5These Things Take Time
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the sacred wunderkind
You took me behind a dis-used railway line
And said "I know a place where we can go
Where we are not known"
And then you gave me something that I won't forget too soon
But I can't believe that you'd ever care
And this is why you'll never care
But these things take time
And I know that I'm
The most inept
That ever stepped
I'm spellbound, but a woman divides
And the hills are alive with celibate cries
But you know where you came from, you know where
You're going and you know where you belong
You said I was ill, and you were not wrong
But I can't believe that you'd ever care
And so, you never cared
But these things take time
And I know that I'm
The most inept
That ever stepped
Oh the alcoholic afternoons
When we sat in your room
They meant more to me
Than any living thing on earth
They had more worth
Than any living thing on earth
Vivid and in your prime
You will leave me behind
You will leave me behind
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
It was a grey day. I remember that clearly, the way the clouds seemed to suck the colour out of everything and everything was grey. Even you. And even then, with the muted colours around us, your grey seemed amplified; your grey shouted.
I was pinned back the first time I saw you in what I thought was a Men's Club, and what WAS a men's club, but for a different kind of man than, for instance, that brutal presence that was my father. Pinned down by the tacks of your cold winter blue eyes. You smiled and I fled; I was intimidated by the masculinity of your body pressed against another man's.
The recollection of how we grew from a fleeting snatch of eyes meeting, to me letting you take my hand to lead me across dead tracks -towards a place where only the crows still haunted- is gone like the colour in my recollection of that cold grey day, but I know that it happened. I have very clear memories of that day.
I was only sixteen and terrified out of my mind with what this meeting meant for me. You were eighteen, and those scant years made such a difference to me. Going on nineteen, you seemed so much worldlier than I was, but still, despite my trepidation, the way I cast dark eyes to the ground and curtained the space between us with unruly earthy coloured hair you still pursued me determinedly. You stopped the nervous run-on of my words with a single finger hooked under my chin, and it felt strangely human. I thought, with your cutting eyes and pale hair, that you would feel cold.
"I know a place where we can go where we are not known." You said, and the conception of the idea that I could exist outside the boundaries of the world (which was my society, which in turn was ultimately my dad's society... and my father himself) grew in my head and caused me the utmost misery until I was finally able to move out, some seven years later.
And then you kissed me.
And I treated it like I was exploring. When you asked me if I liked it, I nodded and said it was good. You were the wonder child, the boy who could have whoever took his fancy, you were eighteen years old. I didn't think I'd have any chance with you, so I made out as if I didn't care. I kept in mind that you'd probably grow bored of me and my adolescence as you were starting to outgrow your own. And I was painfully aware of the incompetence of my adolescence.
It was partly due to my youth that I fell for you. We hardly knew each other and you were restless all the time. There was hardly a time when you were completely with me, I could see it shut away in the back of your eyes. You told me the second time we met that you were in love; with an older woman. She was tall and curved like a cello, you said, eyes that ate you and hair you'd never touched but only in your imagination a thousand times over.
"Is that why you won't have sex with me?"
I had to understand. You liked me a lot, more than a lot. I had similar eyes only mine didn't eat; mine were endless, like holes that he could never be found in. You liked me, you said, in a different way to this woman, but you knew nothing would ever come of us. You'd had boys like me in the past, but nothing was like what you had now for this pure woman, because you had a future with her. And nothing with me.
I told you that you could have a future with me. You said I was lovesick. You were right. But I didn't tell you that. I told you I was just suggesting alternative life options.
I can't believe I ever thought you'd believe me. I made excuses about as well as I kissed, and I kept you as well as I made excuses.
It still aches me in a way that's pleasant and painful at once, in the way that nostalgia makes us long for what we experienced. But at least we had it. We'd take bottles of cheap red wine into your room and sit and drink until we forgot the dead end job that was our lives. Until I forgot my love for you and you forgot your love for that woman although neither of us really ever forgot anything.
And we'd play records over and over: The Smiths made our misery poetic and taught us about the decadent anguish of love; Joy Division made sense out of our confusion and we heard how it felt before suicide; Lou Reed brought us our own culture from America, and Bowie did the same in our own country and Iggy Pop let us be angry with a destruction in our own minds.
The things we spoke about that made it rich, the rambling conversations that went nowhere but we were unfolding before each other in a way that had nothing to do with sex… it WAS our sex; synonyms for intercourse are contact, communication, interaction and association and we did all of it and more. In those warm, drunken, infinite afternoons we were lovers and their memory lies heavy like a weight in my head.
I looked at you. You were eighteen. I was sixteen. There was never any hope for you to stay. You never stayed.