Charly Cox - Validate Me - A life of code-dependency

Nothing riles me more [this is a lie as you’re about to read a book which is essentially a long list of things that rile me to the point of medication punctuated only by rhyme and the rare smatter of hope] than an introduction whereby the writer refers to the infancy of the book’s process. It leaves me with a bored, bourgeois sour taste of someone else’s self-importance, but as I’ve been hailed as an #instapoet I fear I owe it to some sanctimonious troll to exceed a slither of expectation. So let us suck the soured serotonin out of my life lemon.

I pre-empted this. I knew almost so certainly I was on the cusp of complete digital burnout that I pitched this collection thinking I was saving myself from it. Charly from the past, all omniscient, and evidently omnipotent, cackled her way through a Google doc, tripping over a cocktail of www.woes that she knew were exhausting but perhaps important and valid and witty, and hit send. Charly from the past but a few weeks later delighted at the idea of being able to use poetic licence for the first time in her sad, sad life. What fun! You need not sell the last fragment of your young and underdeveloped soul and past trauma! You can use FORESIGHT! And now Charly in the present is furiously walking to Marylebone station at 5am because her contactless card doesn’t work so she can’t get the tube and is desperately aware that everyone is staring at her in the night before’s party dress, mascara on her chin and a hospital bracelet. She’s also talking into her phone in third person, so I need not break this to tell you how far away from the grand dreams of poetic licence she is. This collection, albeit caricatured, is true. Some of it was written on grand spanking highs in expensive hotels in Los Angeles where I (ever the optimist in irony) searched for physical validation, a boyfriend, stardom and a good Instagram opportunity; some of it in bed wheezy on Venlafaxine, Propranolol and an algorithm that hates my content; some of it in Ubers and on trains; some of it to the soundtrack of the men in my local, little countryside pub; some of it leaving a hospital working out if I shouldn’t have run away from it. But all of it was written on my phone and all of it is because of the curse of exactly that.

There. That’s how we got here. This thing in my hand that stole all of my smarts so it could preface its own name with them.

Hello, my name is Charly Cox and I am code-dependent. So would you please, please just validate me.

My rhetoric is changing

My need for love confused

I’ve lost my inner monologue

And sold it all for views.

Shout a little louder

Come a little closer

Let me lead you to the void

The blank expanse

Let yourself fly in a seat

That is pants

Boom across a room

That cares for you little

Wipe off a slick

Of your new hungry spittle

That we’ll sell you as gold

Come grab a feel

Of a hand you can’t hold

Come be a person

That you never knew

Feel grand and feel gorgeous

Then feel worthless and through

Take a trip down the tubes

Get settled in

Welcome, you’ve signed up

It’s all about to begin.

Objectify me Love me Suffocate me Validate me Acknowledgements About the Author Also by the Author About the Publisher

Thought as much

Famed as such

Faked the touch

Of what excites us

Who we are and will always be

Unites us

But we seldom invite that side enough

Swapped it out to sell new love

As though it’s not inside us

Think too much

Fame is such

A thing we’ll fake as something that excites us

Spin it until we’re spinning plates we can’t dine off

Starving

Is this what we’ll die of?

Vapid monsters in a sea of breeding nonsense, jealousy

Portraits of unfulfilled and pretty

Best lives or misery

Rooted to mis-sold faith in a downloaded commodity

Do you like me?

Do you like me?

I don’t know who I am any more

I don’t know who you are

Fascinate me as I fabricate me

Castigate me as I congratulate me

Salivate as I let you navigate me

Masturbate at how inadequate I find me

I’m putting it all out to see

No idea of what I want or who I am sans vanity

No idea of how to please our grumbling society

No idea of where I can slip off silently

I am halves with who I’m wholly miscalculating

Please, would you just validate me?

#candid

You only take photos when you think something might die

You only post photos hoping that it’ll survive.

#fitspo

Smelling of fags and biscuits

Embers the colour of the bits that I missed.

The door opens quickly just as my earring falls out and breaks. Steph catches it and puts it in her pocket, seamlessly, and stares confidently at the man leaning and swaying on the frame. ‘We’re here for the party. Right house?’ She says this with a vague tone of annoyance because it’s bastard-freezing outside. Neither of us have tights on and he’s just stood there gawping, assessing, working out if he’ll get off with one of us by the dregs of the evening. Music crawls in muted tendrils down the tall staircase behind him. No bass.

‘Well, hello girls. Who are you then?’ An over-exaggerated mockney accent dribbles down his polo; when had people started to think that being mindful of your privilege meant performing a class act?

‘This isn’t Mahiki, mate. Let us in, would you?’ It wasn’t, thank God. It was a flat in Denmark Hill, with a door off to the back of a newsagents. Our legs are bare, shaking, and my mind clamours for space as it beats itself into a pulp wondering how I could’ve crammed another cigarette in-between the Uber and this unnecessary faux formality. ‘Robbie invited us,’ I say, meek in Steph’s confidence, staring. I feel shiny. My face feels filled with obvious pores. I feel an intense fraudulence, which I’m sure is about to be exposed. I do not look like my photos. I am catfishing myself, at best. ‘’Course he did,’ he stares at my boobs and Steph’s legs. It feels almost like a compliment that neither of us would ever admit felt like one, we’ve spent enough time slagging off how Robbie always must be seen with the next hot girl and how he always has a line of them waiting, and how horribly disgusting and misogynistic that holds. But to be assumed to be one of them? An ego boost. ‘So can we come in or what? Bloody hell.’ This is boring.

‘Yeah. Yeah, come up.’ He steadies himself on the bannister and the noise of the party engulfs us as he swings open the kitchen door. Everyone stops for a moment.

‘LADS! FOUND THESE TWO LOOKING FOR ROBBIE ON THE DOORSTEP,’ he shouts with smackable smugness. Some roll their eyes whilst others cheer, others pay no attention at all and the girls move in closer to the men they’re sat in front of.

‘Drink?’ Steph glares.

‘Bathroom first. I’ll sort out my face. Pour us one in there. Then let’s give this a go.’

I hadn’t been to a house party in years, the coy butterfly-sizzle of excitement about the hours of pre-game are lost and forgotten. Nothing about being stood in somebody else’s bathroom with a cheap bottle of vodka between our legs felt naughty, it felt a bit grim and regressive. The fists banging on the door outside were not of rowdy teenagers who’d overdone it, not of new-found couples burrowing away for the night for a private snog, but of four thirty-year-olds after the cold, flat porcelain of the toilet to rack up lines of cocaine, which they’d later learn was actually ketamine. We let them bang.