Glastonbury

Memory litter

Stood, small, with two older guys I class as brothers. We’re at the front, near the stage. Blue light sprays out in to the blackness; chill air meets hot breath. Smell merge – beer, smoke, sweat. The tidal hum of thousands of expectant voices, one eye on the stage.

            The day has passed us, is behind us, full and loud. Now we’re packed close, prickly shirts sting our sunburn, drums tremble upon the foggy hills – a prelude to the dawn.

            I decide impulsively I won’t watch this band. I don’t like them and I’m eager to get back to our field. Isn’t worth standing here amongst their keen fans, a lanky lot I don’t much fit with. I tell them I’m off, and numbly shuffle through the crowd; pressing and weaving amongst headless bodies, feeling their heat and words.

            Then, I’m on the outside, in a new crowd – only distinguishable on the basis of movement in contrast to static. Their current takes me along the wide dust path. I walk with them, short, unattached. Bushes and bracken to the right. To the left, the pyramid stage with dancing light beams, black bobbing heads, and pocked of torches and glow sticks. The crowd becomes patchy in the distance, sat in circles round fires, then fades out to the black tend-cluttered hills.

We’re moving fast, weaving under the arch of a branch that m arks an entrance to boggy toilet ground. Large lads in puffed out jackets march in front of me yelling “Es, LSD”.

Drums pulsing louder, whistles, screeches, laughter, mingling in the blue tinged air. A line of men pee in to the bushes – they stretch as far as my horizon. Shadowed flickers dance in manic flickers around bins that look like oil drums set on fire. Many hold an instrument. Rattling, pipes, the shriek of ‘Tequilla’, Shoulders touching mine. Torches light the inside of tents like wombs; luminous orange exudes, along with a lolling tired conversation between friends squished up too closely.

            Kids run in the mud, in ripped jumpers to their knees and dirty legs, pans dangle above fires, wood-smoke obscures the stars – congealing in to a protective dome.

I make a sharp turn to a lonelier path, then begin my awkward clamber over guide-ropes, past colourful decorates metal bins, flags, and strings of rainbow-rags.

            The screams and laughter seem to have sunk over the hill – where the drum beats still rumble as if within the bowels of the earth. Faint whispers and low murmurs dotted around my half-blind blackness. The strobes illuminate and pierce the wood-smoke that has drifted up to the moon.

Reviews

[wrote.here]

Faintly dark in a beauutiful way like how moons wane in the night, :)
truly inspiring, wonderful write