The City Woke Up and So Did I

Just keep on running, in any direction.

We left for the park, still restless and unable to sleep after being split apart by chemicals. A thick black coat shielded her from intimacy and the cold and I was invulnerable to the cold for the prospect of a kiss. We went to the park so we could feel more human before falling into a bloated, restless confected sleep. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep without it being a hot anxious mess.

 

Before you kiss a woman properly her lips float outside of her body, a strawberry drop inside a spoonful of ice cream. I would go to the ends of the earth for a kiss, but not for sex, and that always confused me. I was always more enamoured with a kiss than a sexual encounter, it had promise and optimism, where often, lovemaking seemed so final and unfulfilling - where do you go after you’ve fucked someone?

 

Under her thick black coat she reached for the cigarettes, and nervously fumbled them into her mouth, like her lighter was covered in oil, most things are covered in oil at 9am with no sleep. We watched runners judge our hair greasy and bewildered and tired eyes, tainted and tortured under a night spent in darkness.

 

Most people hold cigarettes with a blithe indifference -like they don’t matter. A person should smoke like it doesn’t matter, because it’s something that kills you, and if you smoke with interested or surreptitiousness it might remind you that each cigarette paves the way to your grave, so you should treat it like it doesn’t matter, so eventually it doesn’t. If you want to, if you’re skilled enough, you can broaden denial to any part of your life.

 

She gripped it like a bungy chord.

 

We laid between small pillars of light filtering through the trees and I would say how lucky we were to watch the city stir and wake up, and how I’ve never seen it happen and that I was happy to share it with her. She would ask where the possums went and night, and tell me that she wanted to smoke a cigarette on the playground, that contrasts and evil juxtaposition was bizarrely satisfying, and that because her childhood was poor she felt that making a small child find a cigarette butt would confuse and confound them, and she could pay forward . She definitely had intimacy issues, but it made her more interesting. I liked to think that I had intimacy issues after I had my heart broken, it made me feel more human, like the way a human would react when they had their heart broken, but I think any intimacy issues I had was supplemented by my narcissism, and those feelings of tenuous intimacy were more derived from inadequacy. That would certainly match a sexual diagnosis anyway.

 

But it wasn’t that petty lust that I remember, or the light that filtered through the trees, it was those tepid colours, those misshapen monochromatic memories that sting you with nostalgia and linger like a bruise. 

Reviews

[Jack Isaac]

[random review] Your thoughts and images are amazingly descriptive. All the paragraphs in this write are stories in of themselves --I especially noted the fourth paragraph down as this seems to open up the entire theme to your story. Okay, problem... this here is a whole paragraph:

'She gripped it like a bungy chord.'

This says and does absolutely nothing, and was put in here as to stand out, as to point out, for the sole purpose of saying "This says nothing at all" --This, my friend, is known as an experimental style. It's a literal poetic expression of art! Since this doesn’t go into a story at all, would you be willing to show us a poem?