Taken from the July 2012 issue of Dazed & Confused:

I’ve been travelling over mountains, he has written back to me. Even through the valleys too. I’ve been travelling night and day, I’ve been streaking all the way, baby, trying to get to you! The part about mountains and valleys I think must be a turn of phrase. There are no mountains between here and Doncaster. There is the A19, or, now that his driving licence has finally been suspended and he goes everywhere by bike, there are any number of smaller roads up towards York and through the Wolds. I can see him, stopping off in all those straight little places, horrifying the villagers as they toddle out of the pub at closing time to find him dashing through the car park in only a ski mask. I can also see him writing this email, in an internet shop somewhere, with his genitals bundled against the underside of the keyboard drawer. 

He started sneaking out of the house at night and hiding in the bushes along the roadside, jumping out to expose himself to motorists and to the night bus

When I read your loving message I just had to reach you, baby, in spite of all you put me through! This, obviously, is a joke. He has never had to collect me from a police station wrapped in a blanket, or had to hold me crying and shivering on the back seat of his car beside the Haxby Co-Op; he is not the one who has had to explain to his sobbing mother why she has found me sitting on her bed wearing her underwear.

The first time I saw him do it I thought it was the funniest thing ever. I thought he was rebellious, carefree and daft. We were in the library with some of our old friends; he had been gone for a few minutes and the next thing we knew he was in the aisle next to ours, where the librarians were trying to talk him down from the top of a stepladder as he perused the high books, his shocking bright buttocks visible to us through the gaps in the bookshelves. That night, he told me about how it had started: a family holiday when he was 12, in Cornwall somewhere, when his brother dared him to go out after dark and flash the couples on the beach. By the time they returned home, he found that he had a taste for it. He started sneaking out of the house at night and hiding in the bushes along the roadside, jumping out to expose himself to motorists and to the night bus. 

It was shortly after that night that we got together. His streaking brought us closer, if anything. He was different; other people couldn’t understand him. We even did it together a couple of times: once from a balcony, and the other time (after a lot of vodka) sprinting through an amusement arcade in Charles and Camilla masks. I got it – the rush, the risk, the enjoyment of planning it out. Those two times were enough for me, though. 

I also think that it is about acknowledgment, wanting people to laugh and be shocked, not allowing himself to leave the roadside until he’s had a certain number of horn honks

For him it is about more than the rush. It must be; up until we split up last month he had done it 344 times. I know this because he keeps a log: 

March 2nd 2003. Easingwold leisure centre. Afternoon. Undressed behind bins in car park, hid behind a 4x4. 2 runs. 3 women, 2 men. 4 laughed. 

March 14th 2003. Footbridge over Malton bypass. From 11.30pm. Undressed on bridge. 17 full beams, 12 horns. 

As well as the logbook, he also has an enormous collection of masks that he has collected over the years – Nelson Mandela, Keanu Reeves, Sting, Marge Simpson, Posh and Becks, David Cameron and George Osborne, Adrian Chiles... – together with ski masks, gas masks, stockings, an American-football helmet and a frightening array of balaclavas. Anonymity is an important part of it. It wasn’t always. Maybe that has become a practical necessity, I am not sure. There is a lot in fact that I’m not too sure I understand, even now, although I have tried. Clearly a big part of it is about recording, about finding new places, new challenges; researching footfall patterns, closing times, escape routes. I also think that it is about acknowledgment, wanting people to laugh and be shocked, not allowing himself to leave the roadside until he’s had a certain number of horn honks. I’ve never really got the guilt aspect of it, though, why he goes out of his way to feel ashamed – why he has allowed himself to be pursued by mobs and police, and why he went to the park the night after being beaten head to toe by a group of men outside a nightclub. Why he once, as a teenager, spent most of a night inside his neighbour’s garage, naked, drinking out of the beer fridge, crying and hating himself, determined to wait until the morning so that the neighbour could open the doors and find him sitting on top of the barbecue. 

I don’t know what it is I want. But I do know that when he arrives on my doorstep later, grinning, drunk, nude, however he arrives, I will accept him and let him in, if nothing else then as a courtesy to my neighbours

There was nothing that could hold me, and keep me away from you, when your loving message told me that you really love me true. 

He talks like that too. It was never for being normal that I was attracted to him. 

The self-hating moments have been a constant during our relationship. I have wondered many times what we would have been like together without these times – all the hours that I have spent consoling him, holding and rocking him – what we would have been like without the streaking. Would he still be him – or is it so much a part of who he is that I couldn’t have loved him any other way? How is it possible to know if a relationship would be right or wrong when one thing always becomes the focus for all your doubts and frustrations?

Certainly, it has kept us together, as addiction can. What would he do without me? I have my own guilty struggle at the thought of leaving him alone in the world, vulnerable. He misinterpreted my message, but not entirely. I did not say that I want him to come here. I don’t know what it is I want. But I do know that when he arrives on my doorstep later, grinning, drunk, nude, however he arrives, I will accept him and let him in, if nothing else then as a courtesy to my neighbours. 

Throughout November we will be publishing an anthology of short stories from our favourite authors to celebrate #NaNoWriMo. Follow them all at http://www.dazeddigital.com/nanowrimo and share your stories with us by tweeting @DazedMagazine with the hashtag #NaNoWriMo.