April Fools

At twenty past seven on Saturday morning I was sat in Oscar’s bed, watching the pink blossom on the opposite side of the street swaying almost undetectably. I was trying to figure out if there was a slight breeze, or if my eyes were making everything sway in a sickly, languid way resembling the way my body felt. Antoine was squashed in to the left of me.

“There’re symbols, and it’s like a crossword, like crazy-bus-lady writing you know, and it’s swelling into a balloon. And now it’s a siren...and it’s like bursting. When I shut my eyes, you know.”He muttered in a thick Irish jabber. Jonny was half tucked into the duvet, his stubble peeking out from the covers and his big blue eyes obscured by Mickey Mouse pupils. “There’s a curtain twitcher across the street” he whispered to me cautiously.

Oscar sat by the record player, chain smoking. Andrew, the twenty-eight-year-old father of two we’d met on the bus an hour previously, asked for a change of music. “Sounds like a bloody funeral in here. What’s this shite? Four Tet? I want some trance on.” I tried to shut my eyes but they buzzed and vibrated in my head, shapes and mathematical patterns floated across my consciousness, trying to lull me to sleep through endless symmetries but it wouldn’t happen, I wouldn’t rest for another twenty hours.

I thought back to the only definate song I could remember of the night. At half four they’d played Sun by Caribou and everyone had slowly extended their hands upwards, contorting towards the light of the dj booth like the cress-in-a dark-cupboard experiment you do in school. They let the sounds alter them, compounding everyone’s movements to the same frantic drone. Oscar asked me how I got to be so good at dancing, and I spent ten minutes introspectively wondering if people were capable of being insincere on the kind of chemical that had tampered with his usually sarcastic and collected temperament.

My cheeks were smushed into the chests and necks of the boys I was with, ushered into the huddle of stimulated serotonin receptors. “I’m an honorary lad, I’m an honorary lad. Wait a minute my bra’s falling down.” Oscar checked his watch, I rolled up my sleeves, Jonny fluffed his fringe. These actions were repeated with compulsive agitation, filling in gaps between the thirteen miles of dance moves my pedometer recorded of the night, and pauses for tender group proclamations.

In the morning air I felt deliciously, hallucinagenically lucid. Putting their arms around me, I propped up the boys as I thought of forgotten childhood memories; playing in the mud with a kitchen spatula, digging up slugs and worms. The next day I tried to make sense of what I had thought was important enough to concentratedly type into my phone:
“Some thoughts I had whilst high. Men are like snails. They respond to the lightest touch. No matter how high I get I retain my cynical level of sub consciousness.”
Obviously not.