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We Only Ever Graze Our Knees In Playgrounds.
I am standing on the edge of summer, back where the lines are blurred like heat-waves along the horizon. There is a certain stillness to the streets which has replaced the nervous anticipation that has kept them in a state of flux these past few weeks, as though with old brushes on brand new percussion the cosmic build up has begun. A distant throb rides the gentle incline, climbing slowly, punctured only by the carefully crafted sentences of strangers intent on making a scene. I dream of charged particles collecting on the terraces and colliding on the pleins and of the first night of The Long Weekend as yet unspoiled by the reality of what gathers in glass back alleys and on the banks of thawed canals. I hear the first peals of laughter, the ping of aluminum ring-pulls and the coquettish kiss of wine bowls filled by an extra third. I see the rudimentary smoke of barbecues which gather like that fog you find over lonely bodies of water in the hours before anyone is really awake yet.
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I See Your Anne Frank’s House And Raise You A Glass Of Beer.
I finally make my way out onto Albert Cuypstraat somewhere between breakfast and lunch. I rub hot rocks from red light eyes as I burst onto this colourful thoroughfare, home to a world famous street market and a little known writer called Sasha Gallo. It was the first Wednesday, the virgin Wednesday and the raw air was still rich with the foretaste of caraway and adventure. There were so many curious smells, spit roasting chickens, flame-grilled veal lawash, crispy vlaamse frites and waffles with a sprinkling of kaneel. I make my way passed the candy-striped awnings and blood-stained tarpaulin, realising that this morning I am hungry for something much more than breakfast.
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Me & The Buoys.
Under the clinical white light at Harwich International Port there isn’t a single face in the crowd, not faces I don’t recognise or faces I have come to forget, but no faces at all. A forlorn terminal littered with featureless spirits that float like wisps of bad weather in every direction all at once as though caught on a spaghetti junction for the dead.
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TO SKIN & BONES!
A smokescreen lifts to reveal a most celebrated of tables at centre stage, a worshipped table, a table whose reputation precedes it, floodlit and in focus, set according to the order of the evening, one last grand descent into madness. Over the rabid course of the last two years it has been around that seemingly commonplace piece of household furniture that countless friendships have been forged with red hot pokers and sizzling smoke water, parchments ironed out and countersigned in blood, crocodile tears hit rock bottom and found beer bottle answers, hash clouds and white tightropes, carcasses stripped by vultures, victoria sponges fist-fucked and eaten, minds lost, minds blown, gunpowder plot and society X, everyone is fed ‘til they’re full, new systems, worlds and dimensions all conceived, born and forgotten before dawn.
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IF YOU’RE 555 THEN I’M 666.
Like so much that happened during those lost days, the pact was forged around that most worshiped of tables. Our absent-minded participation in the fragmented conversation that had come before had helped to conjure a most perplexing situation. We had streaked down the badly paved lanes of our youth, tripping over exposed pipes, ducking between rusty scaffolding and taking shortcuts through metallic back alleys, working ourselves up into a cast iron fever. In the air hung a fantastic stench, a familiar stench, both atomic and cosmic, which if inhaled possessed properties that would allow us to explore the abyss and the infinite all at once. We sought to undo reality, the two of us, at least as desperately as our so-called vices, to strip it back and bury ourselves deep in the void…
Apéritifs & Unpainted Houses.
fiction and photographs by benjamin savva.
