#getting in my head

The way the bus lurches through the three am has such a slow rhythm to it that it’s almost as if the wheezing few tonnes of red metal are trying to rock you to sleep. If it weren’t for the sneaking suspicion that the driver was as quietly drunk as you are, as I am, I’d go along with that idea. Drunk on the night, the time, the intoxicating taboo of three am, when well-to-do folk are well asleep, and the earlier risers are far enough from rising that it’s not even worth contemplating. 

I didn’t kiss you, not at three am. We were both too tired. But I held you for a while, my hand still lightly fuzzy from when I slapped you, spanked you, at the party. 

It’s hard not to feel stranded in London at night, like you’re Odysseus after Troy, tasked with making it all the way home after the carnage you’ve wrought. Each trip is broken, disassembled into its component parts. Walks, rides, the slow circling of the drain towards home, towards bed. Everything stretches, grows thin, until you can do nothing but feel the time pass, occasionally injected with a little activity. Home comes up as a surprise, a jolt of recognition as anonymous buildings suddenly tickle something in your memory, and you rise from whatever nonsense your brain comes up with in the early hours.

We didn’t get home, because we went to yours. Nothing feels quite as unknown as North London before daytime. It’s a sprawl, urban and urbane, and then not. Courteous streets start to decay and age, clean concrete giving way to unkempt brick and cobblestone, council flats and terraces. You knew where you were going, and it was impossible not to feel like you reveled in that little power you had, the lazy smile scrawled over your face an undisguised tell.

There was a trip between busses, or maybe we were done riding for the night. Alcohol and time make my memory fuzzy. I remember pissing on the office building, serving as lookout for one another, a certain juvenile thrill making it seem risky and adventurous instead of crass and rude. I didn’t care, I still don’t. I doubt we were the first, and here, I doubt we were the last.

I do remember the flat, with the boxes, everything half done, as if it was attempted and the monument of the task had overcome whoever was in charge of unpacking. We had to push the door open, clamber over cardboard and books. I remember the sparseness of your room.

And I remember how easily we fell into it, exhaustion, relief and patience each pushing us towards one another. It was so unbelievably relaxed, that night, morning, in between. It’s a wonder I even came, that you did, really. But like I said, everything was stretched thin, made dream like, and I suppose that goes for the sex, too. As if our metabolisms, our senses, had slowed down with us, and with it the experience somehow managed to survive, thrive, even. It’s survived in my memory, at the very least.

We smoked after, in some valiant attempt at retaining consciousness, stretching that moment even more, until it threatened to break. And then we slept, you feeling far too small in my arms. 

Morning changed things, the way morning does. The boxes and books were an obstacle rather than an adventure. The stale smell of smoke in the air ever so slightly distasteful. The grime on the streets had lost its charm, and the only thing I wanted was the familiar, home. It made me feel disingenuous, like I’d merely allowed myself to be carried along with the night, and here I was, Bruce Banner after an episode. I was a wretched thing. 

And yet you were not. You still had that brief smile, the flicker of your eyes towards the ground each time I looked at you. It was as captivating then as it had been the night before, and it made my head spin. Put it down to the alcohol perhaps, the hangover that was turning my head into a drum machine. But that goodbye kiss held all the promise of any of those previous. 

There’s a difference between three am and eleven, and it’s not just in the change of light.