One day we’ll …

One day we’ll what? Just disappear. Blow away.

This is what living at the coast does to you. You have all these fantasies.

 

Maybe we’re becoming each other. Exchanging molecules, or something. I’m a bit you and you’re a bit me. Wouldn’t you like that?

 

We’re exchanging molecules with everything here. With the coast. With the air. With the sky. With the sea. We’re all these things. This is a becoming-coast.

I think you’re becoming pretentious.

We’re becoming porous. The air’s entering into us, or we’re entering into the air, one or the other. We’re spreading. We’re becoming diffuse. We’re becoming subtle. We’re flowing. Is that it?

 

The coast makes you passive. You don’t resist. You just give in.

Give into what?

Give into everything. All the great movements. You let yourself be carried along. All the way to death.

Is that where it’s taking us?

That’s where everything’s taking us.

Love is stronger than death ….

Do you believe that?

Love … at the coast … I don’t believe in anything at the coast. It’s all entropy at the coast … dissolution … being stretched in every direction …

 

Tell me about something that happened to you when you were young.

When I was young …

What?

I lived an ordinary life. Compared to you. I did ordinary things. You were determined to be extraordinary. I had ordinary happinesses and God knows ordinary sadnesses. Which is to say: nothing happened. Nothing extraordinary, anyway.

I wasn’t talking about anything extraordinary.

Of course you were. You’re searching for profundity. Something all sublime and revelatory. And I’m just going to disappoint you. You’ll always come up against my ordinariness. I’m just ordinary. Just Jane mundane. Are you disappointed?

No.

What you really want is a European. An East European, probably. Full of Eastern European promise. The inheritor of decades of suffering. And black humour. The darkest humour – forged by all the oppression, or whatever. Full of Eastern misery and resilience stories …

 

You want me to be more European and mysterious. More pouty and moody. Less, like, organisational management. Laughter. You wish I were French, or something. All demanding. All petulant and impossible. Impossible to please. To woo. To get in the mood. That would be a proper challenge for you. That would engage all your intellectual resources. And your emotional ones. And your seductive ones. A European would really suit you. A

I like you the way you are.

Liar.

And who would you rather I be? Who should I be for you?

Fuck, I don’t know.