because, the night.

Yeah fuck it, here I am. My own silence is deafening me.

I’m writing this with the kind of clarity that a year without your lifetime vice can give ya, one year since I did coke, I mean.

I’m 33. I was 16 when I started.

It was so ridic chic for Doncaster, initiated in a church, fucking win; we did it at Camelot’s and we slept at an older boy’s house cos his parents were away and we’d lied to ours.

There was a crowd and they went to Ibiza and wore Vivienne Westwood and bleached ripped denim and we thought they were so cool.

Our parents found out and we got in trouble, my mum bashed a bouquet of flowers over my head (that I had bought to apologise for something else, before) and got a knife (Global, course) out of the showroom house kitchen draw, sort of cut herself but didn’t. A pattern of emotional blackmail / empty threat / for attention that I adopted.

In the first years it was easy. Never paid for it we just knew who to hang out with. Going out with a fiver and ending up puking in the toilets, still getting a taxi back. Never walking, never buses, not for us.

In Doncaster it was a bar that was loved and rightly so. It was halcyon days, Leeds on Toast. Grown ups, 2000’s, Toni & Guy haircuts.

Youth and booze and staying up, watched by the elders who we chased, absorbed, subtly. Not sure what they thought of us. They let us in. It was the first time I heard the phrases prick tease, coke whore, but it was about someone else so that was fine.

Dramas started then. We did know we were different, special; but in the mix was the small town toxic tonic of suspicion, cynicism. We were special?

Big, loud, obnoxious, voracious fish in small ponds we wanted to leave. We’d coated ourselves in a gloss; it shone shiny where we were, but one minute in the dust of the city it had to be polished, upkept. We should have stripped it, they would have loved it, the novelty, the roughnesss, but it was bonded to our skin, we didn’t know to them it looked cheap. And cheap is easy to buy isn’t it. And insecure is easy to mould, no foundations to burn down, just pliable youth.

The many faces we own now, not sure which is ours. The attraction of the night, where we can live in our darkness, no light to shine white and bright revealing us, the many, many broken parts.

The flash on the floor of dance, of light illuminating dewy, juicy youth, pose, pose and pose, over before it you can grab it. Good, safe, never having to stay anyone.

And the glory of the ecstasy, the pleasure in the recklessness, the defiance, the death welcomingness, the dare. All to spite you; teacher, catholic, mum, properness, conformity, stale boredom, jealous crones. It was something in the water, they said. We knew and and the same time couldn’t bring it up to the light to look at. So we ran into the pill and the powder and the oblivion.

For someone who has a punishing fear of being the same, I have always adopted anything else but my own personality. Loads of sames, offered at different times.

Because, the night.