A. Kennedy - All the Rage

And, most likely, you’re now both thinking in total unison — I will make conversation when we meet and I will say, ‘The coffee here’s good.’ That’s what I’ll begin with. Straight after good morning or good afternoon, or whatever is appropriate.

Morning would be best: it’s the least emotionally charged time of day and will be brighter and have a sense of moving on, of futures and being uplifted.

Although it can also produce an atmosphere of having just left one’s bed. That scent. The good one.

But afternoons could get cantankerous and evenings are too mellow and unfurling and nights are clearly a threat.

The coffee here’s good.

The coffee here’s good this morning.

But why would you decide to say that? Why on earth? Who would that mean you’d become? It would turn you into somebody misleading, casual, and a person who’ll seem cruel in retrospect. You don’t want that. You’re not cruel.

They’re not cruel, either.

You have faith they wouldn’t choose to be.

But they might, nonetheless, have found it necessary.

Anyway, you’re fussy about coffee and haven’t been somewhere with a really good brew available in years, not with coffee worth a positive mention, so remarking upon it randomly in some mediocre venue would be weird, if not laughable, and this won’t be an issue even, because, as you consider it thoroughly, a meeting at a café would be inappropriate. You’ve enjoyed that sort of niceness before, but you shouldn’t again. It could lead you astray. Once you’d arrived, you might start relaxing, even though you’d be feeling lousy, and then you’d brush fingers while you chat with them and share opinions and none of it would end at the intended end. So you won’t go to a café in the first place.

And visiting each other’s homes would be an act of violence.

You can’t.

You won’t.

You couldn’t.

You won’t go anywhere.

You won’t meet.

You are unable.

You shouldn’t trap yourself in a position where you see their mouth, study their mouth and the movement of their lips and the terrible softandgentleness of everything: the dark and lovely, clever softening.

It would be a disaster.

Hi.

Likewise, every possible form of address — any speaking when you’re together — would be wrong.

How are you?

What does that mean?

What are the implications?

You’re a person who weighs implications and so are they, and that’s a factor to consider while you plan. Despite the unfortunate circumstances, you want to be kind and do this right. They will do too. And there’s the question of respecting the other party who’s also involved and who has no way to alter this and neither can you.

I just can’t.

I’m not sure any more.

I was never sure.

But I’m sure I can’t.

And meanwhile you, there’s you and you were, you really, you absolutely — I absolutely — in all of the ways I would like to — in all of the ways I would like

But I

But I

But I

But I

Phone would be better.

Getting clear of the same room, or building, or street would seem better, easier.

Much.

Much worse, if you’re being frank. Only a moral bankrupt would attempt to make this tidy over the phone.

Only a moral bankrupt would view this in terms of being tidy , and you’re not that. Your terminology was a mistake. The permanent grief that you have in the muscles along your forearms since you can’t remember when is destroying your vocabulary and you scramble for phrases as if you’re abroad somewhere inexplicable and scary. Sometimes your head is stuffed with no more than noises and you’re afraid that, if you tried to speak, an animal mess would be the best you’d manage. You’d squeal and be undignified. There’s also a long, anxious tendon, or connective something, a strained nerve, that stings when you reach to the left, or roll over at night — your sleep is, naturally, ruined — and there’s a sense that when you swallow you come inappropriately close to drowning.

I’m not drowning.

I don’t want to.

Your mind is unworkable and over-full.

Perhaps theirs is equally busy with aches and scrambles.

I could make a call, though. I could write down the points I should cover and be reassured and then deliver them presentably.

But if you phone, you’ll hear them breathing, precisely as they might when they’re skin-tight to your cheek and they find out the secrets along your neck and are warm and dense and interesting — they fit so much motion against you, demonstrate such a burden of potential, even when they’re at rest. There are other people who are communicative as fence posts when you hold them: truly numbing, somehow. As if they had gone and left something dead, propped up in the space behind them. Or there are those who are peculiarly, or almost unnervingly, a horrible shape when touched. They’re like badly packed duffel bags with absurdist contents. You don’t like them. They are acquaintances. Or less.

Your life has uncomfortable requirements, one of them apparently that you should hold the unholdable as part of many low-grade social interactions. Comprehensive contact is the fashion currently. How this has come about is beyond you. You didn’t ask for it.

You ask for very little.

Historically, this is true.

Hi, I was calling to

Hi is better than hello. It’s smaller.

Hi.

Or hey. Hey delivered as a smoother version of hi. A dab of sound.

They will recognise your voice.

Even from that dab.

They’ll know it’s you.

They will know you are you, but quite possibly misunderstand what that implies.

Hey.

I was not calling to say that you are endless information. My palms against your back have touched unmistakably the way that you’re built out of shouts and whispers, croons — you have these areas that croon.

You have sweet shapes.

You have places about you that shift my senses and make me have to understand your heats as flavours. You lead to kissing. Always.

You lead to blatant inadequacy and the fear of death, and the kissing blesses all of that away. You unharm me.

And I will never get used to the times when your breath splinters, or to the necessity of cradling. It is correct to cradle you.

There have been times when I have heard you and wanted only to run and cure whatever was wrong, whatever could be wrong, whatever might be wrong.

I am not calling to say that.

So I won’t say that.

It would be, to a degree — not that you’re ungrateful — an inventory of things you’ve never asked for.

Hey.

I couldn’t predict what you would give me.

And you’d have to agree, I didn’t ask for it.

You’ll only tell them the one thing, small sound.

Hey.

After which they will have recognised your voice and then they’ll want to chat and you’ll need to be savage and get in there first like a cold-calling salesman.

Doing this will be vile. Completely. How completely vile of you.

And thereafter they’ll have their own points they need to make and comments, of course. You will end up having a discussion, conversing.

You’re already upset, as it is.

So when they start talking you’ll really be in trouble.

Hey, I

You won’t make a call, then. Not any kind of call — not ringing to leave them a message and ducking the issues arising, which would be cowardly to a degree that you might not survive. You might remain despicable to yourself for the duration after that.