Texas Re-Attempted: Life for Brent

The prophecy is complete. When I first came to Cornwall my aunt had a simple solution to my solitude. "Don't worry, Greg," she said between tango steps in the kitchen, "Everyone will find out you have a car and then you'll be that friend who drives people around!"

At the time I thought this desperate - the hysterical promise of a woman with no way out from my self-entrapment. But now, five years on, I have the pleasure of driving the dark mirror of my soul to work this morning.

His name is Brent - our names sound the same when they're yelled across a call centre - and like most "friends" I have received in my life Brent has stumbled on the comedic holy grail of realising he can call me Gregory and tell me that I'm 'quiet' every hour.

I don't get that. Usually quiet people aren't told they're quiet. You only tell someone they're quiet when it's out of the ordinary. But since I am perpetually quiet it must be that ordinarily they feel a different kind of noise from me - the offshoot energy of my psychic exuberance - and cannot marry it with my laconic presentation.

"Don't trust anyone, Greg," he advises me in his wrist-slitting Nothern drawl. "You can't trust anyone in that call centre. You tell them anything and they'll go and tell everyone. You're the only one I trust not to gossip."

I nod and continue taking mental notes for my blog.

He's 41, lives above a cafe, and has just bought a kitten. He prides himself on starting arguments where arguments are needed and cultivating germophobia and paranoia in equal measure. When we get out of the car he walks ahead of me, as quickly as his little legs can carry him, so that no one will think we are friends. His company is half-confession and half-interrogation, a barter trade of leverage and apology. I spend my shifts at the desk beside him, listening to him ramble between calls and spout random comments in a variety of accents - anything to ward off my silence. Perhaps he will soon seek a confrontation with me, so I might become a marker on the navigation of his rutted existence.

Given my condition - my interpretation of the world in archetypes - I am never sure if I freely allow others to dominate me or if I have no choice in the matter. I certainly don't feel put out. I listen to their thrusts and parries and all the strange squeaks that I elicit in those terrified of silence. And all the while I remember that I am better than them.

Perhaps the ultimate superiority complex: one in which I feign ironic docility. At the end of the day I suppose it's better to wear my ignorance and conceit on the inside.

Today I shadowed a pair of girls (they consented - it was a work thing) and they reminded me of how anomalous I am when I engage people proactively. The usual "deer in the headlights" look set in, whereby a pause and a blank stare followed each of my comments. Luckily I talked about clubbing once, so they refrained from reaching for their rape alarms. It reminded me that, at least in the world of call centres, I am best as a limited robot and sounding board. Anything more brings apocalyptic confusion.

I like to think I make sense. Perhaps it's a form of Alzheimers - to think I am perfectly understandable while all others hear stilted gibberish. It seems like every other human being was taken aside at school (probably when I was crying in the toilets over that silly dead brother business) and taught the codes by which to hide behind small talk and vacuous comments. I really should claim Asperger's and get some benefits - there has to be some payoff besides articulate and moving blogs that make me sound like a perfectly well-adjusted misanthrope.

So perhaps I have nothing to fear. I will never become like Brent, convinced that only cats will love me, starving myself before each weighing at the slimming club, and finding my sole pleasure in 'slasher films, Greg, where they get chased and they think they've escaped but then they get caught and killed'.

I'd like to be someone that people can't blog about - whose multifaceted enigma defies archetype.

I am a claustrophobic undertaker. I force all others into my boxes but fear them for myself.

Perhaps they too hide their beauties, and yet an ugly part of me fears they do not.

I never want to be like Brent.