I was on London’s answer to a beach, faux-mudlarking with a close friend, when my phone accidentally called my now 49-year-old ex-boyfriend. I screamed, she screamed, we both stare at the post-cancelled red name in my recents.
“What is it!” she exclaims.
“It fucking called my ex-boyfriend! I fucking called him!” I shout, as I panic quit every app in my phone. “The pandemic one. The forty-nine-year-old-lives-with-his-mum-despised-me-in-every-single-way-one, that guy!”
She looks confused so I continue to clarify, “…the first edition copy of Lolita for Christmas 2019… him!”
“Christ, Harriet”, speaks close friend.
“I know! I know! Do you think he’ll see it?”
“No, not that— the sound of him”
Oh yeah. The sound of him.
The embodiment of self-loathing in the skin of a manipulative mummy’s boy. A fever dream relationship I’d come to recognise as a staple of most people’s early twenties.
The concern on my friend’s beautiful face transports me back to lockdown with him: He tells me to lose weight before I turn thirty otherwise my body will forget how. He chastises me for talking too much when he’s Zooming his Ibiza friends, and for not talking enough to his mum over dinner. He shouts at me for having my whole life ahead of me, and wasting it with him in Leeds. A hellhole I would wish upon no one. (The relationship, not specifically Leeds). It was the closest I’ve ever been to disappearing completely, and the furthest I’ll ever be from love.
I needed that man like I needed four bits of broken crockery, a single bathroom tile, a fossilised poo, and a green blob. But boy oh boy, did I want him.
As I consider skimming my phone across the brown froth of the Thames, it dawns on me that Mudlarking is undeniably not a needer’s game, but a wanter’s one.
Moments later, with my lopsided pocket-full-of-want dragging me down the steps of the tube, I realise I’ve been putting off the homework my therapist gave me for over a month now.
“Why don’t the committee of ‘need’ and ‘want’ sit down sometime, and see what they have in common?”, my therapist poses.
He knows I like it when he speaks in committees because I once told him there’s a boardroom in my head. A sort of 1960’s Madmen oval of suits, debating my next move. A portrait of the subject of discussion hangs above the mahogany altar: an eBay knick-knack I shouldn’t be bidding on, a holiday I don’t have time for, or the truest test of the assembled internal jury: a man.
(This is quite literally exactly how decisions are made in my head and I’m continually shocked to hear it’s not the same for everyone).
“Because—” I begin. “Because that’s the whole thing, isn’t it? I don’t know what I need”. I know he knows this already. It’s times like these when I’m almost certain he has a humiliation kink.
“Okay, how about this: some homework. Write a list of the things you want, and the things you usually get. And from there, we’ll figure out what it is you need”.
I don’t know why I’m so hesitant to do this, I think, as I spin the fossilised poo between my finger and thumb. Is it a fear that I’ll be confronted with the task of removing want from my life? Or that I’ll realise that what I’m pining for isn’t what I necessarily need?
I start with the basics:
I want to not write this list.
I would usually get the urge to not write this list.
Okay, well that wasn’t so bad. I continue:
I want to get off the Victoria line.
I would usually get off the Victoria line.
Well, I suppose I can do both.
Homeward bound, I decide to lock myself away over the bank-holiday weekend, and speak to no one about anything, until this list is complete. Four Creme Eggs, a micro-dose of mushrooms, and an Amaretto sour later, and I have the foundation of a brief for my life.
Drumroll please.
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