This piece is an autofictional seed for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call. It inspired this other piece.

Dogs Deserve Better

In my phone, there are a few photos that let me know when I am getting close to you. A few hundred before you, there is a bunny with a grenade on a blue wall, in Haggerston. There is a picture of my Garfield lunchbox, I never used it but once, when working out in the city, drunk-painting a DJ’s bedroom. “You don’t need it” written on the back of my hand, rollerball across the surviving freckles and blue veins that look as if they’re trapped underneath a frozen lake. There is the picture of me in 2019, with my ex-girlfriend, wearing a Mickey Mouse hat. And a picture of me in 2021, sucking a lollipop, on the day I was suspended for appearing “under pressure from the work-load” which is my art school’s inoffensive way of saying clearly plastered, completely drunk, positively blitzed. This picture can’t zoom in enough to find the light in my eyes.

I don’t remember much of this time, so I recall with these photos. They’re all useless and I don’t need to keep them, wasting space on my phone, but they tell me when I am getting close to you. So a few hundred before you, I remember the lollipop was Coca Cola, I remember being in love with my ex-girlfriend, I remember feeling profound when people asked me “Why do you have that written on your hand?”, I remember the nights I was date raping myself and buying useless shit on eBay and I remember looking left and right so that no one sees me take a photo of this bunny with a grenade on a blue wall because it annoys me when an artist gets me to do exactly what they wanted me to.

Of course, because you must scroll up to reach the past, everything that is warning me of you and where you are in here is from after you. Post-you. The photo of my goldfish is post-you, the screenshot of a negative coronavirus test result is post-you. The photo of a London billboard, luminous and eye shredding, advertising Netflix movies, is post-you. All of the photos I collected of Ben Affleck smoking, in that eternal “I just lost custody of my kids” face, with an iced coffee in his hand, me feeling like him, using these miserable paparazzi photos as a type of catharsis, like I am being seen when he is being seen. All these celebrities hopelessly caught just living, these are also post-you. And the photo of when I found my yearbook, me standing there, beaming with that after-braces glow, above “most likely to drive a car into a lake”, that is post-you. Mini exhibitions of aesthetics I’ve accidentally curated in my one-man, confessional art-show about me being post-you. When I am looking for an old photo, this gallery becomes just flashes of colour, nothing distinguishable, so my eyes have memory-muscled their way into being scholars of colour theory. As a type of self defence mechanism. We have just passed the day where I got drunk in the bar that played “My Own Summer (Shove It)” by Deftones and Jude’s face lit up. I can tell because I remember the amber glow in the smoking area, the browns of its fashionable exposed brick against my hairsprayed near ginger and the pissy complexion of IPAs. Here we have just passed the 15th of November 2021 because I recognise the cathode ray tube beams of Tekken and Crazy Taxi at the Barcade, which melt into the gloomy purples of when I saw The Microphones live, which melt into the anemic greys of the day I got back the 35mm photos we took in Stratford. Me in my ushanka standing in front of the cranes, London rendered as an empty G-Mod map, a place where no textures have loaded in and these were days where I would K-Hole myself until I fell through the map, looking up at everything, everywhere. Sometimes I think I’m under that lake right now. Hyundai’s cozy down here.

Because you are also me, when I was drunk every day, ugly and cruel, lazy and burnt out. You are me when I was a werewolf. I swipe through my photo gallery until fairy lights and Faceapps and photos of fox eyes streaming through 3AM in camera-flash-green all datamosh and turn to sludge. These kinda moments just fuck you. I’m hoping to just completely glide over you like a sparrow, peaceful above the earth, but I, much more like a garbled sick pigeon, just make a mess flying too close to the ground. With miles on either side of you, if you just stand still, I will still smash right into you.

Right underneath the last photo I ever took of you, there is a photo of a van that had its back doors wide open. Inside were a rainbow of flowers and plants with little fruits hanging on them, as if saying “Come in”. And directly under this photo, 8 photos of a BMW with a mangled bonnet from every conceivable angle. I remember circling around this ruined thing, gawking and perving at its destroyed edges like I was taking upskirt photographs of its sympathetic and compromised position. A recurring theme in my camera roll: skeletons of cars, miserable fetish objects, as if I were cruelly recording a strung-out hooker, ribs showing, stained teeth, droning out on the concrete.

A few time capsules later, an innocent snap of your red coat, with large black fur cuffs, hanging on my wall, on top of a shirt from one of those aimless eBay shopping sprees, of Obama fashioned with a chelsea smile. The photo is taken as if we were lying on my bed in a blissful warmth of bad decision making. I look up and catch the significance of your red coat, but this is before I became accustomed to my knee-jerk styled colour theory. So it was not Danger, Passion, Love or Anger. It was just pretty, like you.

A few days earlier, a photo of a post-it note you left on my wall. In girly cursive, it says:

*1 less g&t
*1 less joint
*and half less talking

A few weeks earlier, a photo of a package that says “Dogs deserve better”, outside my ex’s trendy apartment, where we had goodbye-sex for the fourth time. A day later I would meet you and I must’ve thought “So this is what single feels like”. What it feels like: Crazy, swivel-eyed. King of the world, charisma maxed out. Fucking around on Garageband, hopped up on apple whiskey mixed with energy drinks, recording yourself trying to slur something outside of a 2AM Burger King, taking videos of couples salsa dancing at King’s Cross (but it’s accidentally in slow-mo mode, so you Airdrop a 25 minute long video to the dancers whilst you vibrate off the half-chunk of ecstasy you accepted from some teenagers). These were some of the evanesced days that would summon back to me through my little documents, where I laid little traps of you. They immobilise me for a second or two. I’m back to a time where it felt impossible to lock my boyish yearning in detention, a time where it ripped me up to temper myself, before I learned I wanted nothing to do with the people here and instead I telegraphed myself out overseas, my feelings falling flimsy over the Bermuda and capturing exactly no-one.

You were my last chance. Walking home from the bar, nearly swaying into the shutters, I uncharacteristically catcalled you as a scruffy drunk. I never do that. Not because it’s a bad thing to do, but because it doesn’t fucking work. You, half way inside of a taxi going somewhere, replied with a smile that seemed to break open your face completely. “What do you want to do?” you said, waiting for my clever reply. “Wanna walk around with me?” I replied with a loose this-won’t-work shrug. You slammed the taxi door with a I-don’t-care-about-the-cancellation-fee dereliction. That worked? We threw ourselves back to my room, where Spotify ran to my Xbox One which ran to my TV which could only make sound if it was above a certain volume, a volume that was far too loud for nocturnal hours. This small, blurred night is recorded by mirror selfies and a video of you dancing in the corridor, telling me all about how you’re an actress, a daddy’s girl and an escort. With an unabashed emphasis on the final part. You tell me how much rich men pay to see you do disgusting things and it tugs on my wire in me bound to spark. The want I have for you turns spiky, like a brotherly protectiveness. Or a fatherly need. I want to be a hero, don’t all men? In the clutter of my room, we roll around and feed our habits. You didn’t think I was dangerous, after all, do murderers go for apple flavoured vapes? I don’t feel stupid just because others would think I am. I simply don’t care. I can finally make something of myself through you.
“Do I have to pay for a kiss?”
“You get a freebie.”
A few valiums sitting underneath a whole lot of whiskey, some kind of chemical reaction made me want my Amy Winehouse lookalike to be my forever baby. Right in this moment, you exist to me as much as fiction does. This is no good for real people. I could easily forget that you eat and shit like anyone else. A movie-like moment is dangerous for the romantic in me.

We wake late the next day and lie on the field, hungover and feeling sick, sacking off work until we can’t anymore. I learn nothing new about you and I don’t care to. Later that night, I skulk around where you work and roll cigarettes, I’m waiting for you to get off. Through the window of the pub, I can see you’re full of flirts. Rosy-cheeked, cat eyes. We walk hand in hand to your friend’s place because you’re babysitting the plants. I take photos of you in a thin, cropped shirt, with a Chinese dragon of sequins. Very Depop, very my-type. You are so high you take this little mini photoshoot seriously and I am circling you like a wolf. I want to nibble around your jawline, I want to throw you around and scatter on the floor to look for the dropped nose ring. I want you to feel as atom bomb as I do. I want to do it quietly, so we don’t wake the plants. Snap, snap, snap. I think of that smashed up car. The photos are “live”, I hold down on your chest and it animates you for a second. I replay it over and over, making you alive. Each photo collectively captures around ten seconds I splice together in my dream cinema. Resurrected, although you never died. It would be easier if you had. I captured the first moment you decided to pull up your skirt, but the metadata’s memory is on a short leash and this photo’s dance returns to a chilling static. Somewhere my phone thinks is Scotland, I capture a pink cloud, at 21:02, in September. I undress and wait for you to do the same, I am overcome with feverish need. Your phone buzzes and you flock to another room to take the call. Months in lockdown reduced me to a heavy breather, a peep hole addict, a sex-cam tourist. I needed your touch and I did not even know you for 24 hours yet. Somewhere in Bishopsgate, we drew Sid and Nancy in my portraits book. I am your sick pup waiting for you to get out of the bathroom. I need to be fed, I need my hair stroked. God, I’m such an idiot! Down to my boxers and lying under the lamplight, my brain scattering for conversation. Who even are you? At this moment I will do just about anything to let you exist for more than one day. I hear you talking quietly on the phone. I can hear your hushed tone. Am I on a trial subscription? When do you disappear? The bathroom door squeaks a few moments later and I hear you thud down the hallway. “I think you have to leave,” you say quietly, gritting your teeth. As if I’m deathly ill and you’re about to pull my plug. “Oh, why?”

“Someone is here to fuck me.”

A year later, somewhere around Castle Baynard, someone one million times better than you stands underneath a rainbow.

I lived a lot after this, I lived things to take photos of, so that I could smother you out. Pretty lights and bad hair days get 2 or 3 photos more than they deserve. I started taking photos of my food and because of this, I now know I made fishcakes, I tried my hand at Sloppy Joe burgers and I made pasta for Daisy when she came home with bruises. I didn’t delete blurry photos, I took photos of the moon. I lived weeks to cover up one day. Months. Whenever we met after I was profoundly shredded, when my hubris turned me into 40 miles of rough road, my camera roll suffered a drought. I sometimes made you cry, you sometimes made me drunk. Entirely too wounded to ever forgive you, all of my juvenile brat unleashed in me. I attacked you from every direction, wondering if it would ever make a mark like the one you gave me. Then, I begin to hear from you less. One day we talk about your boyfriend, the next you tell me about the threesomes you have with Indian millionaires and how they just like to get off to girls scissoring. You tell me about the guys who had to hit you so they could get hard, you tell me about what their apartments look like. Some part of me wanted to save you, but you were entirely your own person. You liked your job and this crushed me. It crushed me that there was nothing to save. Renovation is for girls, self destruction is for boys. So much for my understanding of the world. Sheltered from my years of relationship, I found myself thrown in the pound. I didn’t have the guts to delete our little homemade American Apparel ad. I never knew when I would need it, as guilty as I am. I never knew when I needed to see every angle of a car wreck.

Today I was looking for photos of my blonde hair. I saw a little bunny with a grenade on a blue wall. I remembered you’ve moved to Australia and you’ve stopped working as an escort. I wonder if you took your boyfriend with you. I wonder if you’ve shagged your boss. It hurts less now, in fact, not at all. I didn’t really know you. I was left knowing a lot more about myself. Sometimes that can be a terrible thing. It doesn’t hurt even when I shoot a message, hoping you’re well and doing great things and you don’t reply. It doesn’t hurt when you eventually tell you got away from the city and have a “normal job”. Your photos are a little in front of my lockdown hair. I hold down on them and make you dance again. I delete them, one by one. Getting rid of myself.

There is no you, half way in the taxi, babysitting the plants, crying in your sportswear. There is no you, drunk on gin and tonic, doing coke in Catherine Wheel Alley, kissing me goodnight. There is no you, catching me in the cross section between bad and worse. For all I know, there is only you, in Australia, good girl, working in an office, knees unbruised. Like Amy Winehouse won in the end. There is me as I’ve come to hate and there is only you as you’ve told me you are. I believe you. And all of your kisses are for free.