i totally wrote something

We lived in a tall, sweaty house on the outskirts of a grey town; we kept a cod called Moriarty in a scratched lobster tank on the kitchen windowsill, and I grew sweet peas on the balcony to disguise his wet odour. Michael periodically cried with Moriarty. He said he felt as contained and by his thoughts as Moriarty was by us and he felt like a hypocrite. The drinking left Michael blanched and his eyes reflected what fermented in his guts. When he drank, he drank cheap bourbon, and his eyes became full. Full of sadness, full of confusion, tears, hatred. When he was sober, his eyes were dry and empty as two green highball glasses, waiting to be full again. I loved Michael because despite his drinking, his was the nature of boyish wonder and innocence. His friendship with Moriarty had been the first thing that attracted me to him, because it seemed so pure. He sighed when Eileen on the floor below us would scream at her dogs and call them bastards, and I loved him for it. He didn’t love me back. He claimed he had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and was unable to truly love anything. I knew he was fond of Moriarty, but I wasn’t even sure is he was straight if he could be classified as anything at all. After all, his bleached white hair and high cheekbones were the envy of many of my female friends, and he was known to favour velvet leggings and dusty red cowboy boots. He held the same contempt for girls with too much makeup as he did for boys with hoop earrings. The closest thing to sexual attraction I ever saw him display was a fascination with a white stone statue of a water nymph in our local park. It basked in the brassy circle of a fountain, elfin limbs and pre-Raphaelite features perpetually glistening with filmy water. With the shoulder length curls and lean figure it was impossible to decide which gender it was, which in retrospect was probably what attracted Michael to it. He sat by it intently, as if waiting for it to speak to him. The way he looked at it was the way I wished he would one day look at me; with beatific fascination and lust, and all those things women want to be looked at with. I would sit by him knitting scarves or tying blankets together out of strips of old bed sheets and curtains. When angry confused teenagers stuck chewed gum to the statue’s face or spray-painted luminous symbols on it in some mysterious code, Michael would sulk the whole day. I followed him constantly, watching him and slopping milky coffee from Cuppa Joe’s down my front. Cecilia-Delia scorned our living situation when I asked her if she thought he could fall in love with me. ‘He’s above love’ she would say, ‘the only things he loves are himself and hating everybody else.’ Of course she was right, but loves makes fools of us all. I worked at a cheap DVD rental shop, and while I scanned membership cards and ate stolen chewy popcorn, I’d pretend that I’d go home to those highball glass eyes full and wet with intoxicating love for me, and that I’d feel as wonderful as the statue in the fountain.