Everything You've Come To Regret

47 | ice cream at night

August 14, 2018

Stadiums cry
Go on wait until your band gets back together
Don't you think it's probably time you sit
and write your fans an apology letter

⋆ ˚ ° ° ˚⋆

Bent at the waist, hands on my knees, I proudly watched the small model of our hotel on the moon.

Two years ago, in Havana, it hadn't even crossed my mind that Alex would seriously get inspired by it and revolve the next album of the Arctic Monkeys around some pieces of cardboard. I remembered our last night there vividly: both of us sitting cross-legged on the floor, grabbing snacks as we reached for the glue, muttering curses as the cardboard ripped up or fell off. He had a cigarette while I explained what I recalled about NASA's first landing on what they had called the Sea of Tranquillity. I also explained tiny details which had struck me from the documentary I'd watched beneath the covers on a rainy day. My words had been confusing and messy, but Alex did not stop listening once.

Then, after two or three hours of brainstorming, we had built the ten floors, both proud of how clean it looked. The cheap scissors I had used had made my fingers sore. I asked Alex if he liked the idea, our eyes on the model, and after a long pause, he said he was in complete love with the concept. He had said it so sincerely, with his focused expression that made me so excited.

That night, we built something so insignificant and yet so big, unaware that it would change it all. We went back to London together, and we never left each other anymore. Alex built a better and bigger model, both of them displayed in our house like trophies.

And here I was now, exhausted after travelling to Budapest by myself. I'd waited for Alex for a hundred and eight days, at home in LA. He just didn't know that I was here yet, so ready to take part in the Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino tour. Still no hotel on the moon, but just as much amazement on the vision.

While waiting in the band's huge dressing room, I reminisced about the past two years together. Alex and I officially moved into his American house, threw a small house-warming party with our friends, and found out the ups and downs of owning a house together–although it took some months to make the house formally mine in the papers too. We had fights about the mess I made and the dirty dishes, but never went to bed without a kiss. Even when it took a superhuman force to put our pride aside for a second, and it was more of a forced peck on the lips. We dedicated our time to loving and caring about each other, and none of us would dare to threaten it over something meaningless.

We had a big bathroom I spent too much time in, a kitchen I couldn't leave either and a garden the size of my former flat in London (which Kat was now renting with her girlfriend). I'd tried growing out flowers, but it didn't seem to work out just yet. There were two bedrooms, ours and a smaller one that I slept in when I had bad days. Alex had also converted a room he had never used into a library/office, my favourite room. Well, every room was my favourite, really. I was cross after he set up his punching bag there, next to my history books. So he moved it outside instead, next to the swimming pool.

I'd spent days in the water the first summer. It wasn't something you usually had when you grew up near Manchester, so I enjoyed the most of it. I'd thought about my parents more, wishing they could come. And they did come over last year for a week. Their first travel outside the country.

As for Alex, the first months had never been busier. First with the release of Everything You've Come To Expect, and then with the tour that followed. I'd listened to the record in the living room, on our settee. It had taken me at least an hour to get a word out of my mouth. Alex and Miles were geniuses, and I was so proud to be a tiny part of it. Especially when it came to the direct references to me and the beginning of our (quite unhealthy) relationship.