Dancing to Hole’s album with the sea coming to our feet, I became friends with my sister again. With the night stars pinning the sky up above us, we danced off the sharp tequila that had shaken us. We shared headphones and one cassette tape in a cheap walkman. We were still kids then, sort of. We were old enough to drink tequila, but young enough that we didn’t have anyone counting on us. It makes you selfish, being young. It makes you be inside yourself as the centre of your world. It makes looking back from an older age have this filter of wonder, of the strangeness of yourself, of your younger self.
relationships
January: Two people
Two people, at not quite their first meeting but coming together out of boredom and as a result of the deliberate steeping of their own hearts in salt, in a squat-style nightclub in East London at the beginning of Spring, will medicate each other’s wounds only partially successfully and, kiss.
August: Renew
In July, August and September I have to write a lot to finish my course. Instead of writing new things for my blog I’m going to tart up some old things. An early version of this story appeared in Words With Jam magazine in 2011. Let me know what you think.
We’re Chained
The ice cubes in Ali’s glass made tiny twitches as the vodka melted them. ‘This means something,’ she said, her voice hoarse.
‘I’m sorry?’ I said. My chest ached with the sadness that bore down on my ribs. I wanted to drink, and talk, and not think about the way each second, or gesture or even thought, was a second, gesture and thought further from where you and I had been.
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Morning shy eye
The daylight touched her eyelids; the cloth at the window strained the sunlight to milk that then sank through her eyelids. The eyes reacted to the sun’s mild pressure by telling her mind to tell her body to wake up.
Her eyes were eager to take in the room. Details of it had been mouthed to them by the morning light while her body was still too sleep-heavy for the eyes to have peeked out from under their lids.
Her eyes had never seen anything in this room in this light before. They tracked their way over the writing, reading and listening debris on the floor. They navigated the middle-ground of shelves and desk. They traced along the ceiling, back around the door, to the chimney dirt in the old fireplace. Then they hesitantly turned the girl’s attention to the boy in the bed. He was still asleep and so the girl’s eyes took their chance to linger on the details of his face. His pores and follicles. The hue of his eyebrows. The gradient of his lips, from where the pink began and at what point it moistened to red.
The daylight cupped the boy’s face. The girl’s eyes saw his react to the morning kiss of sun and, suddenly nervous of what their opposites would see, they pulled their lids down again.
![By en:image from National Eye Institute and modified by Nordelch. Translated into Japanese by me was a bee. ja:National Eye Instituteからとってきた画像をNordelchさんが加工。was a beeがその画像を日本語に翻訳。 (Image:Eye Diagram without text.gif) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eye_diagram_%28ja%29.png "Eye diagram (japanese)")