| now is | once was | came from | heard tell |

10:48 p.m. - 2005-01-31

Two weeks and counting

Yeah, I miss it. I miss home. I miss layers of familiarity and tension everywhere I go. I miss the music and the dancing and the watching girls out the corner of my eyes. I miss counting down the weeks until the next big dance party, assembling the outfit not just for the night but for the night before, the morning after, the night after that. The nightclubs so closely integrated as the backdrops for the bits of my life that matter. I miss my eyes gritty from eyeliner and glitter, stumbling into a pub where I know no matter what my state, someone waits for me all longing and admiration. I miss kisses and someone in my arms, the claws of self-doubt in my gut or the swagger of absolute certainty. I miss the filthy, bustling street where you can go into a pub at 10am on no sleep and drink beer and play pool and put songs on the jukebox. Wait for the night again.

I love the mess and trash and intensity. That is my life, that is what I made of it. Sex and drugs and tribal beats. Fiercely competitive dancing and life advice swapped in the stolen breaths between stomping feet. Dancing until my outfit is so soaking wet that it sticks to my skin and becomes transparent, my mouth is a hard line and my face is set determination. Oh Mandy, oh Feisty, oh Sveta, how you transported me. Made me a possessed doll, projecting with fierce intensity out of reality into anywhere else. That was my reality. Is my reality.

I have a life that looks like a page from modern urban fiction. See the too-bright stars who are my friends and the way we rip each other apart, the drugs always lubricating so we can go on another night, another party, without falling to pieces. Lines of speed off the back of the CD case of the most recent clubbing hit, a rolled note passed like a hug. You can crush a pill with a razor and rack it up, mixed in with the speed- it might be pink and sparkly, or blue, or any colour of the pilling rainbow. We have little gelatin capsules in baggies for the main event, crystal or MDMA powder or, if it’s a big night, both. The worse it tastes the better it is for you, for the you that lives tonight at least. You will stand in a sea of people and throw your eyes to the glowing steam that is the roof above and give praise. Give thanks. Give love.

And the rest of life, crowded in around with it’s demands, runs a distant second. It is possible to go on forever, so long as you work just enough, study just enough, eat just enough to get through to the next magic night. We are not addicted to the drugs we carry, with a little paranoia, in various cavities of our outfits and persons. They are the vehicles, not the journey or the destination. We are junkies only for that high, that magic, of the night itself, the music, the way your body convulses to the beat when there is no other option. We are the most loyal of subjects.

And now this. All that is left behind. I am here now, in suburbia, with cold streets and big trees and trying still to learn my way around. I cook too elaborately for one, spend hours of my day on the ritual of preparation. I have new acquaintances, potential friends, breathless chattering and cautious choice of words. I don’t have my safety net, I don’t know where to find the beat, my nights out are all quiet bars and a beer clutched in my hand. Such a different life. I long for this. Who am I? I have spent the last three years of my life perfecting the world I just came from, and I had it. Almost perfect. I want to know who I am away from that. How does it feel to go a month without an ecstasy come-down? How does it feel to walk in somewhere and feel genuinely, innocently nervous- not choked up by the layered, years worth of tension and the shining smile I paste over the top? I suppose that’s what I’m here to find out.

- |+

[and then] - 2005-07-11

[Late Spring] - 2005-05-27

[Pop] - 2005-04-08

[Phone Home] - 2005-02-22

[She hurts, even from here, she hurts.] - 2005-02-11