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.