love me?

We meet in the old familiar bar.

This in a sense is weird, I’ve not seen this girl for 2 years, until out of the blue I decided to phone her when I came home for my annual post Christmas visit. And now she is sitting at the bar in one of my old haunts, her long blond hair filled with beads and plaits, purple velvet flared trousers and army boots, every bit the epitome of my perceptions of counter-culture. A dream that has continued to haunt me at times over the years; untouchable.

In many ways she sums up much of what I see as missing from my life since I left, what is still in some ways, my home. And yet in all the fragmented times we’ve met, we have never really talked. 

I am still coming down of the speed I took the night before in some crap indie club the night before, in some vain attempt if I’m honest to find a little attention in a town which has barred my every attempt to re-integrate, if only for a weekend’s visit. I’m tired, aching and heavy as I lift my self onto a barstool beside her, interrupting her from whatever private  reveries she is hiding in from the cold winter world.

“Hi, How the fuck are you?” she says, as she embraces me and kisses my cheek, her warm female scent, like incense and honey and pure desire filling my lungs and my mind.

“Shattered,” I reply, “Y’know every time I come back here I grow increasingly amazed with this town’s ability to fuck with my head…”

“Tell me about it, this place is getting nasty,” she replies draining her glass, so I buy a round an we lapse into a warm haze of the taste of good beer and the scent of tobacco smoke, and reminiscences we only partially share.

“I’d better pass on the beer,” she says after another round, “I’ve got the car in town, what do you want to do?”

“I’ve no plans until tonight,” I answer, finishing my pint.

“Well,” she says “d’you want to come over to mine and have a smoke?”

Her car is parked down the road, immaculate, electric blue. She leans over and opens the door. I climb in as she fumbles in the glove compartment for music.

“Can I play you something?” I ask, taking my personal stereo from my jacket pocket, “I’ve been taking a shot at producing some stuff.”

“Yeah, definitely.” She presses the eject and dumps her tape into the footwell.

The randomly panned kick drums of my tune ricochet across the dashboard speakers and we talk music as the familiar sights of my hometown scroll past the windows of the car as we drive up across the City.

We park outside her house, and she leads me in through the kitchen.

Her Room is a deep purple in colour, draped in exotic fabric, smelling of incense and essential oils, lined with candles, books on occult lore. The room I never had the time to create for myself.

She talks about her herbalism course, we disseminate our hometown and all its problems, the pungent taste of cannabis oil coating our throats, it’s aroma permeating the room.

As we talk we relax, mentally, physically, and also emotionally, until we are revealing our deepest demons.

“I’m not together at all,” she says, “why can’t I just admit it? This is what it was all about, smoking smack, why I keep sleeping with all my ex-boyfriends.” She clings to me as if for dear life.

And we kiss, and the first touch of her tongue to mine is the fulfilment of every dream this town has ever held for me.

She looks into my eyes.

“Why?” she giggles ironically.  “I shouldn’t, but I want you…”

And I want her too. That I know, a feeling more intense than every warning screaming out in my brain: this will hurt you both more than you’ve ever been hurt before.

I sit up, and she rises to meet me as I pull off her top, kissing her pale white neck and shoulders, we undress with more care and tenderness than many times this has happened sensibly and legitimately. She pulls me to her and inside of her and I am lost in the soft, warm unreality of this dream.

And she looks deep into my eyes, every fragment of her mind, every sinew of her body, every atom of her existence crying “love me”

And then the dream is over. I could love her, I do love her, but this can never be and we part with the taste of this shared intimacy still on our lips, but the prescient romance dissolving into a harsh understanding of this cruel existence: a moment in time fading forever.

So our worlds divide. A mere four hours later and my mind is racing from the memory of it all, my senses lifted into a heightened awareness honed to razor sharpness by the pounding rhythms, the stobing lights and the smell of adrenaline as I dance.

Though this music, this dance is the experience I exist for, I wish, how I wish to be back with her tonight, and so my every move in this place is a carefully crafted tool to attract the attentions of someone, anyone, to fill the aching void she left when we said goodbye.

And then for a moment I find someone. Our eyes lock and we dance for a time, following of each other’s movements in that searching way people tend to when their inhibitions have been knocked down by MDMA yet really they’re feeling lonely as fuck inside. Then as usual one of us becomes distracted and I’m left staring as she disappears into the crowd, every fibre of my being pleading “love me…”