I'm wandering down these little narrow streets. They're wider when they're busy. The sunlight illuminates the cobbled pavements and somehow, with its reflected glare, the pavements seem bigger - big enough to carry thousands of shoppers, each so very individual and kooky and bohemian and cool (not to mention, original). Each stone of the floor is a sponge, saturated with a morning's tranquil light and spilling it out everywhere in a flood of orgiastic colour which seeps from the neon green of the sign above the shoe shop saying Offspring over to the demure browns of Montezuma's Ice Cream. The sun retreats, the stones dry, and all the light begins to shy: the stones, hungry to soak up as much light as they can, rob the streets of space and colour and any feeling of home.
Cobbled, cobbled, Stonewall and Milk. I can see where I'm going, thankfully, as I can catch the streams of light flown east from the distant pavillion as it coalesces in the air, before slipping along the pavements, and draining away, to the unseen sewer of light beneath which floods the underground clubs you enter along the seafront. I know the route, but I don't know where I want to go. Nothing and everything is the same as I remember it. Everyone is still my friend or my enemy as left before but no one quite gets along with each other the same way, and the city changes superficially: there's an Esprit and a Bench now, somewhere. These lanes could be the windy streets of any city, except in any other city they'd be a red light district. I kind of squint my eyes, and press my fingers against the lids and then against my forehead, and the whole city shifts into a spectrum of reds like I thought it might, because that's appopriate in so many ways.
I am choking on dirty air. Hallowed halls and 'dreaming spires' produced such a brighter mind and happier countenance. I run fingers along a lamppost, who in squinting eyes has an arm of light pointing out of the lanes and to Hell Itself, and there is something black and moudly now against my hand. I stare closely at it, and I convince myself that it's blood: the lamp is bleeding? The city? My fingers to its touch? I wipe it away, but it just smears my palm, and I close my eyes and imagine it is running upwards along my arm only that it's no longer blood; it is cobbled pavement sucking the light from the lamppost that gives texture to my hair and my skin, and these vestiges of personage become drowned in darkness. My eyes stay closed, and I walk as the city pulls me under into its belly, into depersonalised hell. Do I enjoy these moments of escape, or are they everything I fear? I open sharply and am spat out, or something. As if my eyes shot out light, there are flecks of it in the air with the swaying city as it resumes shape, before they disappear like all the rest of it, pouring and bleeding; stolen.
I walk in an and around the maze of streets until I bump into myself. Not a mirror, but actually me, on the street, as if I were two lost people in the same city. I wonder if if time is stretched and wrapped upon itself in strings and streamers, or if my soul has wandered out of my body to explore the city alone and I have found it (or perhaps my body has found me), or perhaps this doppelganger is a careful double who arrived to replace me in my absence but was crushed under the languishing lows of the life of Liam. He's wearing a new shirt I bought last week, from one of the new shops that weren't here before, and is staring at me with a similar puzzled expression and a hand reaches over - I thought to fondle me, but actually to grap at my clothes - and he lifts a tassle from it into the air with a physiognomy that spells a road not taken, a wanderer in similar straits. I'm in
subfusc, and he's out for a night out, and I am confused by my desire to kiss this better me who with every moment I wonder might instead just be some helpless person, with a face a bit like mine, and hair like mine. How else do we distinguish people - not by who they are, but by how they appear. I think he wants to kiss me as well, but I'm suddenly pained by the knowledge that were we to do so our realities would collide and fold so as if one never happened. I never know which roads to walk, or which taken were better or worse. So, we shake hands, and hug, and walk apart but I turn around and he's doing the same thing I did a minute ago: running his fingers along a lamppost, then looking at it, and closing his eyes with only his imagination to sweep him out of this city.
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