I hear the Irish twang of Ed Byrne ‘Live At The Apollo!’ and I instantly think of Sean. Asides from the obvious, what strikes me most is how I suddenly find his accent endearing rather than irritable. The way his lips would curl around each syllable bore an eerily striking resemblance to my late granny Delma, half dead from dementia, and I would inadvertently cringe. Whatever feelings I may have had for him are an absolute mystery – and yet I think of him now, of the night we spent drinking in the pissing rain, enjoying nothing but each other’s company. I remember laughing the most, promising how we’d fall in love and get married, drunk off the delightful unimportance the events of youth often presents us with. Nothing matters. You can promise yourself to anyone, fool yourself into thinking that this is the man you will grow old with, die with, live with. You’ll cook together and sleep together; you’ll know his bad habits and in turn he’ll learn yours. You can even fart in front of each other. Bliss!
But even the uncouthness of youth has its limit on such frivolous things as ‘first love’. You start to grow tired of the same face, the same arms, the same mother who fixes your lunch for work just the way you like it ‘cause she knows you well enough by now. It all becomes…and rather horribly…routine. You feel old. I’ve missed out on life! On friends! On getting drunk and finding yourself in the arms of an exotic stranger! (although ‘exotic’ would be an extremely dangerous description of someone from the dark corners of Lincoln, and at best describes a man with an indoor toilet.) It is times such as these when even the freshest of spring flowers among us shall look around after the first proper ‘break up’ of their lives and wonder: is this what it’s really all about? Will everyone simply bore me? Or perhaps I am to blame, for never fully loving anyone enough to completely hand your whole self over, defenceless, to this one person who, at the end of the day, when it all boils down to the God Ugly Truth, is probably more interested in Match Of The Day than the girl he convinces himself he is besotted with. That’s why I had to face Sean the next day and confirm that the previous night’s events were harmless fun, and we were drunk, and it never meant anything to either of us.
What’s the point in complicating things when we can screw each other out of our minds instead?
