to The Restorer

This at knife-point ... You operate such a club here. There’s a little of the quaint coffee morning, housewives assembled, keeping it light, agreeable. So you unveil your latest offering at one of your gatherings. Suitably convened, the nodding-heads nod their heads. You offer them a kind of poured-over pictorial intricacy; they say ‘nice colours’, ‘I like the trimming’, ‘is that a cat?’ You chime in, staying in-character, ‘thanks’, ‘lol’, ‘omg’. You think to yourself, ‘I’m attention seeking, yes, but there’s reaction here, so it’s not all fallow ground; look people are interested’. All appears ratified, vindicated. You’re not just seeking attention, you are plainly getting it. You can say, I say therefore I am. Who could argue with that? Similarly, you burn inside with this other thing. You manage to secure yourself someone who will say he is yours; making sense of your other thing, therefore, in a ‘see, I am and I have’. You continue. He, too, says ‘nice colours, I like the trimming, is that a cat?', however.’ Elsewhere, you get a bit more dot dot effing dot with your colours and the way you use them, you get angsty, animated. Still they talk about the colours, the trimming and that cat. One or two detect you sometimes don’t keep it light; one or two offer bigger ideas – though, always confined to a style of commenting that goes: ‘hey, you’re like me. I feel this but you say it better than I do. Thanks xxxxxx’. See how you are, here, the wisest of the bunch. But you seek not to be. So, you feel a little pearl-before-swine, a little out-of-sorts, like the reasons why you pictorialise have been missed; and so the same things recur and recur and recur, uttered into the void, because you’re an attention seeker and that’s what attention seekers do. But wait, perhaps your lover will answer you here with wise words? At least he does not ignore you. That’s good, surely. Plainly, you are willing to settle for whatever you can get in terms of attention, and he knows it. He realises that, in your desperation for attention, you will settle for that and not be too demanding about content. Look, therefore, no surprise, he too is keeping it light. Now and again, when the angst is really up, he points at you, as if you exist. Where to go for you now with that internal debate? Yes, he is at least better than him, the other one, the previous one. Your game of comparisons helps a little. So, again, you prepare another picture of yourself for the nodding heads and your nodding love. All duly nod.