I LOVE YOU
I WANT YOU
I NEED YOU
I ADORE YOU
I MISS YOU
I AM OBSESSED WITH YOU
I ADMIRE YOU
I WORSHIP YOU
I CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT YOU
“Words for Lost” belongs to Valentin Vermot’s series of e-mail and text message erasures. The original was an e-mail from Emilie Pierrade received on Sunday 30 May 2004 at 9:26 pm:
I LOVE YOU
I WANT YOU
I NEED YOU
I ADORE YOU
I MISS YOU
I AM OBSESSED WITH YOU
I ADMIRE YOU
I WORSHIP YOU
I CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT YOU
Emilie
Emili
Emil
Emi
Em
E
e-i-l-i-m-E
Valentin Vermot deleted her name, one letter at a time, until he was back where he had begun. There was no escape.
Teach us to sit still.
– T.E. Lawrence
He wandered, he roved; he shuffled, he roamed; he pounded, he expounded, he strode and he strolled.
Perry Pathetic, we called him, this peripatetic poet who paced the streets of Paris, flogging his verse to all and sundry. “My work I have costed,” he told whoever he accosted, “and I’ll spin you a rhyme, if you slip me a dime,” or words to that effect.
Now his walking does the talking, it has no rhyme nor reason: he is poetry in motion.
“Trews doon,” she snapped after lining up her suitors, “kecks aroond your ankles”. Ms Ramsay was a career woman of the no-nonsense variety with a strong dislike of prevarication, or “shilly-shallying” as she preferred to call it. Her approach to dating was strictly business-like and goal-oriented. No faffing about: life was simply too short — like most eligible males out there. “This should sort out the men from the boys,” she said, producing a tape-measure from her handbag and getting down to brass tacks.
Once upon a time my sister baked a batallion of gingerbread men who seemed destined for doughy, doughty deeds so gallant were they. I simply couldn’t bring myself to eat them; had neither the heart nor the stomach to do so. A moratorium was declared by sisterly decree and the spice boys remained in battle formation on the kitchen table pending mum’s final verdict. You could smell the sensuous, exotic aroma from my bedroom, even behind closed door.
That night, I had this vivid dream in which the ithyphallic gingerbread men rose from the baking tray Galatea-fashion. Still under the influence of the self-raising flour, they legged it upstairs to gang-bang the Play-Doh model of the Girl Next Door I had lovingly sculpted and kept secretly beside my comics and sensible shoes.
Breakfast, the morning after, was a truly religious experience. I binged ravenously on the horny homunculi, tearing away at their limbs, biting off their heads with sheer abandon, and washing them down with enough glasses of Ribena to incarnadine the multitudinous seas.
My love has just left the flat, never to return. I can still smell the scent of her perfume in the room. I can hear her receding footsteps in the corridor.
When I was a kid, there were two different ways to go home, both equidistant. Every day, me and my sister would split up outside the school gates and see who would get there first.
As I open the window I think of the future that could have been, of the children we will never have. Every day they will split up outside the school gates and see who gets home first. We will hear their footsteps coming up the garden path.
Standing on the windowsill, I watch her winding down the six flights of stairs, carrying her blue suitcase. There are two ways to go home, both equidistant, but mine’s the quickest.
Last one’s a sissy.
ANDREW GALLIX 