At this distance, each city light looks like it’s giving me a big sign to stop. We both sat here once, atop Primrose Hill, just mouldering in each other’s self esteem. Remember the day, we approached a junction when I first learned to drive. I remember you telling me that I’d make it through the orange traffic light that was flashing in some untimely celebration of our arrival, when we hadn’t even reached the white line. We watched the windscreen separate us from the endless blue sky whose blocked out shape I now find, a turquoise frame marking out the tower blocks ahead nearly two years later.
As it lies in front of me, everything’s changed. London is not that fog of a curtain lit with some flicker of new truth upon it but a graveyard of dinosaur bones, jutting up in the middle distance. We never waited long enough to say that we felt like two spirits as old as the earth itself, just enjoying each other’s company. Remember how we could read each other in tooth and claw, communicating with the blinking BT Tower, that always will be a tape record of the times you called me brother. Even if we weren’t blood, it was our party trick to pretend and I’m no performer without you in the crowd.
You have caught the plane to Australia by now and it will always be ironic how many planes we watched flying above Primrose Hill, with you not on them. How strange that glinting pink, Planet Mars, was warning me that stars were time frozen till white? Blinking red it screamed at me to take in every moment.
You’re still an echo in that familiar industrial sound so common to these office blocks: a mechanical hug which is probably just the faulty air conditioning, pounding through empty walls. Won’t you reach through the steely concrete and embrace me from time to time? We were as two beams, clad together in our baby bones, stitched to one another with timber, scaffold, brick. We shared our milk teeth, you and I.
I’ll still hold the red and white of my Arsenal scarf at a football game to the height of your head and grab my phone out of my pocket, forgetting to tell you to bring your own before kickoff. North London might not be forever after all, this time.
Does water puddle the same halfway across the globe? Will we smile across at each other through strangers, and will we break our necks on their odd accents, when they mention all the places we’ve been but are no longer? Will we bother to tell each other all these things?
Even the moon, waxing in its own wings, can’t seem to say goodbye; it swims in its gloomy black pond that won’t ever soak up, regardless of how much the temperature rises. No matter how hot it gets out there in the Sydney stained heat.
So, when you reach that terminal, way beyond the blue. Travel far, as fast as you can, don’t pray for a red light to hold you back. The leaves, worms and each and every nook in the tower blocks will remain. These bones will hold. After all, they lived and grew with you and you alone.
Header Image by Louise Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0
