PART II: Everyone has their routine
Sounds of city ambience settled around us as she and I gallivanted past the old, Victorian-era terraces in the centre of the city. There were some teenagers nearby eating greasy fast food. We contemplated whether or not to start harassing them, but instead opted to fling lurid jokes at one another, each of us busting with unrestrained cackles every time a new joke was cracked.
My self-consciousness had vanished. I felt like I didn’t have a care in the world. I often felt like this when I was around her. Furthermore, we never ‘made’ conversation; the conversation always seemed to make itself, escaping from both of us with a natural rapidity. This I especially liked.
We arrived at the new bar. Two beautiful and elegant bartenders, a boy and a girl, sat casually conversing on a step next to the bar entrance. The boy focused on rolling his cigarette while the girl spoke precociously about matters of the highest regard (or so I fantasised). I sensed these two were prime candidates for the ‘interesting and beautiful people’ that I so desired; however, their physical elevation from me (the step they were sitting on was well above ground level) also reflected a psychological elevation – or so I felt – and this caused me to clam up. The entrance to the bar was closed and so she attempted to confirm with the bartenders. They glanced up at us, politely said the bar was closed, and then quickly resumed their foci, the boy on his cigarette, the girl on her one-sided conversation.
We were at a loose end. Another mutual friend of ours had been asking us to come over to her place that night, so we now decided to meet this request by wandering over to the nearest train station. As we headed down the long escalator toward the train platform deep in the belly of the city I felt drunk with alcoholic honesty. I decided to put forward a certain something.
‘Is there a reason that you don’t want to be with me or is it that you just don’t feel it?’
She looked at me. ‘I dunno,’ she said.
I couldn’t read anything in her manner.
The conversation hung there briefly for a moment, but she didn’t say anything further and so I didn’t ask.
We sat waiting for our train. There was something particularly ethereal about the trains that night, specifically the ones that didn’t stop at the station. They would quickly glide past like fast phantoms, hardly making any noise other than a brief whooshing sound right before evaporating into thin air. Every time one flew through, I felt a tingling sensation in my neck.
The train finally arrived. I lay down across the seats with my legs over her, attempting to push a teaspoon of intimacy. She started a conversation with the two guys sitting opposite us and I started to feel anxious. One of them mentioned he was a builder. The other (not a builder) wore a black hoodie and was relatively nondescript. The builder began to talk about how he had just spent $12,000 on a pair of breast implants for his wife.