I’d say it’s what separates us, not from the beasts, but the bestial. Creating the future, renewing a learned past - these are reasons to strive. Writing for and with love, taking and framing an image, stretching new melodic skins onto old skeletons of song… it’s how we manage to fly. It’s how we stay you and me, not us and them.
Unlike Osk, who seemed to establish his own tactical task force wherever we lived, scooping up neighbourhood feline troublemakers as sidekicks (including the memorable ginger behemoth Watson, with whom he used to scope the street from the safety of the shed roof), Jelly has the intelligence gathering skills of a sponge cake.
Anyway, somewhere in between my 'and then you should've done this' and 'why didn't you say x and y, rather than z', and 'for the love of monkeys and the general public's eyesight, you didn't honestly wear that heinous shirt did you', something he was saying about the dating extravaganza we were picking to pieces finally penetrated my cloud of self-congratulatory cumulo-waffle.
"Most people don't talk about how dates are progressing as a tender process, do they?" he asked.
"What?"
"She said I was 'part way through the tender process' and that she was judging me on my submission. I'd like to think there was irony involved, and I think at the time I may have given an admittedly weak "haha, yesssss, quite". Looking back, I'd have to conclude, computer says no on the presence of Fabulon or other aids to achieving crisply pressed linen."
Both maps and hearts are not infallible. Together they are the wretched children of a million badly plotted navigational points of relationship memory, combined with our complete inability to leave that foreign country that is the past well alone.
If someone IS just that into you, and you're not reciprocating, it is an overwhelm, not a bowling over.
You know what I mean. You sift through the pieces, trying to work out which ones fit. Sometimes you are absolutely certain that you have built an entire corner, or a piece of wall, or even managed to construct that mythical blue sky; but then you try to shove and twist two pieces together that aren't meant to be, and the whole puzzle needs to go back in the box...
And you start over again.
If you are playing by the rules, you put the pieces in upside down and go in blind.
