Long-Found-Freinds

It’s the name of the game, he assures me as I wander through heart ridden angst.

Swigging cherry coke and smoking I have Baby shambles in one ear and my Hungarian neighbours fucking in the other.

I tidied up a bit and did some washing, the smell of damp clothes pollutes the room, and hanging up they crease and curl my posters. ‘Swings and roundabouts init’.

It’s a good life deep down I’m sure, somewhere in the swollen tides of it all, where I occasionally find myself when I have had a few too many.

I’m pretty sure there’s a riot going on outside, that settles me. Now and again things fly up and crack at the window, shoes and flowers, and smaller things like rocks and lighters. If there was a repeat button on my CD player I’d press it.

I could sleep for a thousand years, but that would be taking it too far, I worry.

A dull, dopey face stares back at me from the wall where it is pinned, alongside a bag with a few e, post-it-notes with addresses of long-found-friends, and a well-knackered tube map.

The lights have gone out, it’s eight twenty five and the winter darkness has settled in. I have neck ache, and my hand throbs where I dropped a heavy book on it half hour ago.

I’m failing to sit upright, I have pins and needles in my ice cold feet. The dusty air is infectious.

I need to lie down, before I fall down.

Lying down doesn’t really help, because the landlord knocks on the door, and hard as I try to ignore it, I feel nervous.

I’m pretending not to be present and sensory, and to be honest, I’m not totally sure that I am. Its been a short day, so far, and I feel that its not going to get much longer.

I’m all out of coke, and I have no ice to suck. So far this week I’ve been eating new potatoes from cans, with some kind of herbs ready prepared on them. They’re only 97p from the store at the end of the road, so its cool..

Eventually my landlord gives up and goes, but I know he’ll be back. Soon. Probably.

Its not enough to just be content. You have to want it, I think. You have to want it so much that you’d rip apart your life to find it. That cold, sweaty panicky feeling, when you cant remember where you put it. And search as hard as you can, you never will. Because its not there, and its not anywhere. It has been snatched from us, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ve been given a lolly with the wrapper glued on, and our small, useless, childlike fingers and struggling to grip it let alone unwrap and enjoy it.

My long found friends made me realise this.

It’s late now, almost too late. Three in the afternoon and I have achieved nothing of note. The thing is, we can find distraction where ever we want to. There’s nothing in it. A short glance a metre away and I’m falling again.

The neighbour at the end of the garden has taken all her washing in. All that remains is a tea towel that flicks and slaps the wind with its presence and catches the corner of my eye every now and again, to make me look up, distracting me from sleep.

I was sat, just a few hours ago, in a room where a club remix of Velvet Underground was playing. I’m waiting for my man, resonates with me. I was annoyed to hear it treated in this way, club remix? All the same the words were there. And I was there. And the four walls, the ceiling and a dank dusty smell were there. I’m not sure about the floor. I didn’t spend much time on it.

I am overcome. I want to scream. I want to tear, I want to rip and rape and slaughter. But my energy is wavering, pouring from me like petrol from a newly accidentalised car, pissing out onto dirty tarmac, waiting for the flames to ignite.

I’m waiting for my flames. Says the petrol. Says my petrol. Says my mind. A mind. Trapped eternal in a world without sparks, only water, and other such dampening spirits, that put out any heat that was once there.

On my wall I have a picture of an eye, close up, with a flame in it. I wanted that to be my eye. I wanted to be alive. But photos of my eye show no such determination. Photos of my eyes are black, deep, bottomless. Its not that there’s nothing there. Its just that there’s not enough. Not enough to make it work. Not enough to keep me here. For the long run.

Don’t get me wrong, endurance is one of my better qualities. I have no passion for competition, just for showing off, for trying to say that I’m different. For trying to say that I have fire.

How long does one continue, with a petrol leak? Or an exploded tyre?

Once I had a mini metro. The tyre exploded on the A12, and there was nowhere to pull off. So I just kept going for a bit. Mostly because I didn’t want to stop. I was moving house and had all my stuff in the back, and no recovery insurance. I didn’t want to stop, I didn’t want to panic, I didn’t want to put on another tyre. I just wanted to travel, to move, to get away. And that tyre stopped me for a good hour.

I never had a petrol leak, but if I had I’d have kept going too. Just waiting for the spark. Waiting for the explosion. What a way to go. I’d like that. It shows umph. It shows determination. The ultimate way to show off.

I hadn’t noticed that I’d been stamping my foot. I hadn’t noticed I’d left my sewing kit on the floor. I lean down to extract the pins and needles from my foot. This is perhaps the one occasion where it wouldn’t help to walk it off.

I laugh. That’s actually quite funny.

It was here really that I decided to write.

I’m sick of seeing all these books, "stories of a loveless childhood", So you were beaten and kicked around a bit. Yeah, I mean that’s terrible. You were abused by someone with the responsibility to look after you. But it prepared you.

You now know that that’s what authority means, that’s how it is DEFINED.

You didn’t deserve it. But I don’t deserve to have to read about it.

We all live loveless, beaten lives. This is Earth. Welcome to our world.

We all should just fucking jump off bridges, because there is nothing else. This is what we have.

Lets not get into the ‘do we deserve it?’ debate, because of course we do.

We are bastards, cancers that eat away this earth, our own souls, and the souls of those around us.

It’s a well recognised fact. One that has been covered in just about every modern text written, so I wont go over again. I was just reminding you. You are a bastard. You are nothing. You suck. Loser.

I don’t like to put words in the mouths of the masses, but I’m not just speaking for myself here. I have an inkling.

That’s what I learnt from TV.

That’s almost everything I know.

I’m being introduced to a dealer. He’s a little black guy, in a wheelchair, with a painted face. Like a Kiss style painted face. He has thick framed glasses on, and I don’t think he takes them off when he paints his face because they’re covered in the paint too. He wheels into the living room, settles in a cor

ner. We’re watching a film, there’s some blonde skinny kid shaking cocktails in the corner. I’m comfortable in the corner of a sofa with some Spanish guy, but he doesn’t want to hold my hand. There’s some kind of fight going on over the other side of the room, but I cant really hear it. I cant really hear anything. So I try convince myself that nothing is happening. I’m not missing anything, I shouldn’t get involved.

Eventually all the cocktails are gone. So’s the little dealer guy. Its strange because he announced he was going, so we all looked up and gave some kind of bye-greeting, and he wheeled out of the room. It was a good minute later before I realised he might have some trouble with the stairs, so I get up and go to check that he’s doing ok. But when I get to the top of the stairs he’s not there. He’s long gone. And the door’s closed behind him.

I get up to go to the toilet, I take a change of clothes with me. Stepping into the toilet I am tripping. There’s some kind of step, that goes a good foot down, and I missed it. So I’m on the floor, and there’s all types of potted trees in the toilet. I’m all caught up in them I can barely stand, they are so dusty it makes my eyes water and I just want to get the hell out.

I am below the sink, which suddenly seems so high above me. I wade through the trees towards the step and drag myself out. I go into the room next door, and start to change my clothes. I can hear something going on. Voices, stepping, movement. I thought everyone was settled in for the night by now. Its getting late. Must be a sudden burst of energy.

The Spanish guy put a bit of blue paper under the door and shouts to me to take it. It has ‘£20’ written on it. I am highly confused by this point. I open the door, half dressed, but he cant explain. To my left the noises are all coming from the kitchen. A friend of mine is showing two girls around the place, and they have pulled out the long redundant washing machine to look behind it. I have no idea what is going on, but I feel that I have to get out, before that kid starts making more cocktails.

Once again I leave a party before it gets to the end. Its been a while since I was one of the hardcore kids, that stays all the way to the bloody end.

I cant remember how I got out the door, or where I went afterwards. Or if any of it actually happened. All I know is that I never saw that painted guy again, and all that remains of the event is this tale, and a few scratches from those trees.