Jeremy

This skin and all its chromatic hues

I know a guy at university and he has this specific word he uses sometimes. It’s a word that’s special because it encapsulates the affliction we’ve both lived with since … since, well, always. We say it to each other and laugh, knowing it’s our own in-joke, a little jibe we can throw out into the air because the joke’s entirely centred on us. When we say it, we’re laughing at ourselves. At our cells.

The term is beaming. Going red. Blushing. Having skin that at the slightest prickle of attention wants to announce itself to the room and all its occupants, a siren stuck to your face to alert all to your presence and make them turn your way, to stare or laugh or, in the very worst cases—those situations where you simply want to fold yourself up like a piece of origami, folding and folding until you no longer exist—shout: “LOOK AT HIM! HE’S GONE RED!”

Jerks. They don’t understand. They don’t know what it’s like to have cells that respond in such uncontrollable ways. I bet the cells think its useful. I bet they think it's some kind of evolutionary advantage or meaningful response, endowed only upon the worthy and sought to be enriched into the populace through procreation. Let me tell you something, Darwin: it isn't. It’s the opposite of that. It's an affliction.

At least, that’s how it’s always felt.

I guess it's happened to everyone in their childhood at some point, but for some of us, the unfortunate few, it's here for life. Glued in. Encoded. There's probably a gene for it but no one's ever looked, or if they have, I've never read about it. BEAM, chromosome 4, locus q31. I don't know if that’s how you write genes; genetics was too hard for me and I bailed on the subject after just four weeks, but I'm sure it's there in my DNA, somewhere. And of course it's the worst with girls. It's like their eyes emit a certain kind of photon and the special receptors—the ones that are expressed at high levels on the surface of your skin—detect and respond to the photon’s precise wavelength, triggering this pointless cascade that causes you to blush.

What I'm trying to say is, it's always at the worst moments. It's during the round table introduction in a room of people who sit there wondering why this guy—you—is embarrassed to say his own name or mention what he last ate for dinner or, god forbid, describe what he did at the weekend. What a joke he (you) is. Or it’s the kind of thing that’ll occur out of nowhere, on the train when someone asks you to move out of the way and your skin, blessed with its own accursed sentience, becomes aware the entire carriage is staring at you and the incompetent agility of your own body. Or it’s in the cafe where you have to say your name to the barista and the barista didn't hear and so you have to repeat yourself and somehow that mere act, the slight elevation of volume of speaking, sets off this ridiculous heightened awareness, a convoluted oh and now the whole room knows my name, and they’re all peering at you with more intensity than they had previously and why oh why should that matter but it does and it's too late you're going red you’re beaming you've got nowhere to turn or hide.

Idiot.

You can go months without a single beam, and then—hah!—there it is, I got you, your face screams, mocking you from within. You thought you’d forgotten about it. You thought you’d grown up enough, because seriously, isn’t this just something for when you’re thirteen? No. No, it’s not. It can happen at any moment. At any moment! At any moment like when the most perfect girl you've ever seen walks through the doors of the aquarium where you've spent the summer earning the small pittance you'll put towards your student debt, earnings so small you may as well have not worked at all (but it’s character building, your father says, so you’ve done it anyway, even though you spend your lunches staring at the fish and thinking how good they’ve got it having no clue at all about life and all its intricate misery), and you try to prevent the beam by talking first, only you’re a fool and incapable of sensible words and the words fail and she turns to you but by then it’s too late, your face could probably power a small city.

She’s a girl sitting there with a book and for some reason she looks like she just wants to be on her own and do her own thing and she has a tattoo on her wrist that pokes out of her coat sleeve when she plays with her hair and all you want is to peel back her sleeve and ask her what it is that she’s engraved there in ink. My god she’s beautiful. She’s beautiful and you’ll never see her again and you’re just going to let her drift away, because that’s what you always do.

So yeah, this is all about that.

To be continued…

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Hi. Hello. All that stuff.

This is a continuation from last week’s post (here), except now we’re in Jeremy’s point of view. I want to explore flip-flopping between specific points of view¹ in overlapping scenes. As I write, this wants to expand and be larger (considerably larger), so I’m running with it, letting it take me off its original course. After all, isn’t that what this space here is for?

P.S. thanks Chris. You know what for.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

1. One of the reasons I love A Song of Ice and Fire so much is the chapter headers informing you whose point of view you’re about to read. The close third person viewpoint Martin writes in creates such lovely immersion, restriction and tension. I feel the same with Murakami’s 1Q84. Here I want to be exploring almost overlapping scenes but from two (first-person) points of view. That’s the intention, anyway. I don’t know if these rambling footnotes of exploration ruin anything, but I assume only the curious scroll down here anyway. Hello, The Curious.