Storyville

Quite often on pills, on hot dancefloors, I bound up to total strangers because the chemicals have morphed their faces into those of my best friends. I run up to them and hug them. They smile back. They’re fucked too. And it dawns on me the face smiling staring back at me is not the face I thought it was ten metres ago. First off it shocks me, then embarrasses me, and then I realise it’s fine, and lovely because we’re both out of our trees.

Now, sitting here in the corner of a dimly lit pub in Brixton on a warm Tuesday night three days after the clocks went back, there’s a strong feeling of seasons changing and the battening down of hatches and a migration indoors. It’s October, but today it got dark at five fifteen.

Summer was huge and made my mind flip and went on long. And now in the opposite corner of the pub looking across the bar, I see you. Look at you. The slight of your hips. The way they lilt like a seesaw when your weight shifts. The desert boots I don’t associate with you. They’re there, in silhouette beyond the legs of a bar stool. And the line of your very straight nose that hooks into the horizontal that wades into that space above your upper lip, and the hair you don’t let fall over your eyes.

I see you every day. We’re always in the same places. I think that must be because we’re similar. It means we’re similar. There you are. Skipping across the road nowhere near a crossing, sitting in the corner of a plastic coffee place in a part of the city I don’t imagine you being in, watching you focus in on a book you’re trying harder than me to read because words jumble up in your head when you look at them. That’s what makes you so fucking intuitive, and why you scare the shit out of me.

I wonder if we see our friends on pills because in that heightened state we want so badly for it to be them. Because we’re so in love we visualise the people we love the most and we bound up to them.