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tropane alkaloids. Alice was there too. She wasn’t human. She adjusted her face, stroked the back of my hand tenderly and reminded me what she and I really are – real-life individuals or whatever you call it, in a real-life society, with real-life desires that can’t just be sliced out of our real-life heads. You were lying under this big palm tree and waving at me the whole time. I went up to you, so utterly upset I couldn’t even speak any more, and you whispered, ‘Mifti, you’re in a strange land, you’re acting like you’ve just got off the ark and of course you’re much too thin-skinned.’
From:
Ophelia
To:
Mifti
Subject:
Go Fuck Yourself
Date:
Mon, 5 November 2007, 06:28
     
    The fact that I couldn’t remember your real name in my dream shows up my superficiality. I don’t listen properly. The fact that you’d invited so many people or women at the same time is down to my subjective perception of what kind of person you are. I seem to think you’re someone who wants to arouse attention by going to extremes, who’s egocentric and hurls their problems or innermost thoughts in people’s faces for the sake of short-term liberation, and enjoys and needs their reactions. An absolute perpetrator but a victim too, who I end up fucking. Funny, isn’t it? And I don’t even know you well enough. Last night I met you at an awards ceremony. You had your black velour jacket on and you went over to the lift when you saw me. I screamed, ‘Mifti, I hate you!’ You screamed, ‘But why?’ I screamed, ‘For you with your 24 × zoom lens on Alice, any kind of love based on mutual affection is too much to ask! Why can’t other people ever enter your fucking field of vision?’
    I started doing nothing else in maths lessons but developing the next dream to be described in spectacular detail. I failed to develop an understanding of binomial equations or the fact that you can give names to angles in trigonometric functions. All I developed was an all-encompassing love of adjectives.
From:
Ophelia
To:
Mifti
Subject:
RE: No subject
Date:
Sat, 19 January 2008, 10:28
     
    Is it possible that everything’s just chemistry or biology? Then wouldn’t the point of falling in love be only reproduction? So why do I only ever fall in love with women? But still want brutal sex with men? I keep reading this book about serial killers and I think it’s altered my sexuality. It describes everything, and there are things I’d never even imagined in all my life. Ninety per cent of murders are about sex. I think all wars are about sex. It’s a pretty selfish act somehow, the whole shagging thing. You want to be desired; you want to give the other person pleasure because what you can do for them gives you pleasure. You want to be sexy or for the other person to like you. You want an orgasm. Sometimes when I sleep with someone the sounds we make aren’t real, maybe. But maybe they are. Do we exaggerate? I think the whole animal urge thing at the beginning (when I don’t generally reflect on things) is only there to tie you to each other. Nature probably did that on purpose. Then I can do stuff legally that I’d usually only do on my own. Once I loved someone, with my every pore and dripping with kitsch, and I just switched off my brain. What a relief. Because it wasn’t just a reflex, it was suddenly imploding and going soft. So soft that all I could do was smile, because I couldn’t feel anything apart from myself melting away. And from then on it wasn’t an animal urge any more, it was divine and sexy. You ought to stop surrendering yourself to truck drivers and only let someone you love bite your neck, because with everyone else you’re probably really some kind of animal. You are anyway. And none of it matters.
    So I’m climbing some steel staircase side by side with Ophelia. Meanwhile she’s discreetly getting off on the fact of her patented existence as a photographer with her own vision and ideas and all that black and