Loveless

I stayed in London for three months in the autumn of '09.

I was alone. I isolated myself. Deteriorating beneath heavy coats.

I was just barely an adult. I was pushing everyone close away.

I was in love.

And my heart was breaking.

I'd left him in Seattle, the quiet guy with inky blue eyes.

I'd never told him how I felt.

The stress told me starve.

It was a culmination of all the strange food behaviours I'd ever tried.

From binging and purging through exercise and restriction, to simply not eating anything, rewarding myself, if I had been a good girl, with a large mug of hot milk with honey, stolen from my housemates.

I didn't know it, but I was sick in a lot of ways.

An eating disorder was clear, even to me in the haze of my self-hating superiority complex.

I lost 20 pounds in less than 2 months. I was slender to begin with.

I hurt a lot of people, without caring.

I was unsightly.

When I found him, he was just a name in the Facebook search engine.

I clicked on 'friend', promising myself that if it wasn't him, I'd give up this ridiculous obsession and move on.

It was him.

My heart hurt as I whispered to a friend at an art class that night.

'Do you really know this guy?' She asked.

I shrugged. No. We'd hardly shared words. But there was something there.

A flicker, a spark.

Something nudging me forwards.

I had to let him know.

The train ride home was very long. My thin, self-hating face reflected in scratched glass.

Clapham Junction swinging by in a blur of brownstone and darkness.

My fingers shook over the computer keys.

I hit send.

I lay down to close my eyes,

but my stomach cried to be fed, and I felt my world would end, now that I might have something,

someone to lose.

This is what Loveless is to me.

 A love letter. A time I'd rather forget.

It's London in the descending temperatures, The spires of Battersea Powerstation in the early fog.

 This album has completed many different people over the years.

Just as it begins to stitch together the fabrics of my own memories,

covering up the cracks.

It is shoegaze. The sounds shifting through distortion and pitch-bends, rolling around hushed lyrics, till they come up perfectly clear, and clean.

It's a broken mirror. It will lead you nowhere.

It is pure addiction and will hold you down and beat you till you die.

But it will make the sweetest love to you that you've ever known.

This is a very famous album by a very famous band.

I really dug myself a grave trying to find words for this one.

It was lying on the floor. I picked it up.

I'm listening. And I agree with all the listeners before me, and hopefully those to come.

My Bloody Valentine are Bilinda Butcher, Kevin Shields, Debbie Googe, Colm O' Ciosoig.

This is their second album. They have not released anything since.

So, I've shared a snippet of my life, because the music took me back there.

I also know that I can't match what regular My Bloody Valentine listeners might have to say about this album.

I tried.

 And guess what?

I'm married to the man I wrote to that night.

Miracles do happen.

:-)