eBook - ePub
She Must Be Mad
Charly Cox
This is a test
Share book
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
She Must Be Mad
Charly Cox
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoās features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youāll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weāve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is She Must Be Mad an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access She Must Be Mad by Charly Cox in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Women in Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
she must be in love
love part 1
Nobody ever tells you that thereāll be comedians and poets, actors and academics, college students and forty-year-old men to fall in love with.
That you will fall in love with them all.
Their charm and their poise, their anecdotes and foreign phrases, even the stray scratchy hairs on their cheeks and chins that will tickle like an acrylic yarn against your youth.
They first come soft. Soft and slow and ethereal, these perfumed clouds of promise that smell new but hang old, and then before a single tendril has had time to make itself at home on your collar, they exit loud and angry and too early.
They will always exit too early.
Little-to-no explanation, a hole so deep you lose your feet to the black and bleak of self-assumed guilt, he flings the door on its hinges for another man to oil and mend.
Youāll re-imagine hope until he leaves too, tarnishing his very own handiwork.
Nobody ever tells you of these good-looking silhouettes because they have stood in their cast before. They relished in the same way you will but they cowered in the flood.
They sunk with weakened limbs until they no longer knew of that initial burst and lay themselves down to surrender. You, however, will not allow yourself to be a casualty to love. You will grow stronger in it, if you try.
Itās six minutes past midnight, Facebook has updated Messenger, video now available, you have no one to call.
Soon, itās twenty-one minutes past twelve and an unfamiliar noise rings through the hard plastic of your first laptop, it starts to screech. You look up and to the side, a rerun of the news now only important to your periphery.
A boy. Itās a boy.
A boy youāve never met but whose life you know the lengths of. Holidays, parties, girlfriends, new friends, birthdays, likes, lunches ā all arranged into bite-sized books youāve read and torn pages from time and time again. The boy. The boy from the holidays and the parties, with the girlfriends and the new friends, heās calling you.
You answer.
Spanking new anticipation twirling twines that tie knots in your chest, frayed ends tickling your stomach to stir hot queasy butterfly soup.
āHello.ā He says, monotone. Northern.
Eyes thinning to an embarrassed sleepy squint.
āHey?ā You say, a question. Southern.
Smile curving to bunch the bags from under your eyes to pillows.
āJust wondered what your voice sounded like.ā He says, he smiles back.
āSame. Now we know.ā
Lights dim in both screens, you dissolve into the silence of each otherās nights, minds reaching out to touch the other, tousle hair, feel skin. Talk. Talk. Laugh. Smile.
Embarrassment has gone.
Itās five thirty-six in the morning four years later. Lights still dim, faces still rounded in the glow of the laptop. Girlfriends once stalked are now ex-girlfriends discussed. Holidays, planned as fleeting dreams of train journeys across the country to finally meet. Likes, shared. Sometimes agreed.
āDo we know, or at least think, that if you lived down the road from me weād be in love?ā He wrote.
āYes.ā You reply.
A life starts to lead along a parallel secret line, a life thatās yours and a line of fibre optics. Two years pass. You meet in a newsagent at a train station. Heās smaller than you thought. Youāre fatter than heād seen. Geography offers different greetings. Kiss, hug, release. You share pancakes but struggle to look at each other. You walk across Battersea Bridge, he lights a spliff, you sit facing away from each other and imagine youāre still just on the phone. Better.
Three years later and it has never happened again. You never found out if he became the poster boy for postmen in Salford. You never got to tell him of the new bosses and the trips to America. You never got to tell him all the things he was right about. You never got to tell him how your heart held out, how it still occasionally chooses to hold out. How in a life lived on a parallel secret line you never unplugged the receiver. But now you do. Now you get to tell him somewhere he might find it and can only hope he does, before he finds someone else.
to you
This feels silly to write
For in doing so
The sentiment fractures
And goes back full circle
But Iāve kissed plenty of boys
Most of them charming
Iāve kissed plenty of boys
And Iāve been on plenty of arms and
Iāve loved plenty of boys
And theyāve made me feel soft
And Iāve seen plenty of boys
And plenty Iāve lost
Iāve had plenty of evenings
In dimly lit bars
And Iāve had plenty of fumbles
In the backs of their cars
Iāve written plenty of letters
And received plenty of emails
Iāve kissed plenty of boys
And one or two females
Iāve traced plenty of hips
With eager touch
And Iāve kissed plenty of lips
That made me feel too much
And in the plenty Iāve gathered
Iāve garnered plenty of words
But once put all together
They donāt sound like firsts
They all sort of sound similar
As though each man wasnāt new
Which is why itās important to say
Not everything I write is about you.
she moves in her own way
It was sticky in your apartment
I stuck my eyes to every corner
Where youād stuck up old postcards
An entire museum of your life and more a
Window
Framed the shrilling stuck-up summer silhouettes in the pub down below
You stuck a scratched record on
That played the once smooth staccato
You poured me a glass of wine
That slipped sticky to my sides
That slipped your fingers across my thighs
I felt stuck
This time I promised myself ...