Something was watching as we began to leave the cemetery. I don’t know for sure. It was more of a feeling – a paranoia than a certainty, a black space from between the trees and between the gravestones. There are foxes abound in there now, they are becoming tamer, as if nothing matters anymore, or they have nothing left to fear. That night, the dinner and the drinks, was very much a reunion. I wanted to go to a club with the others, but I’m getting too old for this sort of thing. So I went home and felt ill instead.
We walked through the London’s heart, its dark streets and arches. At South Bank, we both saw the homeless girl. “She looks awful,” you said, her eyes no longer looking at the world, but still flaming youth from behind blanched sooty skin. From Millennium Bridge, St Paul’s glistened like a nighttime revelation. It’s fascinated me ever since one 3am walk, noticing one light on in its dome. I’d recently finished Hannibal, and easily saw the good doctor crouched over his parchment, quill in hand, Bach’s Aria da Capo snaking round the gothic rafters like smoke from a cheap tape deck.
Do you know what a true friend is? They’re the ones you can meet up with after years and feel like you never left. As we all lounged about cackling about the past and babbling of our own adventures in Grownupsland, I experienced a brief gnosis of what it is to be happy. Happiness is standing in your own kitchen, potato masher in one hand and glass of wine in the other, with two of your most sincere friends standing there too and making you laugh. And being able to make a bloody good Shepherd’s Pie while they’re doing it.
That was sordid. Like yawning, an exhaustion. I told you a clean truth before you started coughing up unattended to phlegm. As you sighed your goodbye, entirely not understanding, I couldn’t even see your face in the dark. You could have been anyone, and you have been many times before. You like a cheap Yoko and me a clumsy Lennon, you left and left me to my thoughts. I thought of Merlin, and how I was painted with the same colours but not by the same hand. If Fate gives me no other purpose, then what is this emptiness for?
I heard you’re here next weekend. Suddenly resolve collapsed to daydreams of you in white, toasting futures without mud on your cotton suit. You’d stayed up all night bleaching its stains. Did he ever see them? Or is that why he’s here - someone you don’t need honesty with. Someone new to pretend you’re someone else with. You and your blank canvasses. My tapestry might be scrappy, clumsy, frayed even and moth-eaten, but you – you’re a library of notebooks, each smudged once on every page before you turned over a new leaf, frustrated by your mark on the virgin sheet.
This morning I lay in bed watching the red sky spread like a bad omen on the working world. I was truly dreading going in to work. I wanted to stay where it was warm, next to my laptop, notebooks and favourite empty coffee mug. I spent the day realising I should have stayed there. Returning home as I stepped off the bus, a child seen only from the corner of my eye pointed at me and cried “Leto!” I didn’t look back because I suddenly felt anxious. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise.
It was like a fuzzy VHS recording of old times. Through the haze of cigarette smoke and glow of vodka, you could only just notice they’d replaced the actors with cheaper performers who couldn’t act, and the audience who once loved the show too much pretended not to notice. This is all nothing more than nostalgia. Surely at the end of life there should be a party – what happened to going out with a bang? Not this descent into piteous mundane routine. Nothing is new anymore. Everything has been done, everyone has been known and parted from a dozen times.
Don’t you hate discovering someone’s already had your latest great idea? And written it? And, consequentially, you’ll only get accused of plagiarising something you’ve never even read? Nothing’s original anymore. I was born way after my time. The best ideas and abilities to craft them aren’t celebrated anymore, just regurgitating old stories at the right time for the right sized gap in the market. Market, ugh, I ask you. Does anyone remember writing commanding respect? I didn’t think so. Clearly it was before it fell destitute and had to whore itself like every bloody other thing on this miserable planet.
I swear the world wasn’t like this when I was a kid. There was no quick succession of plagues, famines and disasters - no bird flu, floods, hurricanes, terrorism, eruptions and earthquakes in one single year. People didn’t overcome one fear to meet another. The world was not full of hate and death, accelerating towards cataclysm. Peace and love and all everything that makes it worthwhile have just become cliché - all sincerity’s now increasingly rare. I don’t want the world to end. I want people to stop mindlessly killing each other and work together to do something about it.
It was the first time I’d done a reading in some time. I asked about the path I am taking. Blocking the brilliant light of The Sun was The Fool, dancing aimlessly about like a joyful child - unfocused, undisciplined. Two clear paths were ahead, though I’ve been trying to walk both. One brings wealth assured, though the sunlight will, gradually, fade. The other route is hard work and perilous, but I would be duly rewarded with Six Wands. Stubbornness, and clinging to stagnance will undo. It reaffirmed what I already knew. I have to quit my job to succeed.
