If you believe anything Pete Doherty had to say in 2007, after what one can imagine was a hell of a drug-fueled blowout, Kate Moss sliced open her bony finger and scribbled six words across her lovers bedroom wall.
“You’re in my veins, you fuck.”
Some (most should, actually) will write this off as junkie prose. The cocaine-brain ramblings of a cracked bride to her crackhead lover. The reddest of flags. A literal bloody mess.
Then there angels like Kate and cursed men like Pete whose brain chemistry is…special. But fried. Who only respond to stimuli that is all sorts of wrong. Men and women who walk among you yet are not rooted here on earth, but somewhere else entirely. Whirling about with Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s lustful second circle of hell, probably. An infected breed who don’t care to see the iceberg of mania and heartache straight ahead. A sick bunch who read “you’re in my veins, you fuck” and hear a love song.
The trouble with being a romantic, besides the obvious, can be summed up in a few words- in our search for la dolce vita, the lot of us have lost the fucking plot. The deluded dreamer, the romantic, confuses their otherworldly desires with earthly needs and goes about life suffering from lack of beauty like others suffer from lack of bread. The romantic malady is to yearn for the moon as if it could one day be ours. We mistake her polite reminders that she is not for the taking as a challenge. As flirtation. As playing hard to get.
And if you think the romantics have it bad, those well-meaning but ill-fated enough who come along for the ride have it worse. Show me a romantic and I’ll show you a dozen winded former lovers who couldn’t keep up. An asylum full of once rational men and women driven to madness trying to make sense of our Dionysian delusions. Lovers who don’t speak the Romance languages well enough to translate the Times New Roman quod me nutrit me destruit1 warning tattooed across our chest.
The trouble with romantics and those who love them, you see, is neither wants to admit that an eternity of longing can only lead to eternity of leaving.
The trouble with romantics is simple - the rest of the world isn’t.
"I love her with all my heart. I like the way she walks and talks. I love her bones. I love her brain. Kate has broken my heart. There’s been this lockdown and I can’t get hold of her. This is the only way I can get through. I need her to know that she’s out of her fucking mind. Kate, if you love me then realize I don’t want any other girl. Do I still love her? Don’t ask me that question. Why do you think I’m here today talking to you? I’m here to tell her that I love her. Fucking hell man, why does she read the Daily Mirror, anyway? - Pete Doherty to the Daily Mirror, 2007
Latin for “what nourishes me destroys me”
The brutal truth of being what we are here
“An infected breed who don’t care to see the iceberg of mania and heartache straight ahead. A sick bunch who read “you’re in my veins, you fuck” and hear a love song.”
Jfc this is good shit. And yes…to me, that sentence is a love song.