Nocturnette 12: Avila. By Jan Lakowski.
The television flashes on. Anaemic eye of White light. Duck and cover, caged under tables, the rapid tucking of limbs. Communal Scaphism in the Anderson Shelter, part-buried in soil like an ancient ruin. Enveloped in nightcrawlers.
You're faded, a bloodstain. The slaughter that gives. People missing love in iphone texts, fingering close-typed quips instead of watching that forgotten sun rise or set. Rise again, rise again. Playing online Scrabble instead of dissecting that twisted affair. Photographing the wet, pursed pink anemone instead of kissing it, and relishing its salt.
Lives left unenriched, non-affirmed, hollowed out in draws, smithereens of fear, worn to wraiths of violet smoke.
A lonely winter coast where summer holds no promise, no firm, sun warmed future days, and then another bottle's bottom. Lager tops, bottle buttons.
I switch the T.V off, and breathe a long sigh of relief.
Though I imagine that each time I visit Usan, I return to my car, spent and fevered, and motoring, ride over skeins of asphalt to dive deep into my bed like an auk, I realise repeatedly that actually I never leave.
And the tide, is perpetually pulled in endless retreat, by the yellowed moon in that perfected reality, as explicit as a tooth's void, in the infinite curve of time in the ever-expanding space of a smile. How far will it retract from my mind to tease me? I feel I have to find the infantile drool at its low water mark, before its swell learns the lay, fruit, and dead of the transitory shore.
I am suddenly reminded of my trip to Avila, Spain, during Christmas and New Year 2012. The kindly Spanish winter, dry as an oak twig. Luminous yellow sunsets over the mountain wall mirroring the walled town. Spain filtered through brashly vibrant Americanised restaurants and the pious melancholy of the bare white mornings espied through the shades, already dying down with the day. Out roving with Dave while she dreamt. My lover, Spain, the full-bodied sun, the trees and the tourist droves and drovers. That initial caress, the first sex of that life. The dance of hands and a woman's inadequately proportioned confidence and egotism. Small festive hours raining spent Spanish cigarettes on clean concrete, menstrual blood over hands, bellies, cock and bed sheets. Falling in love with the romance of that place and time and losing the woman somewhere passing on while reality becomes more defined, in textual anxieties over mobile phones and computer screens. I got bitten so badly I bled out in a snowy copse at night, walking in circles reciting a mantra of our idealistic love, crying and calling out.
I snap to, blinking in the low sun, red as a buoy beacon, silhouetting looming copses of rocky spires as far as my eyes will allow me to see. Just how far will that impossible tide recede?
It might be best to take a gander, prior to dusk's hallowed bent. Make a start, anyhow. I am on form and breathing hard. Chest flushed, stomach wound tight in a hanging tension, rabid for the unusual and the unexpected.
(The epitome of weathered beauty, a ruined majesty in a reflection of a microcosmic habitat reigned over by the vulturous moon, cowled and erudite, all encapsulated in the ancient agate nodule, tactile and sensuous, a 3 dimensional chromatographic relic. You have your theories on agate formation, as you also have your theories on the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth senses, perceptions, on the holocaust, on the imminent afterlife.)