Everything is limited to infinity
Sitting sideways in the bathtub, legs dangling over the edge.
Staring at the ceiling, the paint is peeling with grey asbestos exposed. My congested lungs fill with steam, white clouds separating that toxic grit from my wet body.
I’m two days in to the slow recovery from a six hour high, key tips of ketamine in Fitzroy dive bar, then beers till daybreak in a white walled townhouse.
Wondering again, what was I chasing? What errant psychology surfaces so strongly, over and over, firing up that unstoppable need to climb out of my mind and unhinge from the balanced distribution of energy. Stubborn curve balls thrown at myself, joyfully.
As always, there were kisses for a broken boy, a fierce want to whisper love into hard skin and feel it melt around the edges of my lips.
The boundless hallucinogenic beauty of being totally free inside my own hot, loose limbs, rocknroll, a belly dancer swinging on the kitchen bench, cigarettes on the floor, stumbling upon fragments of divinity, finding sense within nonsense and soft laughter, then forgetting it all.
Dancing in the streets. Buskers on plastic drums, old African men in suits with twinkling eyes, who see my hips wind and know their secrets, the language of free movement reminding me that I will not regret, what I did not not do.
“It’s for Sam”, I said, over and over, hugging our new housemate, “he needs to see this town”. Such hollow hospitality is beyond me even after three drinks let alone at 5am with a head full of sex and tranquilizers, but we all looked so happy. Each I am sure, with our own nameless agenda.
And then, time runs out and I can’t catch up, colleagues working overtime as I am sent home sniffling, a feeble Monday, she’s sick they say. And I am…sick with wanting and pleasure and fragments of memory. Guilt doesn’ t work because I know that none of this is real, upside down in the void, all that industry a means to an end, carving pathways for feeling, each moment sacred in itself, no matter its allocated worth in the trembling tension of timespace.
I spin around in the bath, legs stretching long up the wall, hunched shoulders wedged hard against the grimy edge. Sighing, I admire the keyhole between my sunken thighs, it’s a little larger after that big weekend, burning calories and brain cells simultaneously. But 27 really isn’ t 21 and though these thighs still inspire shaky fingers to drift across their soft interior, my organs can’t seem to condense all that experience anymore, not without a trade off. Bursts of abusive celebration are measured out against, slow, dull, aching apologies that last for days and days, I wonder if its worth it.
At least, I suppose, these words are left, cashed in with an empty bank account and unread emails, dry lips and a dry cough. The diary of another blowout, much less regular now, but when I think about it, identical to all the rest.
