Videotape
Serpents of rainwater form like rivers upon the map of my window pane. It’s 2am again, and I’m thinking through treacle, through cut-scenes of holding hands in bars and walks along well-versed pavements. My head is pounding with the weight of all the wine; the motion picture in my mind occasionally freezes - rewinds - to the time we clung together desperately the morning after ecstasy and then dropped each other as quickly as the pill.
I’m through with love poetry. We’re all projecting our own
inadequacies and forming our own fantasies and making jigsaw puzzle-people out
of indifferent puzzled persons.
‘I don’t love you, I’m just passing the time’ is the mantra of our younger
years, and the mantra of our future fears. Difficult to swallow, like
Monday-morning porridge or the 10 o’clock news.
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‘The curtains are moving’ he says, his face creasing into a frown, the corners
of his mouth turned down. The curtains are not moving.
‘Sometimes this happens...’ he trails off. I nod. I wonder whether the pattern
on the blood-red material alarms him; whether the curl of the shapes form
devil’s tongues and dismembered organs that coil around one another, a mesh of
flesh. All the while I stare at my static vision of this imagined horror,
trying to see through his eyes. He did LSD a few weeks back, he explains with
pride, but all this distortion seems frightening and ugly and pointless to me.
If he wants to exist in a world where he can’t rely on curtains, I wonder what
his reality must be.
I turn to him. His eyes are so dark; I have to concentrate hard to see his
pupils. We both stare at my window, seeing very different things.
-------
The seagull perches on the garage roof and gulps down hunks of muscle and meat
torn from the chicken carcass.
A woman is watching, looking through the binoculars that her father left to her
when he passed away. They date back to the second world war. They smell of
leather and the house that she grew up in; she inhales the scent like a child
drowning. Her Sunday roast dinners are not left to rot in the stomachs of bins.
One day, she thinks, her bones may give birth to a seed,
give life to a tree; the larks jenny wrens and the finches and the jays, they
will one day nest in me. I will be recycled.
‘If only all of our hopes could be as humble as the earth we stem from’, she
writes, pen pushing against paper, ink staining skin. The gull mews at her from
its corrugated perch, beats its wings, leaves.
-------
‘Have you ever been interested in me?’ she chokes out. He stiffens, studies her
thoughtfully for a second.
‘I think that you’re pretty.’ he says quietly, shifting upon the mattress.
What a dull thing to be, the girl thinks.
-----
‘You know, I’ve never really loved anyone,’ I tell my friend whilst chewing a
baguette, bacon fat dripping onto my lips. I lick them clean.
‘You’re drunk’, she says nonchalantly.
I am drunk. I can feel the fog of the alcohol, a dull ache on the roof of my
mouth, a looseness in my limbs. Right now I could love anybody; I feel an
infinite sense of possibility, and at the same time I don’t give a fuck. I’m
apathetic, all out of luck.
I leave my food half eaten on the plate, along with all the other pursuits.
-----
I’m walking alone under lamplight, imagining what the concrete underfoot used
to look like, what the hills used to look like when they weren’t stifled by the
grey paving, what the stars used to look like from here when they weren’t
erased by the street lamps. I smile at the people that I walk past because
they’re there and they’re beautiful and this moment is timeless, this moment is
forever, and they walk faster, faces blank, eyes fixed on their destination.
They all look like they know where they’re going.
There’s a thickness to the air, and I have a sense that no matter what happened
it would all be okay. I inhale and exhale, feel the night pressing on my skull,
my eyelids, the hairs on the nape of my neck. Nothing can ever erase how it
feels to be 20, on this street, in these clothes, at this hour, in this mind,
in this moment. People are getting up for work in a house that I walk past; a
man has drawn his curtains, is doing up the cuffs of his sleeves. He pauses,
sees me staring. We both examine one another for that moment, seeing very
different things.
I carry on walking. The curtains close.