-----------------------------------------------------------------------  It feels like time to close up here.

This blog has really been just one long letter,
and yesterday it felt like the right time to let it go.

This has been an odd story, but it has been one I am so very glad to have been a part of, it's been fun, emotional, and in truth, a life saver; but it's time for a little break, a wee trip, and then, I hope, something new.

Something anyway..


Later...
..and much love,

                                                                                                                     David.

It is not an impulsive change, like I woke up a different, or suddenly felt magnificent and lapped the morning dew.

No no no.
It has taken forever.

It is more subtle than that; but there is a bound and a spring in my pace today. Perhaps it's all those Easter bunnies, maybe it's just all chocolate.  Life has literally begun: I have a new second cousin, she will have a name, and I will spoil her rotten. Perhaps it's because I sort of get it: I have the world on a stick and string, one little salsa step away, and I have a new and unusual friend who has put up with a surprising amount of hot air these last few months, but I do love her to bits, and that has been well said. Enough.

I left everything behind looking for new beginnings, but found a world so alien, so unrecognisable from my own that I truly staggered for a little, all that ebb and flow, so much to learn from the unpitying curve; and today it is not over, today is not born again, a monument to the new, for that is for fools and fiction. It is just another day, but it is a day where all the oddities, all this off-world landscape begins to look more like a place I know, it is the start of what was, in a place that was not, it is a good day, maybe the very best of days.

And I am home.

There is Life on Mars after all,
Who would ever, ever have thought that?

The light detonates upon us. From the dark, bass drenched safety of the playground to the sudden, clammy impact of early morning asphalt; we are here. We are solid now, fleshy and pale under the quizzical emanations of the day. We can no longer conceal that which is best kept shy, that which is our very own, our reality. I don't know you, and our entanglement thus far has been the product of another, more base, chemistry; but I like you and that, I imagine, makes for something. It has to.

The 7-Eleven has become an occupation and we lose us for an age between the isles, like rows and rows of plastic fruit, a deception of some magnitude. You look for orange ice pops; I hunt for breakfast amongst the ranks of sweet falsehood. There is nothing more for us here. At the counter, two ice pops to the good, my change spits from my pocket as I try to pull out what is left with a damp hand, the nickel shower now ringing about our feet. I look into your eyes, slightly panicked, but I am shielded, not alone. Together we drop and collect the spill, we are in slow-motion, the master of deception, and his ravenous till, can wait.

Back out amid the eyes, accusing and disapproving, we hang our ice pops about our mouths, they are sweet and serve us well in our grounding, and I shiver as my tongue runs across its clingy edge. You do not. We find shelter against a gloomy wall in the shade of the giant 7, greedily lapping at our hands; you look at me over the top of yours as it feeds you. And in your eyes, eyes that I still do not know, I see past our ingest, our prescription, and for a tiny, but indelible moment, I am close to you.

Then I wish, as I hope do you, that this, this orangey buzz, is not the sugar finding my emptiness, but conceivably something new, something solid and pale, something that can live in a world less chemical, less self-indulgent; that can survive the daylight and all of its illusory ways, orange and unfaithful. It is, I hope, not just a grounding, but the start of something worthy. A beginning.

In this age, my age, of ruddy falsity and self deception, of chemical love, induced and momentary, delusive; and under the icy protections of a lofty 7, I am exchanging wordless reams with a Someone that I do not yet know, and that I like, and I am absorbed in  the prospect of a more daring, more solid and hitherto undreamt future.

What is past is prologue.
                     William Shakespeare

That tunnel opened and yesterday I took it and thought of you and our little subterranean adventure with all the sepia hues that memory can afford. And I have to admit that it saddened me and blanched my skin, as it slipped under all that make believe light: after all that time, so many lights and years, we became just rock and dirt, a memory for the keeping. And then the Gore Hill loomed and the sun, so low and near its end, shone lightly on my face, chipping at the rue. And I believed, or listened, to that little voice, resonating through all that blood and bone, it has travelled me so, little little scars, and it spoke of the past, much like the tunnel, fixed and unfixable, and of the uncertainty of the lay, the unexpected, the closeness of new intimacy. That thing, delivered by old sun, delicious and engaging, slate and past, is no tunnel, is no linear fold. No. It is exemption, the get out of jail free, not judge nor jury; but a glimpse of all that may or may not become. It is choice and consequence and love. It is air, free to breathe and trackless.

Yesterday I did not take the quick way home, through the harbour tunnel  and yet more perpetual sameness, I chose the airy path and wallowed in all the curiosity of that beautiful landlocked bridge, and the view it so reluctantly yields; and I felt I connected, for just a breath or two, with the millions and millions of stories, much like this one, my very own, the weight of the city and all the lumbering hearts, so effortlessly borne.