Small Mercies

Get up, walk about, sit back down, sit back down. Get up. Sit back down. Sip rum. Rub the soreness in my temple. Get up. Walk over to the window. Watch the street running like treacle below. Don't feel regret. Don't feel anything. Not yet.

I dreamt of chasing Noel Fielding up dead-ends and through back-streets because he said he'd sell me a T-shirt. Ended up in a cellar with a fat man. I watch videos, and more videos. Re-fire ambition. Remember the dream. The one that always returns. Sit down, make myself remember. Think. That dream was always what got me worst. On a bleak winter's day, coming round the corner, in a grey duffel coat and a scarf. He didn't look at me. Always was me. I edge the mirror out of the window. Smash. Hear it splinter.

Put on I-Tunes. I only want to hear sad tunes. Listen to the Specials, remember the Eighties, how I grew up too fast. Thank god for small mercies. Where'd I have been if I'd actually got what I wanted.

I'm as good for it now as I was then. Clueless, torn, gluing words onto an A4 ring binder, hoping for it to make some sense. Pretending I know what I'm meant to know by now.

Outside someone is shouting. Fuck off, you cunt. Fuck off. YOU CUNT.

Thank god for small mercies.

The Break-Up

I am calmer today, but not much. The sun is behind me, trickling through the back of my skull, past my retina, into what I see. And I see a shiny screen pretending it is my life, a mass of letters and symbols making out they are me.

      
It's so soft, this sunlight. It's casting gold onto the wall, nudging against a shadow of purple flowers and green stalks, against my pink curtains. Curtains plump and pinched in the middle like two old ladies. But their colour's gone sepia, it's just a fading simulacrum.

     
It might sound stupid, but I can feel how blue the sky is behind me; I can feel it bathed in its 8 o'clock glow. Children are shouting. Traffic is coming, going... then suddenly a motorcycle. My stomach is growling.

     
I could almost believe that the world is still, moving only silently, a little way this way, a little that. A smooth stalk growing steadily towards its sun. That we all will sleep soundly in our beds tonight, and wake tomorrow to a fresh, dewy morning.

     
How dull, these things I fantasise. How dull, the mechanism of peace.