Bye to Matte
I can’t stop watching this video of Des Ark:
So, I went to see Matte in Leeds. The train from Cambridge to London was delayed, so I missed the train to Leeds, and then the one I got broke down. Train rage welled up. I watched Jim Jarmusch’s film, Stranger Than Paradise. It’s in black and white and each scene is filmed in one static shot and nothing really happens, but not in a good way.
I arrived and Matte and I were deferential and danced around each other. We went for some Japanese food and she told me about being in the forest. It sounds like she is happy: she is exactly where she wants to be. She mentioned that she is hardly seeing Abel anymore. Apparently, things kind of fell apart after they started spending extended periods of time together.
We wandered around in the cold and then went to a pub that had a fake fire. We talked about how things felt a bit weird. I figured it was because we were seeing each other for the first time where there was no romance. It was so fucking different from when we last saw each other again after we broke up the first time and we couldn’t stop touching. I said something, and I can’t remember what it was, and tears welled up. Later, I said I missed her so much, and that I was really worried about meeting the paramedics who saved me, and that I was totally discombobulated by the thought of moving to Berlin. And then I got even closer to crying so I went to the loo to do that in private.
The thing that became clear, and that made me cry repeatedly over the next few days: she has basically moved on.
I wanted to tell her about this scene in Stone Butch Blues where Jess takes two children to the zoo. It’s snowing and freezing cold and the animals are forlorn. One of the children asks her whether she’s leaving and she says, Yes because I have to, and the children cry. And the whole scene is suffused with that strange hopeless sadness of childhood that comes when something bad happens that is completely beyond your control. My Mum said that when my Dad left home, she told me, Daddy’s leaving, and I cried and said, No, and, though I don’t remember that moment, when I think of it now I get the same feeling as that scene.
So, I wanted to tell Matte, but I kind of knew in advance that, like some of the other really strong things in my head, she just wouldn’t get it. Very few people do.
We wandered around in the snow by the canal. She showed me where she used to smoke weed and snog her friends, and her favourite bridge to stand on and look at the old factories (now all office buildings). At last, we went to the station and hugged and kissed once on the lips and then I got on the train and cried most of the way home.
I listened to the recording I made of Efterklang’s Cutting Ice To Snow, and thought about how tears rolled down my cheeks as they played, and that the lyrics, which I heard as, “You’ve gone too far, despite my city walls”, were, for me, about Matte becoming a person I was no longer compatible with, who existed outside my borders: in the wild, away from big cities, polyamorous.