thousand places revisted in an instant. Remembered and experienced yet again like time travel, a living memory.

Having kissed her, after just a handful of words, she was always the impulsive type, a man rushed over and pushed me out of her way. He spoke in a familiarly home counties accent. He asked me who the fuck I was. He looked to the girl, my girl, the girl I hoped would be mine and his eyes became plump, as they do, with potential tears. He apologised. I’m sorry, he said, my wife isn’t well, she doesnt know what she is doing. How did he put it? Oh yes he said she had a kind of juvenile dementia….for some reason i could only thnk of how this was why she was on the online register with all us other british residents. She must have got one through being his wife.

I’m back in London now. And, looking on her page again, it seems she died not long after our encounter. Walked off a cliff apparently. I wonder how that home counties widower is now.

Someone just knocked on the door but i wont go and answer it. when you start answering doors thats when the world starts ending through new knowledge and awareness of ones own thinking.

Good morning 2017. I will no doubt spend most of my 2018 thinking of you and what you gave me. And so to that 2018, and the things you bring.