Mastermind
moriarty i ain't
In hindsight it was a truly insane choice. Two years ago I was chatting with talking to
emailing a friend not technically ex
girl I went to high school with - and we got to the topic of the then-latest Taylor Swift album, Midnights. She was, after all, the reason I started listening to Taylor in the first place. I asked her favourite song - it was Lavender Haze, which is, for the record, a kinda beige, empty, nothing answer - and I made the mistake of being honest. Mistake because, honestly, in hindsight, it was a truly insane choice.
In typical Taylor Swift fashion, she put out three versions of Midnights. Mastermind just barely squeaked its way onto the final slot of the initial release, and was never put out as a single. It's almost something of a villain song, and takes the form of a manic confession from a woman framing herself as a kind of master manipulator, romantic Moriarty figure. As she confesses, confesses to her social schemes and to her assumed sins and to her all consuming lust need
desire it builds to a pulsing crescendo - and we learn that you, the person she's confessing to, saw right through her schemes. You, whoever you are, saw the trap and stepped into it anyway because you felt it too.
By the time I told her I loved her it was too late, and I got it wrong anyway. It was in the weeks after an argument and an action that, had she been anyone else, wouldn't have been as bad as it was. But she was her, and we were kids, and I grabbed her arm, and that was enough to rend every shred of trust she had in me, to burn that bridge back to the pilings. I remember feeling like I was falling, falling for days, weeks, months, trying to grab any hand, and watching them pull away one by one. Watching my social circle chip, shatter, and fall away, radiating out from her like a bullet hole in a plate glass window.
So I told her in that - too late - and I told her I loved her like family - wrong anyway.
When the truth is, I was in love with her. Fully, completely, in the way that sits in your heart and your gut and your dreams. In the way where just a look made me smile and blush, where she picked on me for the blush, where I smiled bigger and blushed redder.
But it was the first time I had felt that way, and I had... abysmal self esteem. Any time our friends asked me if I had a crush I'd self-censor, lie convincingly, no-sell any attempt to sort them in a fuck-marry-kill, render myself soft, safe, quiet, asexual. I hadn't yet gotten to the part of Feminism where you learn you can both respect and be attracted to women, so in all the fantasies I had of her we skipped over the dating, the high school, the sex, to the years later, waking up with kids. I even censored the fantasies, shook them out whenever anything more lewd threatened the white pickets, dare I somehow disrespect the girl I cared so much about.
I'm getting more used to asking people out these days. Then again, maybe I'm doing it wrong. I've settled on a strategy that... admittedly doesn't seem to be working. I don't think I know how to be sexy. But what I do, these days, is try to ask them as soon as possible. Day of, usually, so that if it is a polite rejection we get to just move on as frictionlessly as possible. I kinda got it in my head that waiting too long would be a social faux pas that would drag you both into hell, but, then again, that's a different girl, and a different story.
But then again, perhaps it's relevant because it was only after that different girl that I considered writing, then used illness as an excuse to follow through on sending the emails that started this whole thing.
When you ask someone out within a few days of meeting them, there's a little bit of those flutters but, honestly, there's no romance to it. It's a very... safe way of doing things, but no one ever fell in love with safety. It's a way of stopping myself from being let down.
But I still fantasise about it. About that feeling of rushing blood, every inch of your body burning as the confession lights you ablaze. Of hanging in that instant - that's why I'm writing a rom-com, that's why I love When Harry Met Sally, why I sent that damned email in the first place-
Ah.
My plan, inasmuch as I had one, was simple. The kind of plan you can only come up with after a soul-rending breakup, and a week of self-isolation with COVID-19.
Step 1: Send email, offer to buy her a coffee.
Step 2: Have coffee, ideally in the next week or so.
Step 3: Talk a bit, see how things go. If the moment arose, confess my long-held and deeply felt crush on her.
And then, of course, the first wrinkle in that plan arose -
She was in Hong Kong, but she'd be back in... three months.
So we... talked chatted
emailed very intermittently for the next few months. In that time I learned she definitely didn't want to text, or call, or really talk much over email, that she wanted to talk to me in person or not at all. This is when the aforementioned exchange about Midnights took place, where I stated the aforementioned truly insane yet nonetheless honest opinion I had about Mastermind. I did also cap that email by saying I was a quote "sucker for a sappy, happy ending."
Moriarty I ain't.
Now, personally, I think it's an incredibly sweet song. It evokes perfectly the feeling of the anxious confession - the percussion pounds like a heartbeat, the sweeping electronic bass alternating between chest tightening highs and stomach dropping lows, the desperate, frantic, emotive voice she brings to it is tuned to a point. It's youthful, naive, its the naivety of thinking you're braver, smarter than you are, the protagonist of every story. It's fantastical in a way a lot of people don't like, hell, Swift's next original album was a resounding rejection of fantasy so even she seems to be tiring of it.
So what does it say that I... don't?
I dreamed about her again. I don't remember all the details, it being a dream and all, but I remember being with her. All but alone with her, surrounded by people we used to care about, at some sort of sleepover where they had all fallen asleep. There was a storm outside.
I think I confessed.
We live in the digital age, surrounded by Images to an unprecedented extent, so I think that impacts how we make metaphors of our memory. The prevailing wisdom is that our brains are like our phones, that remembering something is like looking it up on the internet. That's not quite true.
Remembering is destructive. The act of remembering itself would be better described as photocopying, or taping, or some similarly analogue metaphor.
Remembering has three steps.
Copy the memory from Long Term Storage to Short Term Storage.
Replay the memory, reinterpret the memory, think about the memory.
Copy the replay with those new Thoughts from Short Term Storage into Long Term Storage, overwriting whatever was there before.
Something is lost, something degrades of the memory every time we relive it. Things become fuzzy, cartoonish. We forget their face, the words, the detail, until all that's left is an impressionistic archetype. A copy of a copy of copies hundreds of layers deep, until all you have is a smudge.
When people are in our lives we don't notice this as much. Your vision of them is built both from your memory, and their existence. It's an image made up of two halves - like projected light onto a painting. There is the physical, real object, person, painting, and the perception, the ephemeral, illuminated, projection laid on top of it. We correct each other, relearn their face and their voice and their laugh constantly, but as soon as that slips...
Your understanding of them falters. The painting beneath chips and burns, and all you're left with is your ephemeral light, catching on scraps and loose ash.
We lose something every time we re-remember a memory, and I don't think I've remembered anyone more than her. I've thought about her, fantasised about her, dreamed about her more than anyone I've ever known.
And I've lost something every time.
She is... out there. She is a real, complicated, human being. Living, and fighting, and learning, and laughing, but I have no idea what for. Where. With whom. I know almost nothing about her anymore. I know a few, scant details.
She's published.
She didn't show up to the reunion.
She only wants to talk to me in person or over email.
Well, wanted. Past tense. She decided against even that. Understandably. It makes sense.
That... isn't enough paint to restore the canvas beneath the projection. All I got from that strange and sparse email exchange was more bloody questions.
I don't have her on socials - unlike me, she's set it all to private and I unfollowed her long ago - but every once in a while I google her.
It's... a bad habit. It's self harm. It's not stalking. It doesn't feel like stalking. I hope it's not stalking.
If it is, I'm bad at it. I know she finished her bachelors, though I don't know what she studied, and I know she still writes. Little else.
Like me, she is Search Unique. The only person in known universe with that specific form of that specific name. And every once in a while I'll find she's written something new.
I know, trust me, I know, that you can't use someone's writing as a key to their soul. Well, unless its something like this, which any healthy person would keep in a padlocked journal, but fiction, poetry, isn't the same. You can read, reread, and all you'll ever get is an interpretation. You can only use someone's writing for that when they grab you by the pen and spell it out.
But nevertheless, when you're lonely, and 18 months single, and it's late, and you're a bit tipsy, sometimes you wonder about that girl you used to know. Sometimes you find she's written a story about the shock, the tension, of a text from an old friend, or you catch on a stray line about "blushing like a teenage boy" and-
That's not... anything, is it? To call that grasping at straws would be an insult to the straw. No, it's grasping at ash. At embers, at dying sparks of light.
But it sends the mind spinning.
And in that spin at 4:49 am you text a friend about it, and when they wake at 2:03 pm they reply "oh buddyyyyyyy" [sic].
There are notes, singular details from our teenage years, but they're so scattered, so sparse. Pins holding that painting to the wall, while the canvas rots and burns around them. A favourite book, a favourite song, a conversation about sunsets. For years I lied, convinced myself that was enough to know anything of her but...
i think i just want to be in love again
as a child i fell in love with her
i fell so deeply so innocently in love that when i imagine someone i imagine her
but its her not her
not the real woman but the
silhouette
smear
ash
photocopy
projection
memory
i have nothing left of the girl i fell in love with except the fact that i fell in love
she is the shape feelings take when there's no one else in my life
an abstract her-shaped hole full of everything i've ever loved about the world
and yet
i can't remember her face
and yet
she is somehow still my muse
the force behind every confession and love story i've ever wanted to write
and yet
she is a stranger now. i don't know her
what would happen if she reached out?
if she asked to talk?
a quantum collapse of possibility and reality
would it fix me? would it break me?
both?
and yet
some days i get so cold
so desperately cold
that i want her to break me
just so i can have a new way to hurt
she is not a... person, in my mind.
she is an archetype, a freudian figure, a role
a type
my type, i suppose
when i was happy i forgot about her
or i let someone else occupy that role
i forgot about her for two long years
then again, for seven nice months
so i suppose she is the fantasy i escape to when i'm unhappy with my love life
looking back, my dreams of her were... warnings.
when i struggled with the ballet dancer, i thought of her
and again, when things fell apart with the artist, i dreamed of her
of that long gone, cryptic, faceless girl who made me blush and watched sunsets and pulled me in to fix my collar, who writes poems and emails and who i so deeply admired
who i so entirely adored
who broke my heart. whose heart i broke
who once said she forgot things were ever good
i
i can't kill these fantasies.
i've tried. i feel perverted
disgusting
obsessive
the best i can do is replace them.
wash away the faceless girl with someone i can hold.
their smells, their quirks, their smile, their laugh.
everything they love, every sight they marvel at.
i'll never dream of her if i can wake up to them
so if I can't stop these fantasies, maybe i can learn to live with them
to see them as nothing more
as abstract urges, yearning, cast out and projected in flickering light
onto a woman i will never meet again
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