When I come home from SinCity I invariably smell like other people. Tonight my hands are spicy, a light fragrance with a vaguely familiar undertone, as if the man I brought home with me wears a scent that was worn by someone I used to know. In my hair is the dancefloor, dry stale air of the sort only found in night-time establishments, and a little bit of Matthew, who became more familiar as the evening wore on to morning, though I still can’t place where I know him from. I can sense that my sentences are fragmentary, but I’m far too tired to place the how or where of such matters. Certainties lie in the fact that my hands are shaking from fatigue and typing is difficult because of it, that Matthew is my friend in spite of my being unable to remember, that I am chilled, but there have to be effort spent before my bed will be free of cloth and clean clothing enough to burrow into, and that once again I’ve trusted someone with no definable reason beyond the fact that it was the right thing to do.
That last one. I like it that way, I think. At least, with what thinking is possible when the brain is immersed in such weariness. Soaked in it like the tea I just had, pale and warm and soothing. It’s five:ohthree now, perhaps by six I will be able to sleep. There is laundry to be collected from the room at the foot of the stairs. I’m not looking forward to it, however brief the excursion. It is a cold cement room in the basement, next to the car-park we have no access to, lonely because of it’s slothful utilitarianism. There is a hole in the wall, large enough for a small rabbit to fall through with ease, what leads directly outside, and the floor is made of dirty floorboards on top of damp cement, lint driven permanently into the cracks. It reminds me of cliche, though they all have to start somewhere, and this building is a good a start as any. Even the tenants themselves are slightly passe.
It seems the main floor is populated entirely with hookers, as evinced by they themselves and backed up slightly by the laundry I occasionally fish from the washing machine which they thank me for finding later, with the one exception of the one armed war veteran who has them scurrying over all the time. They dart, hiding, into his room when the front door opens and they are caught in the hall. My floor, the second, has a quiet married couple next to us, a single mother on welfare with two young children across the hall, and a mystery neighbor no-one has ever seen next to the back stairs. Upstairs is unknown but for the Native women who’ve decided that I am a playwright from my manners and dress. A convenient world that must be, I think, to have such pegs and holes. I must only be missing the cravat, as surely a playwright must have one. Haven’t these people seen Dickens? I would suppose in a better written script, I might be the art student, living with my best friend who drinks interesting alcohol with me and moans about the state of the world today. The film would give him an accent he does not have in real life.
