A walk in the dark

Thinking back now the sea seems static in my mind, like the waves on a postcard or in a children’s book, but how it roared then. In the darkness its motion excited the place and brought together the fragments of each moment with an energised, rippling force that drove things onwards and forwards like they would never end. It’s funny, when you look back to things and they seem so unreal. But momentary glimpses of you become more real to me as I illustrate them with the colours of my progressing years. The musty male smell cloaked by faded old spice and cigarette butts; your rattling mechanical smokers cough; strong, human arms, speckled and hairy, enclosing around me so that I know they’ll never leave. They never were really real anyway, were they? Maybe that’s why I still love the darkness. It reminds me of those times when you were real. After all, the darkness is all we can see that’s eternal and infinite. Yet even that, we must reluctantly concede, must be broken by the momentary brilliance of the day.

At this juncture I emerge from my dialogue with the night time, and peer reluctantly into the darkness of another night overhung by that same sky. Many miles east of that shore and many moons later, an inner-city street is quiet except for the electrical ticking of a streetlight. Its flickering plays patterns across the wall of a bedroom, as it intrudes into other similar bedrooms in its featureless red-brick residence. Here someone else is speckled and hairy. He takes an empty glass from off the bedside table and leaves the room. I lie perfectly still and wait, as I have done all night. My feelings of infinite energy have been replaced by something dense. The alcohol is still coursing through my veins, now carrying a negative energy with it. My brain cannot rest. It simply waits for the man to emerge and return to the bed. I look at the clock, 3 am. The toilet flushes and I shut my eyes as he passes back into the room. I am waiting for him to get back into the bed. Then I’ll relax back into my non-sleep. The negative energy persists, yet I’m too numb to feel. He picks up his jeans, jangles as he puts them on, takes a watch off the table, and leaves closing the door silently behind him. My stomach wobbles upwards and my heart pushes it back down. I take a sleeping pill from the draw beside the bed, swallow it dry and sleep.

You know I can’t continue this…

What are you listening for anyway? It’s some perverted desire to see into another person’s soul. Find out whether you yourself are normal? Well, this isn’t me. Merely abstractions that’s all they are. Even I don’t know what they mean. They just exist in a bubble called reality in my brain. This is the thing, you see, I’m just not sure anymore. And I certainly don’t know if you’re alright, that’s for sure.

Anyway, I can’t seem to see this episode closing really. It just morphs its way back into view when I least wish for it. Like the sun.

I remember waking up that morning with sunlight streaming in through the window, shattering my dreamless sleep with a headache that made the summer a horror to behold. I got up and looked at that door he opened and left through. Something seemed to implode inside of me, a feeling that repeated itself when I glanced disgustedly at a shrivvelly condom on the floor. I tried to remember the guys’ name and then, defeated, crawled back into bed but it felt dirty now and stank of stale male sweat. I sat back up and looked in the mirror by the desk at my puffed face. The alcohol had speckled my cheeks with tiny red exploded blood vessels. They complimented the dark bags under my eyes for that advanced alcoholism look. I shivered the revulsion through my body like it was mine and no-one could take it from me. I got up and pulled the sheets from my bed and the motion sent me running to the bathroom to vomit. Of course I wiped it all away with the sick speckles later, as one of those things that you do, but really I knew, I know, it’s one of those things that I do.

So what do you think of me now I wonder. You think me pathetic? But I like playing shadow-games. I’m not fragile. I’m not lonely. I’m just like you. I have a good job, friends, a cat; I read the paper and laugh at people’s jokes, and buy the big issue, and people like me. It’s all too tangible.

It’s just that I get lost in the momentary brilliance of night and want to stay there. That’s all.