on this day

I did all those London things. Woke up late. Hungover. Quasi jump-out-the-window. Not quite. Not really. Get out. Feel better. Drink coffee in an important office. Feel connnected in a disconnected office. Sniff out openings. Feel dirty for wanting to sniff out openings when all you really want to do is catch up with someone who happens to work in an important office. Relatively important. It's all relative. Experience an awkward British hug. Go to another office. Name drop a bit. Demonstrate some intelligence. Feel the carpet moving under my feet. Go home. Sleep. Go out. Drink. Connect. Get the tube. The pub I went to is one I used to live right next to. In Brixton. For years it never changed and now it's been redone. Kind of tastefully. I went there with N and H on a particular night. The night of the day that the death of SK was revealed. A day of stunned sense. Sense not having been negated by what in other cases might have been a senseless action. Stunned, because even if it was not such a surprise, after all, after all that people knew and didn't know, after all that had been written, death still comes as a jolt. A winding. Breath taken out of sails. And we drunk in the pub in the same place if not the same table as I drunk tonight, and we were not yet sad, though at some point, later that night maybe, we would be possessed of a sadness we didn't know we could possess. But that came later. At that point we were, if anything, frustrated. Even irritated. As though one of us had given up the fight. Although it's never quite as simple as that, is it? As though we had been left behind, whilst the other moved down the fast lane, leaving nothing but tail lights, as red as ever, to be chased. And there I am, a decade and more later, still chasing. Catching up. Ever closer. Doing all those London things. Which are only beats. In a story which is being imagined in the mind of someone who's never been here; never tasted beer; never talked in a pub; never known refurbishment.