Cool To Be Lonely

There are people marauding everywhere carrying packages of emoticons wrapped up in cells hand-held, both hands, before them. How people ever interacted with people they weren’t already connected to baffles me. What does it look like to be lonely these days? Everyone has a way of covering it up. It used be hats now it’s a device, a more intricate and far less mysterious device. Phones, headsets, gadgets. Only the truly brave wear loneliness with pride, in true fashion.

It falls somewhere between desolation and delirium. For loneliness to work one has to be in it, that is alone, and why else would anyone find themselves there unless on the very edge of something. Loneliness is settling and sometimes a person has to feel it to appreciate the other side, which is company, and good company at that. Say, feeling lonely is natural; not something to be covered up by modern living like some dirty secret; something to be done once in a while to remind humanity of its threadbare way of existence in an albeit cool city. It’s cool to be lonely, sometimes.

Date

Looking in all the drawers for cigarettes.

Rummaging around, opening the drawers - going through ruckasacks - coat pockets - and opening and shutting the fridge door. Find scraps of paper, packet of paracetamol, ball of string, toothbrush, golden thread, Ibuprofen, no damn cigarettes. Settle for a muckefuck instead. And settle on this computer typewriter instead. Yeah.

We stood beside one another in a moment of unknown significance.

Three people meet at an Eat café (but one of them can’t make it). So it’s a date. A Blind Date. A spontaneous thing like combustion. We meet and she says,

‘Have you been here long?’

And he says, ‘I’ve been here 4 minutes.’

A good start don’t you think? Precise and to the point.

She gives him one of her funny looks and they embark.

The other person is MIA in Berlin. Who knows in a whore house or on a barge, what’s the difference? It’s all art anyway. He has a predilection for whisky but can’t admit it. She knows it and describes it as an addiction (privately).

‘Enough about me tell me more about yourself’

‘Well –‘

‘I’m twenty-seven by the way, just so you know, I’m twenty-seven.’

There’s a pause so she gives him that look again but this time it’s slightly on the verge of encouragement.

‘How old are you?’ (him)

‘How old do I look?’ (her)

‘Judging from your position in life, where you are and what you're currently doing…’ I hasten to add she doesn’t like hypebole

‘… I would say, not by the way you look but judging by the way you are – somewhere between twenty-five and twenty-eight?’

‘I’m twenty-four.’

Putting his coffee cup down firmly, ‘Well done.’

A moon in a bottle. A landscape of dreams. Freudian conclusions, that’s Surrealism for you. Pictures hanging the wrong way round portraits of impulses and fear congealed with time. Expanses of objective nothingness, which is everything in the mind’s eye. She’s heartbroken and she’s consuming everything with her eyes and teeth and smiles. She hates the lifeblood and wants to freeze it and chuck it out into the Arctic Ocean where there’s an abundance of ice cubes, but not, shards.

(Last Year) They stood beside one another in a moment of unknown significance.

Eras

It was like what it was in the 90’s

                       It could have been the 60’s

                                        And it felt like our 20’s