It all started with me drinking chilled Czech lager, most things do. The ethanol serpent had his tail in his mouth, the orobouros of despair. It was right at the end of December and I was walking towards Oxford Street to exchange the unwanted Christmas presents my parents always give me because after 26 years they still don't know who I am. Why I fell into the pub after, I don't know. It was only the next day I realised I had lost him. I thought you would stay with me forever. I couldn't not-cry under the neon light of abandonment. That night and the next day I grieved but vowed to leave the Czech lager back in the republic for evermore. This was too much. I tried to drive the sense of loss from my mind.
On the train to the airport two days later I did a lot of thinking. M Scott Peck wrote "Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner..."
Now I've met myself before but this time the horror was full. What have I done to myself? And then grief. Everything that had been lost and broken, lowered into the ash and earth on a day when I vowed, "Things will be different". And they were. I don't really like Heineken anyway.
When we arrived in Amsterdam, I took hold of Navigation, rode out every tram route and mapped where all things were. It's something I always do as soon as I arrive in a strange city. I conquer its paths and map its roads and churches and ways of life. I make it my own, and in doing so become empowered. Being lost is being vulnerable; to be without a chart is to be in an uncharted land.
We found the shabby hotel where the rest of our friends were staying and had a smoke with Do-It and Estar. Rather they smoked and I just watched the wisps gradually possess the whole room, saturating it, the thick migraine of the Gods. We arranged to meet the next day and headed back to the other side of town, sleepy. I was restless all night, missing the sedation of alcohol, and still obsessed with my own mourning.
I was set on the club scene for the New Year's Eve celebrations. Still staring into my own eyes with remorse, I steered clear of any liquid intoxication, and sipped a pint of Bulmer's slowly, slowly. The first port of call was Spencer's house party, which took off when we racked up a few lines. Zoom. (This is what good means. Hey I'm back up top now, and the night's going to be so full of good. Good fireworks, good times, good rhythm that rhymes, good karma, good friends. Spencer pulls out some apples and I buy two. Eight Euros each, that's good).
In the club the music was full on, the lights awesome, the crowd pulsing. I swallowed down the bitter pill. Ecstatic. We began to dance, and dance, and feet were in a blur and the tracks had taken over, and I was okay. This place, people, banging techno, warm trance, cocaine-haze, ecstatic ecstasy - it was all okay, right then I swear it was a world in which we would find something, something fine.
Because I realised only I could give myself permission to be ordinary.
A handsome young Dutch boy asked me how it was going and I answered and Henri slips easily into my language. We talk for a little while about the club scene. He reminds me of myself at twenty-one. That's only five years ago mind, I'd still have time to go back. Back into the warmth. I wished the night would last forever, but the cold grey of a winter morning engulfed the flat landscape too soon and I saw the morning's hand stretching inwards with no dread in my heart. The smoke and powders protected me from despair.
What became of us? There were eleven of us altogether, combing the strands of music into a braid of togetherness. We all fell asleep of course, for most of New Year's Day. Then it was coffee shops and bars and partings and finally the journey home to a home without my bear and a world that would never be the same.
