aorta a last-min val:day zine by mou
Note from mou. August 2016. This was intended as a last minute zine for Valentines Day about half a year ago. As usual, I didn’t get around to collecting and formatting and editing and writing more and finishing it. Sorry. All poems etc. were written before the 14th, hence relative thinness. Some are quite old. I think artistic license has been used. If not, assume melodrama.
all content mine unless otherwise stated
 
 
Before I saw love stories become stories about love
hope
Untitled, 27th October 2015, 2.28am The evening of the day I lost my virginity A friend asked the group
 
What is love? And my girl said Love is beauty And my love said Love is when absence makes the heart grow fonder And his love said Love is being shat on.
It just hit me. The reason why it hurts, and why I keep saying I still care, and why I can’t imagine not caring, is because I fell, completely and utterly. I fell for your grin and the twinkle in your eyes, the squint they take on when you laugh and the creases that frame them when you smile. My heart grew attached to the pitch of your voice, its highs and lows, its rhythm. I can’t forget the way you questioned things, negated things, provoked things. Your flaws became your vulnerabilities and I accepted them one by one, learning you, understanding you. You hurt me but left me without the power to hurt you.
demons i saw him in your fingertips as they brushed against my thighs i saw him on my neck as you whispered in my ear things for only me to hear things that made me think it was all in my head i saw the devil in him becoming the devil in you chasing the devil in me 
vindictive its not regret its not anger i want you back but i dont want you. i want you to be happy but i want me to be happy, more i want you to know the pain i felt for days upon days 
Showers It’s 2015. I’m 3 months shy of adulthood and just over a week on from losing the old v-card. I’m sitting in the shower (yes, sitting, that’s how it works in my house) and as I’m holding the shower-head above me I feel mentally freed. I feel emotionally liberated from all friends and all male friends. And as I sit there, I realise that this is not the first time water running over the curves of my naked body has helped me move on from a crush or a fling or a boy. Earlier that morning I’d been hopelessly, half-ironically scrolling through wiki-support pages, my body folded up in a foetal position under my duvet with my phone screen right up against my nose, trying desperately to absorb ridiculous ‘tips and tricks’ on how to get over someone. By this point in my adolescence, I would say I’ve had three main relationship-typethings. The first was my month-long boyfriend at age 15, who I let finger me in public parks and private gardens and repeatedly ask my best friend if I was ready to give him head until I realised that it was pretty ridiculous and finally let him go. The second was a horrible mistake. I made out with a good guy friend at 4am on a London scale - blisteringly hot summer night whilst listening to Simon & Garfunkel on vinyl. I lived out the rest of the holiday hopelessly hung up on him, or maybe, in retrospect, in love with the romanticised notion the thought of our entwined bodies had left me - though I was 100% aware of his infatuation with his ex-girlfriend. The last, or latest I suppose, was a 4 month fling with what quickly became a close friend through a series of spontaneous hook-ups and flirty text messages (he was the kind who idolised total detachment; something I told myself I was achieving though it was more an attempt to ignore his frequent absence that then left me regularly miserable). I remember each shower so clearly. For the first boyfriend it was a Saturday morning. We’d broken up on a Friday afternoon, casually strolling the streets that run parallel to my school at just after four pm and then awkwardly sitting through a dinner party side by side. The next day, I sat in the bathtub, the shower head resting on my knees, getting ready for a ‘lets-meet-new-people-and-get-yousomeone-else’ appointment I’d had scheduled for me by my best friend. My mother came in and asked me what my plans were for the day. Facing the wet white tiles I told her I was ‘going out to surround myself with my friends because that’s all I need right now, it’s all I can handle, I need it so badly, my heart is broken, etc.’ And the truth is, I got out that shower, got to know a small cluster of lanky prepubescents gathering in Wimbledon Park, and got myself a (shocker of a) movie date for the following Wednesday. We watched ‘Now You See Me’. It was awful, but I was happy. Let’s call the second boy Thomas. Thomas took time. I spent endless evenings, following my initial night with him, sitting in his kitchen, staring him down, wishing he would make a move like that first night. And I knew, as his friend, he never would. Night after night I tortured myself with his platonic company. I exhausted
myself going to his house after work each evening and waiting. A month or so later, finally abroad, he got with a friend I had introduced him to. To prevent any embarrassing outbursts of emotion, I shut myself in the bathroom. I used fancy french shower gel and avocado oil shampoo and scrubbed a couple layers off my skin. I felt closure. I felt fine. I never thought of him confessing his love for me over a long distance phone call again. Whatever I felt for Thomas seeped out and sunk into the drain. But this last boy. Where do I begin with this last boy? Well, the shower didn’t work. I’ve had several. I started writing this at eleven this morning, I’m finishing this last part now at 18:59. And although I may have felt a-okay this morning, I now do not. He’s a large part of my life - not because he was my first; virginity, to me, is a social construct. No boy’s dick is important enough to change my life or the way I think. Maybe because he was my vent for 3 months. Maybe because I know I won’t stop going back, at least for a while. He’s leaving in just over a month. He’s fulfilling dreams and going to art school and I’m staying here, home. Left behind and it feels ridiculous to say because it’s not as if it’s the time for me to go anywhere anyway. In some strange part of my mind, he’ll always be the right guy who came in at the wrong time - I’m certainly not a believer in serious adolescent relationships and he’s finally learning (and enjoying the fact) that sex at 17 can mean nothing. If we’d met in a different context, a different storyboard, in a far away future where I’m a decade older and not as cynical as I have been condemned to be, then he would be the only and I would not let him escape because we laugh a lot when we’re naked and I think that’s a sign. I think, when the only thing stopping us is the unstoppable curse we call time, he won’t come out in a single rinse. So for now, I’ll keep showering until he washes out. Sad Shower in New York Tracey Emin
When Black and White are colours and not races, people will still fall in love and discriminate between partners and feel sad and bad and need art that breaks your heart and takes you to those places where pain becomes beauty. From ‘The Next Generation’ by Marlene Dumas