Moving to London was one of the best decisions of my life, and like most Londoners, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my flat should I get killed during the day. What if someone pushes me onto the underground tracks? Or if I accidentally blow up? Or if a lady with a pram studs my big toe making me fall in front of a double-decker bus? What then? After I get rushed to hospital and the sheets cover my face. After my funeral and all the cheese and pickle hedgehogs have been demolished. What will happen?
Back in my little room will be an unmade bed with my dishes still unwashed in the kitchen. The day I get shot in the corner shop (buying fags, naturally) will be laundry day with all my clothes on the floor, but I opted to watch 'Modern Family' all day in my onsie instead. I picture, quite frequently, my parents coming down to London to collect my things and clean out my room and they enter a room so disgusting that they'll actually be angry with me, even though I'll be six feet under.
Whilst my parents are discovering my huge collection of gay lifestyle magazines, and finding my giant stash of 54 condoms I took from the university nurse during freshers week. They will also probably come across my mini Spongebob Squarepants figure collection kept in a shoebox under my bed. There are about 8 mini figures that I have collected since my mid-teens. Every time I saw one of those toy vending machines that had a Spongebob inclusion, I wouldn't hesitate to waste a £2 coin, even if it was shiny. The sad thing about the collection is, that the most recent addition to the collection was only three weeks ago, when I saw a vending machine at a M4 services.
I'm not exactly sure how the Spongebob thing happend, but it has happened, and there's no going back now. I was quite a Spongebob fan as a youngster, but not in a way where I would ask my parents for paraphernalia. I guess I just like the fact that they're little and cute. Plus I always thought that if Spongebob was in office he would legalise gay marriage immediately. And thus the Spongebob shoebox came to be.
It's uncomfortable to admit, but I've been given Spongebob figures on two occasions by my past lovers. My ex-boyfriend back when I was in Wales gave me one on Valentines day. I know it seems like a pathetic gift in comparison to chocolate, but we'd only been seeing each other a week before V-Day. Then before Christmas, when someone came back to mine after a night out, he found the Spongebob collection. A week later I had a little gift from the same person, a limited edition, baywatch-esque, mini Spongebob figure. These figures are becoming a symbol that marks the beginning of a relationship. Kinda cute, right? But I was thinking last night, that the whole Spongebob thing is equally as cute as it is creepy. The Spongebob gift is the beginning of a romantic repertoire of private jokes within my relationships (which is how I think all relationships are focused on), and a chance for all my future boyfriends (every member of One Direction) to see how much of a slut I was before them. So I'm not sure what to do with the figures.
What if, these Spongebob figures, if by accident, come to represent the most overtly sentimental parts of my life? Because both relationships that had Spongebob gifts included, have ended, and ended badly. But I couldn't throw them away because I already had a collection before both relationships. They are my odd little secret, if you will.
Unfortunately the creepy overrides the sentimental and whilst writing this, I've put the Spongebob shoebox in the bin, and the bin is almost ready to go outside and into the skip. I created this ideology and now I need to uncreate it. When I fall down a montain, get trampled on by scaffolding or eaten by a Lion that escaped from London zoo, a shoebox will not represent my pathetic love life. The real proof that I was loved and did love could never fit in a converse box.
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