Blue Dress Hot Mess

Written in the bathroom of a central London flat on Friday 6th December, at precisely 11:52 pm.

I was chatted up last night by a man who claimed to be a writer, and, to prove it, rapped to me. His eyes were squinted with drink, but that didn’t really matter because you couldn’t see them when his lips were pressed close to my ear in a crowded room, and he was making the crude claims all rappers make about the simultaneously astounding beauty of “his gurl” (in this case, me) and the miserable condition of humanity (which he intended to solve by “a little love, y’all”. Oddly familiar).

Profile: An actor, from Mexico, who spoke Spanish (presumably well) and French (definitely badly) and told me I was beautiful and took to calling me “ma belle”. I am not his “belle”. Never was. Never shall be. Think I gave him my number. (Mistake: never give a random wannabe actor who is surely already in his late twenties your number after a third of a bottle of white wine, a bowl of Ramen noodles, a mulled wine (my first of the Season – joy), and a bizarre mixture of herbal-flavoured Gin and Soda). Luckily, I sincerely doubt he will ever text, nor recall when he squints through his little eyes and growing hangover who “Cressy” is in his phone.

So he said I was beautiful. This is interesting, because not four hours earlier I had been driving to the station singing Ed Sheeran’s Christmas song and wanting someone to think I was beautiful. Somehow the words seem less meaningful when falling from the lips of a drunk man with bad teeth. He asked to kiss me. I said no. (Not a mistake: like I say, his teeth were BAD).

We danced with his hand around my waist to All I Want for Christmas is You (not true), and Mr Brightside (retch). I made an excuse and went to the loo. My friend Amy and I “went out for some air”. She had been talking to an actor, too. Her actor was better looking, but less persistent, or potentially entirely uninterested. My actor said he had been an extra in Spider-Man. Her actor said he had been an extra in Harry Potter, which is much cooler, but he looked tired of life already. I wondered dimly in the darkness of the bar just how many times the two of them had been through this rigmarole before, with another pair of young girls, on another Friday night, in another back-room of another pub.

We had a wonderful night. I felt entirely whole, and wholly empty. It was a good feeling. On the day that would have been me and my ex’s 3 year anniversary, it seems stupid to grieve a life no one is living. It wouldn’t have been our anniversary, because it’s not. We broke up. Nearly a year ago. Get over it. But if I could go back three years, would I say yes? Would I say yes, I would be his girlfriend; yes, I would love him; yes, he could treat me the way he did and yes, I would put myself through it, knowingly, all over again? I told Amy I’d say no. I told her, in the rain walking back to board the Victoria Line Southbound from Finsbury Park tube, that it is not better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all.

I think I lied. But isn’t it time, now, to be over it? Isn’t it time, now, to want to kiss the little man with an earring who makes up a rap for me and tells me I have beautiful eyes in the dark mist of a pub in North London on a Friday night in early December? When will I be ready to say yes to him, and no to the memory of the one who came before?

Maybe it would help if the next one has better teeth. And perhaps I’ll take a singer over a rapper. But I guess a girl shouldn’t be so picky.