Good Material

by Dolly Alderton

There is a jumper and a shirt hanging on the washing line in my mum’s garden that look like they’re holding hands in the breeze.

twenty-two hours ago. We agreed I would call at seven but I wait until three minutes past to make a point that she doesn’t get to call the shots any more.

I take a photo on my phone of the jumper and the shirt in case I forget what it feels like to be loved. I close the curtains and get into the bed I’ve been sleeping in since I was a little boy. And I cry and cry and cry and cry.

One of the reviews declared: “This is the most spectacularly weak hour of comedy I have ever seen at The Fringe,” which I shortened to: “the most spectacular…hour of comedy I have ever seen” for the flyers.

Poetry is the most reviled and redundant art form, everyone rolls their eyes at it and takes the piss out of it. But the second that something shit happens in our lives, it’s the first recourse we have.

There are so many hidden miniature break-ups within a big break-up.

Each taking turns to present an emotion they’ve felt and all of them putting it under the microscope for inspection, as if it were a gem with a billion faces.

I feel like I want to cry, and I am not sure why.

Did I confuse my enthusiasm for a potential new girlfriend with my enthusiasm for living on a canal boat?

“Got dumped, moved on to a canal for two nights, moved in with a ghost,” Matt says with a huge grin on his face, putting his arm around me. “There’s no one else like him.”

“I’m an artist, this is what we do. We overanalyse. We masticate our misery until it’s pulverized enough to swallow.”

Sometimes I worry I’m only going out with the hope of bumping into her.

BALD has been replaced by identical daily topless photos of myself and I don’t know which is more embarrassing.

she says, brandishing an amphibian-skinned gherkin at me.

Absolutely crazy sentence

Because the person who is in charge in a relationship is the one who loves the least.

On more than one occasion I watched him go to the gym then come back and eat a whole plain loaf of bread.