Anagram

 

I offered you everything — security, choice clothes and various home comforts in my mansion but when we couldn’t reconcile what you wanted with what I wanted to give you, I then offered you actual hard cash to buy what you wanted. My theory was that you did not know what you wanted. I even paced up and down outside your flat, while you made up your mind. But you rang the police to tell them I was bothering you. And I received a caution and they told me that if I continued in my behaviour, then more serious repercussions would ensue. So I was now forced to watch my step and, self-evidently, I would have to decide the precise targeted manner of my next approach to you, but only after I had established what you really wanted from me. So far it had been like using a splatter gun. 

Let me step back, for a while. Even if you think you, the reader, have guessed what you really wanted, it was never as simple as that. Nothing is simple in life, especially between two tentative or shy lovers, be they man and woman, be they woman and woman or be they man and man, or neither or even both. 

I need to describe some things about myself to give at least partial context to what I might eventually find to satisfy your desires. I was born many years ago, but my story is about my life as a young person when I first met you who was, if anything, younger than myself. It was in the foyer of a theatre, with dimmed lighting either to enhance the romanticism of the moment or to soften the cold light of day carried by the milling faces around us, faces young as well as old. The ticket booth was the hub of the hubbub, if I can start having fun with my words. So far, I have been restrained in my descriptions. But my usual style is often one of playfulness mixed with darkness. I was third in the queue when I first became aware of you. You were a single queuing person away from me, and were already at the ticket-window, your voice rising as if something had gone awry, your ordered tickets not available or an unknown argument with the man who was spooling out perforated cardboard segments with seat numbers on each segment. Perhaps you had simply taken a dislike to him or he was someone you already knew, someone with whom you had a history. At first I was annoyed, being delayed by this altercation. But I was soon entranced by your backstraps and the flow of hair over your shoulders. I yearned to see your face, hoping it would soften the shrill tones of your voice, Yes, entranced by the hands that eventually handled the entrance tickets, tickets of entrancement in your entrancing fingers. I was soon to get know you better, but I should have guessed straight from the satart what one day you would want me to give you. Either my mansion or hard cash, or both. Your handbag, by the way, on your left arm was overstuffed with chocolates and mint humbugs together with old-fashioned penny-chews, pear drops, blackjacks and pineapple chunks. Imagine the noise you would make in the auditorium during the quiet moments of the show, I thought. But it completely slipped from my mind, as you turned your back to the the ticket booth, any altercation resolved, and I saw your face for the first time.

What was the show? I can hardly remember, because you have outshone my life from that moment on. I have since looked at contemporary information about it and gather it was a sort of opera about Akhenaten. It has the Latin word for birth in that name, I guess, and, yes, I was born, too, then, by simply seeing you. And we have since reminisced about our early days together, without detailing the hard facts of transient society going on during that period. How we ended up coincidentally sitting in the audience only a few seats apart. There was an empty seat next to mine in an otherwise seemingly full house. Probably someone who was too sick to come or was held up in traffic. This was because you evidently wanted a better view of the stage and decided to utilise that empty seat. The rest is history.

Since then, the whole affair has been rather one-sided with me doing all the running. Offering you things, and having them rejected. I started this rumination by telling you, the reader, about the situation between us. And I treat you as an audience in our studio theatre, two actors on a stage looking out at a sea of faces, waiting for the final outcome of our relationship. A chamber drama, as we face each other, with one of us sometimes looking up to see you and everyone else shifting in your seats, manoeuvring for better views, coughing and, yes, rattling sweets and crinkly wrappings. It is as if it is a mutual happening, a scene of intense passion where we both try to draw everyone into us as a collective conscious towards the props and words of our almost musical ‘dying fall’, our love on the wane, played out to the weakening strains of recurrent notes.

My last note that I have now passed to you, yet another billet doux, is one that I am confident you will not read as you have not read this about us, and it is tugged from the depths of my own equivalent version of a bottomless handbag, accidentally spilling out a sudden hoard of wrappings and coloured shapes. Things I have hidden there for whatever reason. Until now. And you smiled. With an accompanying sob. 

You left in silence after loud applause. And I expect for myself another police caution, and an injunction. Or hopefully a choice of segmented tickets to another show, another life. Another empty seat due to heavy traffic. You had always ruthlessly wanted my soul as well as hard cash, if not my worthless roofless mansion. And we all know what the letters of ‘mansion’ make as an anagram, don’t we? Sweet, eh?