Oxygen (Catfish And The Bottlemen/1975)

Fliss

I'd never admit it to the girls but I missed Van dearly when he wasn't around. When we were on tour and he was half the world away cooped up in a recording studio with the lads.
It felt like part of me was half the world away too.

It made it difficult to concentrate on my present. Made it difficult to keep up conversation.

Even when I tried my hardest to take Vans advice and concentrate on the present entirely, instead of getting in my own head about where I wasnt and people i wanted in my future, I couldn't. I wasn't as good at that as he apparently was, i couldnt just not get stuck in my own head about it.
I was myself, talking to myself about myself twenty four seven, even if other people didn't really seem to notice it so much. I was constantly asking questions and constantly riddled with doubt.

Bondy had made a joke once before we went on stage, massaging our shoulders, trying to pretend we were boxers about to go into the ring, when he'd gotten to me he'd winced and cracked a grin. Said that i should go see a doctor before I broke something. Quoted Mighty Boosh, said I was Howard Moon with stage fright.

I'd just grinned tried to laugh it off but he was right. And he was right now too because even when everyone else around me was winding down, even Saff had worn a smile all week, I was still sitting upright in the back of our cold van trying to write a better song for our set.

And i was sitting rigid in the back of our cold little van struggling to write a song because I missed Van and I was beginning to realise that though he himself was easy to love, it was going to be difficult being in love with him.

Because to me he was heavensent and sweet as you like and when someone like that gets taken away from it, you feel it far more than when you break up with someone who was horrible to you.

It was harder being apart from Van than it was being a part from Danny. And for a long time I'd missed Danny with a burning agony.

I took my phone out and chewed my cheek, toying with myself. To scroll or not to scroll down my instagram or my twitter. To interect or to do as Van had said and shy away.

That had been his lasting piece of advice to me since the news of our relationship had broken out. Just don't look. Thats what hed said. Just logout your accounts and keep your head down. Forget your passwords, hed said, thats what I did, he'd said. But it wasn't all as easy as that for me.

Because I wasn't famous, my boyfriend was. And I didn't have the same excuses he did. I looked like a dickhead if I ignored messages or switched my phone off for weeks at a time. And i didnt want to ignore people or distance from people either. I just didnt want to know what the rest of the world had to say about me and the longer I left checking the more I worried and the more it ate away at me.

I watched Kitty on the phone with Benji sometimes and I wondered how she did it. How she managed not to freak out about it every other minute of the day. But i hadnt asked her about it because if i did I'd let on that I was nervous and I wasn't the nervous one.

Our band was like a little family, our friendship group was just as tight and if Saff was the mother always worrying and werriting about everyone else first, then Kitty was the wise woman full of Nan knowledge, quiet twinkling eyes. And if that was Kitty then I was the wild child. The youngest and most optimistic. I was the careless one because i was the baby of the group, I'd never really had to worry about anything before because everyone else always took care of things for me.

Jazz was the older brother whod taken me under his wing in a music tech class when our lecturer had shrugged his shoulders of me simply because I was a girl. Katie had taken me in at the back of a performance class when she'd seen me play for the first time and realised how young i was. How i was too young to really even be there.