Middle row, centre stage. Double feature at Nova, Breathless and Contempt. A middle seat too; the girls have left it for me because I was late. Someone who knows someone else's boyfriend, the man sitting directly in front of my seat, has the stupidly largest head I've ever seen, obscuring the screen from me, and I resign just not to bother trying to read subtitles anymore. Bridget Bardot's behind is flickering on the screen. She asks her lover, Paul: 

‍

“See my feet in the mirror?” 

“Think they’re pretty?” 

“Very.” 

“You like my ankles?” 

“And my knees, too?” 

“I really like your knees.” 

“And my thighs?” 

“Your thighs, too.” 

“See my behind in the mirror?” 

“Do you think I have a cute ass?” 

“Really.” 

“Shall I get on my knees?” 

“No need to.” 

“And my breasts. You like them?” 

“Yes, tremendously.”

‍

The camera slowly tapers down her legs. The light changes from a warm yellow to blue, going against the ruched toile de métis bedding, cigarettes and the tousled choucroute of hair that make up the opening scene. The screen shifts again, the head of a Greek bust, Apollo, floating. Brief talks of The Odyssey can be heard. I lift my half-mauled Milo choc-top cone to the screen to make an illusion that the bust's head is just floating on a cone. Bust head, cone-bodied. 

‍

The smell of popcorn and Malie's sweet perfume is distracting me, and I find myself just staring at the whorl of black hair in Bardot's lover's head, thinking about everything else other than the rather repetitive dialogue, with the words "Capri" and "Prokosch" intermittently entering my field of sound. 

‍

I start rubbing my split thumb cuticles against the perimeter of my top and bottom lip, a habit I've had since I was a child, creating a beautiful stinging sensation. This is called the vermilion border, which swells and reddens them. I begin to click my nails too, and rub my tongue against my back left molar, so violently that it leaves me with ulcers on the tip of my tongue when I do it. I let my ballet flat flop off my foot, lackadaisically, periodically flexing my foot inward to suction it back onto my sole with a sharp release of air. Bright fuchsia, dirty things. When I peed in a bush yesterday, it got on the right shoe. My wavering interest in the films makes me feel like a philistine, and I wouldn't dare lean over to Sabine and say I’m bored or hungry. 

‍

But my mind is elsewhere, up, up, and drifting away, sifting through images of past and present, from minutes ago to years ago, like a kaleidoscope as I twist its barrel. I let my eyes slacken, splitting the image before me, the screen doubling as though each figure were shadowed by a twin. 

‍

The theatre begins to reorganise itself under my gaze: rows of velvet seats tessellate into plush rows of repeating teeth. Popcorn gathers in rounded clusters, each kernel pressing into the next until they resemble a thousand unfolding flowers. A dress swells and releases, a leaf trembles in place. This double visage dissolves the world into pattern and moors into a rhythm of clarity. 

‍

I am born back into the world as fast as I left it. The sounds of Lygon Street and the shopfront lights are jarring. I lift my hand to my face and put heels to concrete, tap, tap, tap. I find myself running with an outturned gait à la ballerina. Pushing against the swell outside Brunetti’s, where bodies form a human wall, I dodge teenage couples making out and Italian families and girls I know peripherally but really don't want to say hi, blah blah blah right now. 

‍

Wait… I can loosen my focus again. I let my eyes slip, let the image double, anddd, the patterns returning, a blanket just got thrown over everything but me. 

‍

I reach the door and slam it behind me. Outside, a man’s voice reverberates through a microphone somewhere in the background, butchering completely Letters to Cleo’s 1999 one-time wonder hit: 

‍

‘Cruel to be kind, it's a very good sign 

Cruel to be kind means that I love you, babyyyyy 

You’ve gotta be cruel to be kind’

‍