Tales From The Town #44: Modern Love

A Complete Openness Of Data

It was the tradition now. To go along with those old markers of commitment – engagement rings, joint bank accounts, borrowed clothes, shared rent – there was this opening up of your data to each other, all the things you had said and done and seen and been, all the way back to the beginning of time (2007). There was no deeper symbol of your trust, no greater intimacy in your relationship, than this limitless mingling of information.

Anna and Oya laid their phones on top of each other and between them they shared everything.

The Confluence Of Interests

Anna liked the lists best, tracking the overlap of their histories in the books they’d read, the shows they’d watched, the songs they’d listened to, the games they had played, patterns they’d knitted, topics studied, recipes cooked, links shared. She spent whole days, entire weeks comparing their pasts, revisiting barely remembered childhood obsessions, re-discovering old favourites that she never knew they both loved.

But alongside the joys there was a lingering feeling of fear, a persistent atmosphere of dread. Who knew what opinions Oya had kept hidden behind that stoic facade of hers all these years. Anna couldn’t decide which was going to be worse when it finally happened – discovering Oya hated the things Anna loved unconditionally, or discovering Oya loved those things Anna hated more than anything she could imagine.

They Had Lived Their Lives On Average 1721 Miles Apart

Oya was obsessed with the maps of their lives. At first she jumped from moment to moment – where was Anna when I was here or here or here – but then she let the whole thing play out, the two of them watching the screen together as time lapse journeys traced across the globe, twisting and turning lines recording their passage through time against the surface of the Earth, every minute of their lives mapped to the very inch of the globe.

The first line was Anna’s, then Oya’s blinked into existence moments later. These lines didn’t start when they were born, of course, but from the moments they got their first phones, half a continent away and ten months apart. The map zoomed in from the world view, until only Europe remained, Anna on the left, near the top, Oya on the right, near the bottom, the two lines still so far away it was impossible to think they could ever possibly meet.

Then a sudden jump in scale, down and down, Oya now in the city, Anna in the town, still never having met, but close. So close. There were tantalising moments here and there of near convergence, occasional day trips or holidays bringing them closer to each other, then further apart again. Teenagers now, oblivious of each other’s existence, yet here they were on tubes passing in the dark, in clubs on nearby streets, their breath catching as the map zoomed in further and further, their lines so close now they only needed to show a single street, a single room.

On opposite sides of a stadium, two rows apart in the cinema, side by side in the queue at the bar, waiting for the last bus at the same stop, their dots overlaid on each other as they sat in their seats, Oya downstairs, Anna upstairs, but for a moment looking as if they were sat in each other’s laps.

A pause, for dreams of what might have been.

Had they seen each other? Had they spoken? Were they already in each other’s phones somewhere, before they had even met? The back of a head in a photo, a voice in the background of a call, allusions to each other in social media posts, their identities lost in the noise of fifteen years of accumulated data, hidden in memories unrecoverable even by algorithm.

Then finally here we are, the lines converging towards the town, towards each other. Not just day trips and nights out bringing them coincidentally close any more, but a more permanent swirling in together, getting closer in steps as the choices of their lives draw them inexorably towards each other. The same town, the same places, the same friends. The same house, the same room. The same bed. Every moment of their lives leading them here, to each other, to this moment, this very second, the lines as close now as they could possibly be.

And on the screen things slow, seem to stop. From here on out, those lines would have to move in real time. They had lived their lives on average 1721 miles apart. How long would it take them, Oya wondered, to get that down to zero.

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Notes:

1. Written between June 5th and June 7th, 2021
2. Although it’s based on a story I started but never finished
3. And also lost entirely at some point
4. From 10 or 15 years ago or something
5. Back when this might have been science fiction
6. Rather than science supposition

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Historical Love Story

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Notes:

1. Made on March 3rd, 2021
2. Based on a comic I’d sketched in a notebook I found the other day
3. Where two penguins stared impassively at each
4. With this cartoons text written below
5. I didn’t remember writing it at all
6. And still don’t
7. So I hope it was mine in the first place
8. Rather than being stolen inexplicably from someone else

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Tale #138: A Mother’s Love

My mother always said, “Well, you can’t complain.” But it turns out you can. You can.

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Notes:

1. Written in February, 2020

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Tale #137: The Snow Daughter, or The Voice Beneath The Snow

The whispers come up from beneath our feet, every step another sigh, every sigh a plea, a cry. But the mistake would be to listen, to stop, to try and find the source. For the voice is a trap, to catch the caring. To steal that final flicker of warmth from your trembling desperate heart, to turn your soul to ice.

Better instead to ignore that snow siren’s cry. Better instead to let your own heart turn to stone.

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Notes:

1. Written on April 1st, 2019
2. See not only Sirens, obviously, but also the Yuki-onna.

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Tale #76: Of Wolves And Women

I heard the following tale from both my aunts when I was a child, a year or so apart.

I’m not sure if you’re supposed to think of your aunts this way, but I always did, when I was young – one of them was from within the family (my mother’s sister), the other from without (my dad’s brother’s wife). That one of them was a real aunt, the other merely playing one.

Nowadays, I’m not sure what to think.

Anyway, they both told this story slightly differently – different setting, different details, different phrases, different folksy claims of authenticity – but beyond that, they were the same tale, in all the ways that mattered.

The same body clothed in different clothes.

The story went like this.

A long time ago in a land far away (or, in the other telling, in the town where I grew up), there lived a princess (or a girl, just like you or me) in a castle (or a house). She had no brothers (nor any sisters) and her parents were too busy with the affairs of state (or, quite simply, too dead) to pay her any mind. So the girl/princess would wander the halls of her castle (or the streets of her town) all on her own, searching, always, for something, some sign, some proof that she was loved (or had been loved).

One day a woman came to see the princess at court (or, more simply, knocked on her front door) and said, “I’m your aunt, and I love you as if you were my one and only child.” And the woman stayed with her for the rest of the year, accompanying her on her walks, reading her stories before bed, helping her get dressed in the morning, and always, always, treating the lonely girl with love and tenderness and the utmost care.

On the princess’s 8th birthday (or the girl’s 9th), the aunt said, “I must return to the land where I live. Come with me, little girl, and leave this sadness (and loneliness) behind. Be free of your neglect, and stay by my side.”

And it was here that the tales diverged.

The tales ended very differently, and these were differences that were genuine rather than merely cosmetic. Not different hats so much as entirely different faces. A wolf revealed beneath the mirrored kindnesses of my aunts’ smiles.

In the first, the princess goes with her aunt. But when she arrives in the distant land her aunt called home, the aunt’s demeanour changed. “Obey me, now-child-of-mine, and do as I say. Serve me as a servant and a slave, from dawn until dusk, else I’ll eat you up for my dinner and that will be that.”

So the girl lived in fear, for the rest of her days. And no-one came to save her, for none knew where she had gone.

The moral of this tale as I perceived it then, whether or not that was what was intended: quit your whining, accept your place, for there’s a world out there worse than whatever you hate about home.

The second telling, the one I preferred, the orphan girl again goes with her aunt. She leaves behind her empty house, her lonely town, and walks with her aunt across the country.

Each time the girl feels discomfort, her aunt moves to help. The sun shines too brightly, so she gives the girl her wide-brimmed hat. At night it is too cold, so she gives the girl her coat. To stop the girl being pricked by thorns as they make their way through the woods, she gives the girl her gloves. When the girl loses her shoes in the mud of the brook, she gives the girl her boots.

Finally, the girl can walk no more and collapses to the ground. The aunt removes her clothes, takes off her mask, gets down on all fours, and leans over the girl, her jaw wide, her teeth sharp, her tongue as red as blood. And in her lupine voice, she says, “I’m not your aunt, I never was. I came to you because you were alone and unprotected.”

The mouth gets closer, opens wider. The girl waits for the snap of the jaw, the rasp of the tongue, the bite of the teeth, the pain that will surely come as she’s gobbled up and eaten whole.

But instead, the wolf says, ”I will carry you the rest of the way, my child.”

And with a deft flick of her head she flips the girl into the air and onto her back, and together they travel over the hills, into the woods, far, far away, living happily together ever after.

It was a fairy tale, after all.

The moral of this one: there is kindness in strangers, there is love out there if you will let yourself look.

After I heard this second telling, I wondered which of my aunts was the woman, which the wolf. Always, from then on, I’d be looking, checking, staring, hoping to see some slip of the mask, whether real or metaphorical, to catch the truth of the smile, see a glimpse of the real teeth beneath the false.

To see if their kindness masked cruelty, or if it hid an even deeper kindness, hid love without want, without need, without end.

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Notes:

1. Written in June 2018
2. There was a documentary about Angela Carter on BBC Two with the same title as this
3. Which was first shown in August 2018
4. My use of the same title is purely coincidental
5. But nicely serendipitous

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