Not ever & Where were you when Zayn left One Direction by Jonno Revanche
Not ever
To yearn for so long, here free-falling, blindsided by anticipation from the very second you’re born…….sitting one side of toyota windows with greatness blurring, on the other like plainsongs…..I wonder how it moves, the tolls of many manic years of youth like this. into futurity, your eyes glint at night. Idealising, glancing across from situational tenures, meadows, and staring away these distances, living politely beyond confines, we glow. “I’m just a small-town girl with a giant heart, looking for love in the big city.” I’m smallness imagining largeness, a blip - a figure on the screen of fidelity, giddily an adult, post-teen. One anagram happening in hyperglycemic mindsets, many contained personalities vying for validation. A cartography of everything, practicing juvenility discreetly. That cannot substitute connection - the sublime is an accessory to the finale, in real-time. This is a substitution. I look up absolution in the dictionary. I turn away from individuality. There’s been so much thankless waiting, and then an occasional flash of brilliance. [loud ariana Grande voice] “Here is my heart, and here is a trap beat behind it.” This acknowledgement of terror and possibility happens through make believe, mapping, indeterminable knowing. I’ve been drawing myself into existence since I knew all the right ways to spool. You cannot be entirely chemical, brief interlude between delirium you, a cultural fangirl, seeing possibility beyond what solidifies - creating these cold circumstances of telling, of exacting; capsules of full day-dreaming, marrow, belonging and intestinal twisting. Much more than just a stand-in person, this takes the cake: the real thing, with real multitudes. I imagine all my dead selves taking place in ceremony; I’m digesting them whole for the sake of this prose. I don’t love anyone, only the simulation of all the people I’ve ever wanted to be. That’s such an eternal horizon! in time all reason creeps right up to you point of your station. Some say there is a point in stillness where the caterpillar is mostly liquid. Mush. Waiting for mania to possess you is quite the commitment when it feels like evolution - to make buoyancy above materialism, like how one experiences drugs - floating above your body, bearing witness to yourself and inner monologue, touching someone in temporary time or tenderly existing amongst silence with a friend, tight diamonds. Nathaniel Branden wrote that “there is life beyond this neighbourhood.” All of these sprints were never taken for granted in the wider personal chaos. They rise up like a violently agitated bottle of Sprite, that shaking making way for more life, from foreplay. They emulsify (or do they implode) and then the collapse is seen flying, lets note: how showers of it blot the sky and pass high hanging telephone wires. Perhaps it's my condition - it took time to get limber - culminations of illness, quick looks, its residue, echoes of a trauma from being sworn in, dissipated hope, blows on soft tissue, blackouts observed from a different periphery collapsing in on themselves. But it's truly a delightful spin. It’s enough to be content with the sickly excitement. These make-believes pinprick on every surface of my leather to take me behind the real, enticing me in its exquisitely painful mainstay to move beyond all I have been promised, that even when i reach caffeine arcadia I’m still reticent. Absorbed.
Where were you when Zayn left One Direction
……..it is the following date: [redacted]
some might say…the
saddest day in history
together the fangirl tears could create
a Tolkienesque river…..such turbulence
could cause flood services to issue a
statewide warning!
the boys pushed up against walls, as they
often are, pretending they don’t want to be
pretty girls, slate brick patterns torn from ruthless silence
and teenagers running short of breath,
a type of hyperventilating akin to ketamine - now,
emotions hit high peaks
on cursive buses home
it feels like…….
the world has no more playgrounds,
no joy to be appropriately spoken
now that the most beautiful boy in the world (arguably!)
has died (........metaphorically)
and then it’s like -
the worst has yet to come,
because they haven’t even seen the
most recent poorly worded outburst from his twitter account….
of which there are many…….
or….something to that effect
i hear whispers! And see overblown headlines!
hyper-colours transposed on taught public screens!
well-lit textualities swerve in, out, against themselves most
remarking: this is very bad and perhaps even……..the most bad
it rains hellishly when I first hear the news,
wrapped up in 6 feet worth of scarf and
pattern and drowning in everyone’s hormonal opinions,
i prop up metaphysical umbrellas, notice
a change in civic energy, people move in different
ways than before -
are they moving in a way that suggests
culminated sexual frustration? well, finally, some relatable content
media outlets buzz with misinformation, the
faces of conventionally attractive boys are everywhere -
they’re a symbol of something, but I don’t know what,
but it is not often that eye candy is so deliciously available
and now sadly……there is one less of them to look at………..
…………..[bangs gong]
i remember when I lost a friend and it felt
like a part of me
was openly hemorrhaging……..
now the whole world echoes
time turned, angularly, to me too.
suddenly I grip the passenger bar, gripping
on deftly to old malaise
not to be tooooooo misty-eyed……...but……..if
someone feels sadness about someone they don’t know
i wonder if it is a speed run
for the real thing -
[elle woods voice] any good psychologist will tell you feelings are not always truths
but signs can cut right through you, when not promptly avoided….
i reach the city on the transport
i’ve passed dappled houses and notice
strangers moving in and out of them,
slower than they have before
he utters his testimony on the television
with….....particularly well styled hair (David Beckham is shaking)
but his emotions are untenable
they ask him:
“were you sad?”
but when he opens his mouth
there is only enough space for stale air
he must have felt such an ultimatum in his heart
being sublimated within the echoes of everyone else :<
it is not folly when someone means
maps, or telegraphs, or passports -
set-ups of a handsome side profile,
on the walls of hairdresser booths
Executive Producers
Daniel Henson
Sarah Hunt
Sue White
