The Crying Doorman
The literal meaning of life is whatever’s stopping you from killing yourself. Right now I don’t know what that is.
I’m nine-hundred and seventy pounds into my overdraft, and it’s only the tenth of the month. I have over three-thousand pounds of credit card debt, plus countless thousands in student loan. Accrued by studying film, a dying art in a dying world. In two hours I have work at a bar where I sit on my arse and do nothing for hours at a time, with a boss I can’t stand. When I do work, I deal with people that are drunk, violent, perverse, argumentative or just plain cunts. I’m a doorman, don’t you know?
My girlfriend of a month, whom I have declared my love for already, sits on the sofa beside me. We’ve had a strange, psychosocial episode where I’ve tried to understand why she feels the way she does. I’m still none the wiser. I’ve cried twice and now I feel numb.
She left to do some shopping a few hours ago, came back in a much better mood. Not before she tended to me like the baby I am. I’ve always got to make it about me. Maybe she went out and got some dick or pussy on the side. Her phone hasn’t stopped buzzing since she got back. Text messages too, not the usual Instagram notifications from her group of gay friends, some of whom think I’m likely to hit her or worse. I’ve been swinging from pangs of bitter jealousy to utter dispassion, all in my head of course.
We had a cigarette and tea outside on the balcony. The rain spattered us from the balcony upstairs. Hard bullets of rain keep landing on the slate grey metal of her balcony. It slopes slightly upward, obscuring the below. I can see the parked cars (Audis, Ranges, BMWs) lined up neatly along brick wall and fence. Just beyond them is the back of a chain pub and a takeaway called ‘The Goodfather’. Sometimes the employees of both places emerge from the back doors, backlit in tooth decay yellow, and haul empty kegs or swollen bin bags to the end of their alleyways.
I’m not sure what the point of all this living is right now. I’ll figure it out in the morning. I’ve got uni at nine. Short Film 02 I think.
“What if it all works out?” was a favourite saying of an ex-thing of mine. Never a girlfriend. Situationship just isn’t me. It was love. Real, genuine love. She’d say that phrase whenever I told her my fears: that I’d be stuck in Blackpool forever doing nothing. That I’d never make art for a living. That I’d never be understood, or loved, in the way I wanted.
We’d lie on the floor of my one bed flat, right above my letting agent, wrapped in blankets and candlelight. Noses inches away from each other. Eyes locked. Hers were green, wreathed in freckles, stray brown and copper hairs trapped in her lashes. Mine dark and blood shot, plum-purple bags drooping down under them. She’d look right at me and say just what I needed to hear. It was a comforting, intoxicating feeling to be validated for nothing.
Validation comes the hard way. My insecurities and fears creep up on me, snaring me in the same cycle that destroys all of my relationships. I’m certain I love my girlfriend more than she does me. As is always the case.
I just need to find a reason not to kill myself.