Pepperoni Passion.
BBQ Chicken Bliss.
“I don’t get you,” said the boy behind the counter. “You’ve already got a great boyfriend.”
“But there’s always someone better.”
He looked at me.
“Is there? From where I’m standing, this new guy’s a loser.”
Pause.
“You’re the only one who thinks he isn’t.”
Hot Honey Dough Balls?
There is a new film director in our apartment. Not literally, of course. But after seeing Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent at the cinema, we discovered that MUBI was showing a small collection of his earlier films. Trust Charlie to want to watch Aquarius, which—naturally—wasn’t among them.
The thing about Charlie is that he never gives up. He eventually found it on the Internet Archive, only to be dismayed that it was in Portuguese. He tried to locate English or French subtitles, but to no avail. The other thing about Charlie is that he is impatient.
I wrestled the TV remote from him and began investigating for myself. This was not what he wanted. “Give it back,” he ordered. “You’re wasting my time now.”
Call me childish, sulky—perhaps simply bad-tempered—but I had what can only be described as an adult tantrum. I threw the remote into his lap and stormed off to bed.
The next morning, Charlie went for the César Award. “I was frightened,” he claimed. “You threw the remote at my head. I believe I may even have been unconscious for a while.”
“I’m home again in my old narrow bed
Where I grew tall and my feet hung over the end
The low beam room with the window looking out
On the soft summer garden
Where the boys grew in the trees.”
Boys in the Trees (1978). Lyrics by Carly Simon.
February ended with an odd remark from Charlie.
“I searched online,” he said, “and found no evidence that you have ever written anything.”
In one sense this was reassuring. I write under an assumed name, after all. Yet it was also unsettling, because the remark revealed that Charlie had been looking. If he were ever to find my work, he might not appreciate how frequently he appears in it.
He forgets that I am blocked from viewing his Instagram page, though that obstacle proved easily solved with a hastily created fake profile.
“Some people prefer to remain anonymous,” I told him.
Charlie cannot understand this. The French boy dreams of fame and dabbles in anything that might propel him towards it. I, on the other hand, prefer the safety of obscurity.
My friend David, a successful author, has written under a nom de plume for decades. As he once explained, “If I knew a book would succeed, I’d happily publish it under my real name. But writers are haunted by failure. Imagine the shame of having that failure attached to the real you.”
I have never had the heart to tell him that his real identity can be discovered by anyone, anywhere in the world.
Charlie might have uncovered my secret already, had he possessed a little more information. A few weeks ago I typed the titles of several of my stories into Google. To my alarm, an AI assistant suggested that they might have been written by me. It had linked three titles to Spotify playlists of the same name on my profile. I quickly changed the account name, but the episode left me with an uneasy realisation: artificial intelligence will always be a few steps ahead of us.
Anonymity, it turns out, is fertile ground for paranoia.
Charlie later recommended that I watch a short film on YouTube.
“It is about a writer with a mental block,” he said, “who rents a summer house and becomes obsessed with a young boy on the beach.” Then he gave me a mischievous wink. “Watch it. It is very you.”
The film was Belgian. It followed Louis, an ageing writer who becomes fixated on Tommy, a young man who visits the beach each day with his girlfriend. The obsession rekindles Louis’s imagination, and in the novel he begins to write he conveniently drowns the girlfriend, leaving Tommy entirely to himself. At least, I think that is what happens. The ending leaves you uncertain whether the events belong to fiction or reality.
Charlie was right. It was “very me”, in the sense that I often begin with a person and build a story around them. What Charlie did not know was how close that description came to the truth. I found myself wondering whether he had somehow hacked into my laptop.
“Why did you search for my work?” I asked.
He hesitated.
“Well,” he said eventually, “I am curious about what you are writing—and whether it is good.”
That was the dilemma. Long ago I realised that I depend on acceptance for survival, and that my writing might reveal far more of my inner life than I would ever willingly confess.
“I’m not sure I could face the shame of criticism,” I said. “Or the possibility of being exposed as incompetent.”
It was meant as an offhand remark, yet it revealed more than I intended.
I half expected reassurance, perhaps even encouragement. None came.
“I suppose we are all afraid that people might see our flaws,” Charlie said thoughtfully. Then he smiled.
“Except, of course, when you do not have any. Like me.”
Maxwell and Myles: two brothers, yet two entirely different temperaments.
Maxwell, the extrovert; Myles, the introvert.
Maxwell reserved only in appearance, Myles inwardly repressive.
Maxwell is confident where Myles is nervous.
Careless meets diligent.
Dominant faces the submissive.
The imaginative brother beside the one more firmly rooted.
An optimist paired with a pessimist.
Adventurousness set against caution.
All of it the quiet outcome of the genetic lottery: strands of DNA shuffled and recombined into millions of possible arrangements. From the same parents, yet never the same person. And then life intervenes—different encounters, different choices, different small accidents of experience.
What begins as chance becomes character.
What begins as similarity drifts toward contrast.
In the end, perhaps they also choose it—each brother carving out a separate niche, shaping himself in deliberate opposition to the other, until the distance between them feels almost inevitable.
“The self-righteousness of that age was really camouflage to disguise its own hypocrisy, and the people who were loudest in their condemnation of my father were often those whose own lives could least bear investigation.”
– Vyvyan Holland writing in Son of Oscar Wilde. Published by Rupert Hart-Davis (1954)
And I can’t help thinking that the same still applies…
Something strange had happened beforehand. A young guy sold me my cinema ticket. Soft features, dark curls, expressive eyes. Soft-spoken. All the time he smiled as though sharing a secret only he understood.
There were other staff around, but when I bought a coffee he served me again. He looked astonishingly vulnerable when he realised he’d screwed up making my hazelnut coffee. And then he scanned my ticket when I headed into the screening.
He might have been Jeff Buckley, if only he’d known who he was.
The cinema was empty, as though this showing were meant for my eyes alone—someone who only discovered him after he was already dead. That strange, almost mystical aura: the romantic legend whose story remains unfinished. It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.
A Pre-Raphaelite look—with scratchy stubble—and the whisper of a small child that could rise suddenly into a soaring falsetto, almost devotional. Was there ever anyone who captivated me so completely?
I heard the murmur of Cinema Boy: “The face that once commanded admiration and became a ruin, a tragic testament to a sad end.” That someone so beautiful would go swimming and never come back. My heart insists it was intentional.
One album—both his coming-out and his epitaph. One of the greatest albums ever recorded.
Six days. That’s all it took. A body decomposing, bloating. Skin that once felt so good to touch became pruned, pale and waterlogged—brownish, yellowish, ugly. Corpse wax. A moral fable in which the loss of physical perfection mirrors the decay of the soul.
The film ended. And Cinema Boy—who was probably called Will, or Aaron—came into the cinema to clear up after me.
He was still smiling to himself.
Jeffrey Scott Buckley. Guardian angel. Born: Anaheim, California (1966). Died: Memphis, Tennessee (1997), aged 30.
The people who excite me rarely seem interested in me, while those I feel nothing for often are. It’s a familiar paradox. Attraction doesn’t always align; sometimes it’s a mismatch of types, sometimes it’s the pull of emotional unavailability. I keep finding myself drawn to people who can’t—or won’t—choose me.
The sensible answer is obvious: stop chasing. Put that energy back into my own life instead of pursuing people who remain out of reach. Still, it’s irritating to realise that the very traits I possess—traits that don’t necessarily fit my own ideal—might be exactly what someone else has been looking for all along.
Some faces belong more to memory than to the world.
It’s a bit of an obsession, though I try not to talk about him too much. Still, his name surfaces from time to time. And then the teenage guy asks me if I know who River Phoenix was.
He asks it casually, like it’s just another name drifting out of the past. Of course I know. But I hesitate before answering, as though admitting it might reveal too much.
Who would have imagined we’d spend the entire night talking about River Phoenix? About how beauty becomes fixed in time. About the strange intimacy we form with the dead.
Every so often he tilts his head in a way that reminds me of him. Not exactly. But enough. For a moment I imagine he might be the reincarnation of River Phoenix. The thought is absurd, of course.
What he loves is not the person. Only the image. And the image never grows older.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 