Listing to Port

1. I vow to track you down, wherever you may be in the world; to come for you, bags packed, all my affairs in order; to stride up to you as you eat outside at some cafe and cheerily greet you by the name that you had then; and then to saunter off home, leaving you to make the brew of uncertainty and confusion for yourself.
2. I vow to sneak into your porch at night and install a little hook in all your boots that makes your sock gradually wriggle down your foot and bunch up at the toe end when you walk.
3. I vow to vote for someone you dislike; if they achieve power and go on to make my life hell, I vow to add that to my list of your misdeeds.
4. I vow to always be at the supermarket ten minutes before you, emptying their shelves of your favourite condiments.
5. I vow to enter an ascetic life of training, meditation and mentorship by the world’s foremost practitioners of violence for a full ten years, until I am widely known as one of the world’s baddest motherfuckers; after which point I will probably have forgotten about my old grievances and will get a TV show about being good at violence or something.
6. I vow to eat arsenic and piss on your compost heap.
7. I vow to auction my soul in the perilous realms in apprenticeship to something old and terrible; to spend a thousand years in a day growing there like lichen; to be unspeakable, to be the outrage and the glory of faerie; to ascend to highest of glamours therein; so that one day I may captain the Wild Hunt past your door and doom you too.
8. I vow to put a thinly fictionalised account of you into all of my novels and email you links to all the fanfiction that bubbles up about them.
9. I vow to leave a single small piece of lego on your carpet each night; always in a different place but vaguely on the way from your bed to the toilet.
10. I vow to become so fabulous, to soar so high into the stratosphere of Planet Amazing, that you will look up from the fertile mud of your grubby little tectonic plate and long to be part of it; but you will never be able to.

1. I swear I will faithfully follow you until death and then beyond, even when you tell me to go away. I will faithfully follow you into the bathroom and stand behind you when you pee. You will not have a more faithful follower than me.  
2. I swear fealty to the general sort of thing that you do, even though I could do that sort of thing much better, but go ahead, I’m sure it’ll work out just fine.
3. When the final danger overtakes you, on that day long-foretold when the sun will rise twice and the second time blood-red, when you have come to the terrible Pass of Congealed Time, I solemnly swear that I will be at home in bed, having a nice cup of coffee and maybe a bit of a giggle at your plight.
4. I pledge allegiance to the divine cause of sexual tension, to which end I will enter your service and do everything you want of me, whilst making moon-eyes at you and languidly moping. I swear that I am quite good at languidly moping and you will sometimes catch me at it and feel disturbed and not know why. I swear that I will tell you that I totally don’t have a thing for you when you tell me that you totally don’t have a thing for me, and then we will sit in silence for a while until we both mournfully go back to our rooms.
5. I solemnly swear to serve you until nearly the end, then I will knife you in the back before someone else gets there first.
6. I swear that I will stop a bullet for you, leap in front of a speeding train, catch the flying cannonball. When the piano drops I will push you to safety. I will swim the spent fuel pool to save you from your enemy’s lasers and when the window explodes into shards I will be right there in front of you. I will kill the assassins when they come calling. All I ask is that you take me with you to where there are bullets, and lasers, and trains, and assassins.
7. I swear to not bother you about your quest past the hills of Dornock’s Drift through the Cavern of Awful Night beyond the Sharp-toothed Cracks in the Grey Forest where Death lurks in the Ashen Air, even though it kind of bugs me.
8. Having given all my love to the concept of love and found it wanting, I pledge allegiance to the concept of allegiance. I will serve you with my entire heart and soul until some more exciting concept comes along, at which point I will utterly reject the idea of service and probably punch you.
9. I pledge to misinterpret your every command to great humorous effect, which will make my meaningless death in your service, when it comes, that much more poignant.
10. I swear absolute fealty to you and your cause until the end of my contract of employment, at which point I will write a cutting memoir and go on all the talk shows.
11. I pledge my body and my soul absolutely to your cause, but not my mind, to which end I will obey your every command whilst continually arguing with you about them.  
12. I solemnly swear to go to all of your enemies and solemnly swear false allegiance to them, before bringing you all of their salacious gossip.
13. I solemnly swear. It’s how I release tension. I promise not to do so in front of the class.
14. I promise to carry out all your plans to the letter and take credit for the ones that work.
15. I pledge to retweet your tweets, sign your petitions and tell you that everything is going to be OK. If I hear that someone is coming to kill you I will totally tell you, unless I am in work at the time.