It all always starts with I – Rudy Civello

September 12, 2026

I.I

I am a one trick pony. It all always starts with I. It comes from a lack of vocabulary, loosely styled into a style of some sort mainly using lists and repetitions of words and phrases to symbolise the amount of beats in each bar of the song playing in the background of the scene. It all takes place in a living room on the second top floor of a high flat looking out over the River Clyde with the sun either rising or setting or shining cartoonishly bright and everything always dies because it never rains. I’m always trying to cheat on my wife or my wife is my girlfriend cheating on me and I’m the best and worst fighter and the best and worst cunt and some poor cunt always get battered but it’s never me and that’s why I know it’s fiction.

 

I.II

I am a bad writer. I’m sorry to anyone who reads this shit. I was too busy drinking iced bananana lattes and listening to a fusion of free jazz and psychedelic noise rock, getting full of ket, ecto, acid and buckfast and playing houses with my best friend’s structurally challenged ex-girlfriend, then going home and watching videos of girls kissing while my dogs bark at me from point blank range, when the whole time I should’ve been reading and working on my craft.

II.I

I never felt love for a person other than myself until ecstasy. I watched the love of my life and my best friend have sex and I remembered something that happened when I was little. I was walking home with my dad one night and he got a bit of a fright after he nearly stood on a frog. I asked what would happen if he did.

It would die, he said.

I didn’t believe him, so I stood on a frog the next time I saw one. It turned to jelly and got stuck in the pattern on the sole of my shoe and I panicked and threw my shoe into the river then ran away. I looked into my best friend’s eyes as she climaxed and thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen and thought that’s it, that’s what it’s all about.

I woke up the next day to my dad handing me a pair of the exact same shoes and telling me not to tell my mum, then my best friend sat down next to me and asked if I enjoyed the show. I nodded.

It was so good, she said.

I love you, I replied.

 

II.II

I love her far more than I love myself and that’s really saying something, but I feel a responsibility as an artist to follow the muse wherever she takes me. I sometimes think reading books and watching films about romance and falling in love and throwing caution to the wind in the name of it all has warped my brain far more than porn ever could. I spend far too much time fantasising about lives I could’ve or should’ve lived, usually involving me but a few stone lighter in a Paris apartment with an artsy brunette drinking spiced rum and diet coke and talking about post-punk or proto-punk or the limitations and failures of punk, but then I remember that the thing that all these characters in all these books are searching for, I already have. I have a beautiful woman who I love and who loves me sitting in the next room watching some shite on the tele and every so often popping her head in to say how’s your writing going. And the feeling of crashing back down to that reality is better than anything.