Angels and Demons

Tell me all your thoughts on God
'Cause I would really like to meet her.
And ask her why we're who we are.
Tell me all your thoughts on God?
'Cause I am on my way to see her.
So tell me am I very far?

-Counting Blue cars, Dishwalla

It begins when your head feels like a badly tuned radio. You try and figure out some coherent thought in all the static, but you can’t. You fill up your ears with music, but that just makes the noise worse. In this state, part anger, part panic, and part real fear, you escape from the cage that is your home and you run down the streets. With your steps comes a semblance of order; with your marching, your music is disciplined, and in this method you discover your loneliness. Deep within. So deep it is part of you. So deep that if you gouged it out now, you would hemorrhage and die. And then you’re about to give up, lean against the nearest wall and slide down in defeat; but there is a part, a very very small part compounded of courage and hope. And that part makes you call a number. Like fucking once before dying of cancer.

It is a property of sodium vapour lamps and of great cities, I think; in the night one can walk streets tirelessly. So we made that our property. Seamlessly we walked, not hand in hand, but with a camaraderie that seemed born of the yellow night. What else was born of the night, I do not know; I know only this- there was laughter in it, a little forced, a little tired, but real nevertheless; there was a relief tantamount coming home for a while, laying down a tired head on a sympathetic shoulder; there was some wonder at secrets spilled easy, guessed easy. Like making love for the first time, like undressing your lover, gently, every revelation a miracle. Like finding birthmarks in unexpected places and home in the crook of an elbow and the curve of a waist.

It was thing of pretty lights and riversides. It was a string of stories around our necks, and we compared their colours. We gasped when they were the same, even though we knew there are only so many beads and only so many colours. It was a thing of desperation, because you see, we had stood at so many street corners, asking so many people the same questions, and we had almost stopped believing that we would ever get the right answers. Or finding people who understood the survey in the first place. It was a thing of intellectual snobbery, and a shot of hormones in the veins. But mainly, it was a thing of the night- an illicit secret, a decadent flavour, a bastard child.

It was a picnic in exile. Yesterday, we didn’t kill our demons. We bribed them into temporary silence with tequila shots.

We wish them the worst hangover. Ever.