33/100, The Shutter Snaps a Friendship

After O'Hara, after Proust, after a summer.

July and I swear off London for the summer. I want my days long and loose, syrup sweet and just as cloying; no tourists on the south bank or cluttering up Covent Garden, I will wait for Soho in the winter, rain wet streets glass and just as dangerous, the windows of the French House open to an incumbent storm. Perhaps the Christmas lights will be up when we next meet or there will be a chance to coordinate schedules before then, autumn maybe, October possibly, yes there is a window then; and we text it’s been too long because it’s always too long, and although I don’t smoke or perhaps more accurately like to believe I don’t smoke unless it is 2am, I tell him that next time he must bring his narrow cigarettes, brought home from France and perhaps it’ll still be warm enough to sit outside and smoke them and if we see anyone we know, we will not lower our sunglasses, making strangers instead of mutual friends while we drink many small glasses of wine and wonder how it is possible to be tipsy after only four, since they are so so small and we will swap months like machines guns, firing a barrage of events back and forward, and how’s work and you won’t believe and the year been will stretch long as it turns from feeling to experience to stories; and it will sound fantastical in parts and impossible in others, and we will both order steak tartare and fries and ketchup and cokes too and I will make the joke I always make about Frank O’Hara but whatever we talk about will not stretch to anything as definitive as statuary and come dessert we will order madeleines and neither of us will make the obvious joke although we will both want to and I will insist we need 12 although six by then is too many, and espressos too even though coffee after 3pm is a bad idea nowadays, and night will have wrapped itself around the street by now, turning it all to a gift, before it is hurried goodbyes for the last train west and I will have to remember, it’s the Victoria Line I take from Oxford Street now and not the Northern at Tottenham Court Road.