Riff raff, spoons, and sheltered existence all dancing to the tune of barn yard guitar garble. I heard every third word they said between the rock and the hard place I found myself in. Instantly she appeared, a blue heron flown in from days gone by, lost, and soon forgotten. There was no doubt I was back in Glasgow, back in a pub.
The past months have felt like years, elastic moments outstretched and snapped suddenly back. I am home now, but once I was not.
First was Brussels, namesake of the sprout but famous for its waffles; it was a city of walls. Walls that held up the jumble of bold, golden, almost-buildings scaffolded along its skyline. Walls within which a population of malcontents and miscreants seemed to sit, simmer, brew, and breed beyond reach. Walls, that in strokes of inky entreaty called for a better future and a worse tomorrow. Who will win I think I wondered; the answer, like the beauty, remains with the beholder.
Hours later, Amsterdam arrived. Its beauty was sheer like adolescence and rested firmly beyond denial. A glory upholstered on the back of an arcane underbelly, through which ran veins congested by confused spirit; lust and violence. Awkward varicose outgrowths that no longer belonged.
Eons on and lightyears away, I sat in the supersonic park and ate my cake from space. Follicles of grass buckled under my weightless body, subsuming and returning me to the dirt where I was created.
Awake I dreamt: a cathedral of missing monuments, an echo of words said and thoughts lost, whispering in one voice they told me “it never ends.”
Later on, I emerged and found around me a twenty-one bed hostel room. Amongst the metropole of high rise bed-bunks lay several Spaniards, three irritable Italians, one Russian sounding suspect, a family of four - Mother, Father, Child, Child - and our group of five. A handful of students turned creatures in combat of crabb and circumstance.
Just around the corner from our bedsit bedroom was the reception, which though memorable in itself, contained one element of character that pasted itself so firmly in my mind. On every sixth hour that passed by, someone entirely new and distinct absolutely from the last would appear. Seamless, the transition of this residency, of course, never seemed to occur in the presence of me or in fact any of my group, giving the house and its operators an uncanny quality, like bad digital animation or a marionette and its puppet master sat waiting for an audience. The trifecta of room flipping mouse clickers seemed to occupy entirely different planes of being. The shiftiest of them, perhaps in part as a result, though certainly by nature, occupied the night shift exclusively. He paired a bald, stout, and burly demeanour with an absent minded appearance that made the lone hair on the back of my neck stand en garde. The other of the three was incredibly handsome. Most commonly he would sit, both hidden and displayed, behind his cartoonishly tall desk and amongst the airpod max headphones that only exaggerated his square face and tight skin. Alternatively, he could be found stood at the doorway fumigating the hostel with the smell of the joint he only ever seemed to be half-way through smoking…