A Bristol Novella

It's Friday and we're in a bar and its pretty crowded but we manage to grab a table, order a few drinks. A few familiar faces come and go, and mostly this bar is filled with people who I probably went to school with, but probably don't know.

And I lean in, and over the music tell Jessica that I'm gonna leave, go some place else. And she smiles, and we make our way though the crowd and out onto the beach. And the weather is wicked, minus twelve, and the pavement snow covered.

As we talk she tells me that this guy, Tim, who we went to school with, who she goes to university with, about how he has been sectioned. Insane. And I look at her and say,
"Well babe, some people don't loose it their entire life, and it must be terrible" and I smile as I'm saying this, and she just looks at me, takes my arm and says

"Well we're not exactly normal now are we"

And I'm trying to think of all the people I knew that used to live around here, and I cant. I can't picture them with out thinking of our High school photographs. Everyone still sixteen, seventeen.

The ones they thought would make it, burnt out in lifeless office jobs, the ones we knew wouldn't, with child in lifeless council flats. Others trying to stay sane, trying to escape. Get out of here.

And I'm watching the spit of the sea crash on the pebble, and the florescences, the street lights, a trawler in the bay, and I'm just staring into the night, into the future.