Saturday 21 July 2012

It's somewhere between 0145 and 0212 and I am cursing around the streets of the inner city, watching drunk couples stumble in and out of bars and clubs, men with blood on their shirts, and the classic short skirt cellulite girls on the corner of kebab shops. And I'm thinking when did it all get so fucked up.

At the 24/7, where we used to by straights for reformation into joints, I buy a bottle of vodka (home brand) and a mints, and solely walk from the service hatch to my pavement mounted car, unscrewing the tinny cap and pushing the mints into the liquid.

City and Colour, Sometimes, has been on repeat for 21 days, and is my cruise music of choice. Dallas has a way of talking directly at you, whilst egotistically singing about himself, and even though the music is evidently about a type of love that I have never felt, I imagine that I have, that I am.

The lights wash over the City from the observatory streaking an amber stain into the midnight sky, the neon floodlights of the Cumberland basin bouncing reflections on to the cliff edge. And Dallas is singing of blank stares and empty threats, the acoustics enhanced by the solid gorge as the car sits embankment above, headlights spilling over the scene. And I'm swigging on the vodka, and my watering eyes cause the lights to blur, and I'm thinking of all the people who keep calling me now we aren't at university, all that nostalgic bullshit about how "we should keep in touch" and how many times I'm going to have to click "reject", and how I promised to myself that I'd have left by now, be on some beach somewhere near my home town, some fishing village, and why I'm still here when clearly there are better things to be had.

And really I guess I listen to Sometimes to remind me of the City that I left behind, and the people that I left behind when I decided to move to Bristol, on the basis that I'd be with friends, many of whom I no longer speak to. And I guess this feeling is regret mixed with anxiety and anticipation, and I imagine where five years previous and then five ahead. The vast differences spread before me like a ocean. And I think of all the situations which I now regret, and all the people I have met, or haven't met, and all the people I have slept with, and how I could have had it all, and didn't want it. And all the people I've doubled crossed, or strung along. And I take the scalpel blade that I've been thumbing from my pocket and carve the words "Disappear Here" over the name, on the brass plaque on the bench beneath which inscribed, rather aptly, 2012.

These two words, a motto of mine, a summary of the feelings I have felt for this city a city in which I expected to make no lasting acquaintances. And as I finger the fresh edit I contemplate playing Disappear Here - a game which evolved from my unique skill to ditch unfavourables in nightclubs - and I think I am finally ready, four weeks later than planned.