'til I met you.

Is always the prefix to lovesongs. There's never more than one absolute love, but there really is. I fall for people all the time; none of them are absolute, which is worrying because am I missing people all the time, assuming there'll be another one later? I fall slowly, but easily. It just takes someone strong, interesting and intelligent to reveal a sudden vulnerability, and I'm undone. Age doesn't matter. Neither does gender, or physicality, because anyone that has those things is automatically beautiful to me. I can find beauty. I am a magnifier of the aesthetic, for these qualities, for people who have these qualities.

It's true, though, that when there's one person, there is just one person.

There was a desperate man at the pub today. He came on to my Mum, and then to me, and made horrific comments. He said, "I came over on the banana boat, she wasn't far behind"- pointing to one of my sister's friends. He wore an open necked shirt revealing greying chest hair, and incited us to guess his age. K, my sister's friend, was the unfortunate recipient of a tap on the fist (because, as she is black, she must like that sort of thing, odious man) and a, "nah, you're alright". He certainly wasn't. I could see exactly the type of man he was; he was RA's age, and had similar background; british Asian. She hated being referred to as British Asian; she was Indian, she said, and it was hard for her to accept the British aspects of herself. It irritates her when people say they are both. The pub man was the opposite; he'd anglicised his name, he said he was English and made jokes before anyone else did; he was anticipating our racism, anticipating the racism of others, assuming that everyone makes jokes behind his back so he'd better do it in the open before they get a chance, and at least if they do, he's said the worst things out loud, the things that are used as weapons to ostracise and divide. I could imagine the child he was; trying to get in on everyone's games, reasoning that the reason they didn't want him was because of his race (it might have been then, god only knows times have changed). A small, skinny boy with ruffled hair in grey cotton shorts standing on hot tarmac scowling, feeling the prickle of panic puncture his stomach, because the gang is playing hide and seek and they have hidden from him. He can't go home; the sweat makes a thin film on his lip, his father will ask where he is, what he's been doing with those white children, doesn't he know they'll only reject him, only turn on him later on. You can't trust them. Best to stick to your studies; but he always disappoints, he's in the middle, not at the top. Make a joke, make them like you. Make them unable to say it before you have. K hated him; I hated him. I hated that he forced his own complexes onto her, assumed that just because they had something vaguely in common that it was alright for him to say things like that. I think we all disliked him. He was drunk, but inebriation is an extension of your ego and id, I think. We have ridiculous and awful things lurking inside us that we usually manage to suppress, but a few beverages and...