26/365: remembering it

we’re young and we’re beautiful in the way we never will be again; we’re too young, too beautiful to know it and the night’s hot and it’s August and the city’s packed and the venue more than capacity and there’s no smoking ban and everyone’s lighting up around you. You can still taste how it feels, that first inhale. The floor’s sweat wet already after the support band and you feel his eyes on you, you wind your ring around your finger, feel those hard square stones you sold yourself in exchange for, feel his eyes again, it’s your top that’s the problem, with one shoulder and your bra strap out, he’s used words like slut and worldly and you know you won’t wear it again and the house lights go down, and the singer’s there on the stage and you want to dance like you used to, those nights with vodka in coke bottles and your veins full of it, the guy next to you lights up and you move closer to him for his second hand smoke the smell of him the idea of what it might be like to touch him and not this man you’ve promised yourself to for tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. You keep your nails short for a reason. They are easier to dig into your palms that way. 8 perfect crescent moons glow red when the band stops and good show don’t you think he says.

these are things you have forgotten until the music starts and you’re back there; same track, same night; everything plays on repeat eventually. This is why for a time you couldn’t play any music from the past. This is why you were future tense, all have you heard this and have you read that and running running to keep up all the time, to keep it away. But you can’t write that way. Maybe you could live that way, if it’s living, to have no past to speak of or to not speak of the past, but you can’t write that way, and at some point you choose writing over everything else. Every one else. Your birth right for a piece of paper, you often think in those long nights when the dreams come and you wake sweat slicked and shivering and you shit talk yourself until dawn. All that loss for what? And then you learn how to do it. How to write and how to leave. You begin to suspect this makes you a dangerous sort of person. If you’ve done it once, you can do it again. And you do. You begin to worry you are a brat, stuck at a certain age.

and there you are, aged seven and there they are, all beset by sadness and you, the little interloper, left behind where you shouldn’t be. You don’t know it yet but you’ll spend years trying to disappear. First, you disappear into a poem. You write very very bad ones and read very very good ones in the hope the balance switches. It doesn’t. And then you find beer which works for a while. And there you are in the park, jumping from the swings, your body cutting a perfect arc every time you get it right, that moment too soon gone where you’re more spirit than anything else. Boys work for a while. And pills too. But nothing nothing nothing works like being empty, as empty as you’ve felt and needed to be for years. You stop listening to music then. Sometimes the boy on the bus gives you his headphones and you sit, him with one and you with the other, and it feels like love for a bit. Or you lie on the floor of someone else’s bedroom, hard to see the ceiling for the way the smoke’s so thick and it’s snowing outside, the snow that blue you don’t know you’ll miss forever, the sheep pink, and you’re leaving your body just enough just enough and you don’t want pulled back into it, where flesh waits.

this is what you can’t listen to. this is what you think you’ll keep away. the right playlist becomes a vanishing spell. you will be free of the past. washed clean for one final time. but the book you’ve chosen over all of them demands you remember what it was like to be there and the book you are reading asks, how much past can a person bear, and you will never forget that line. But you think they got it wrong, as good as it is, it is not how much past can a person bear, but how much past can a body hold. You begin to put the wrong playlist together. There it is. 1987, and 1990 and Gazza weeping and 1994 and Kurt Cobain is dead and you’re teaching each other how to fuck, and 1998 and the dance music’s bad and making holes of you and so it goes, until it is 1999 and you cannot continue but you do. You listen and you write as you listen and you are sick after and dinner becomes a thing difficult to swallow again and you have never showered so much in your life, you are surprised some days you have skin left to wash you scrub it so hard. and the past the body holds is re-membered by songs, perhaps you are re-covering yourself:

and there you are, in the hallway in the dark waiting for mum to come and smack you, you deserve it for the way you’re always getting too excited and it’s winter again and the window in the front door’s got some kind of security wire in it and the dark comes through it and you’re worried your dad might appear at it although you wouldn’t know it was him. You spend half the time staring at the moon, wishing he’d come back for you. The other half terrified he will. But it’s been a while since he last tried to kidnap you. No one’s sure where he is. After the smacking, you’ll read the bible, just so you know how bad you’ve been. just so you won’t do it again. but you will you will you do.

and the taxi door’s open, the taxi driver holding your eye just a second too long and you’re pissed but not so pissed you don’t notice although you don’t know what it is he’s trying to say. you ok, the driver says, and you say you’re fine as he’s unlocking the door, his back to you both, ok then as he climbs back into his cab but the next morning is shattered glass and things on the floor and you have no idea whose fault it is and you cannot ask and because no music was playing, you have no way of piecing it together, forever then it could be your fault or it might have been him although you know always always you are to blame. if only you could stop wearing red tops with one shoulder out, if you could stop standing too close to strangers just to inhale their smoke, if you could stop wanting the world, we’d be just fine.