I stumbled out my front door tripping over shoes, down the steps and onto the side walk. I love just about any city by night, Im a city-whore like that. Get me drunk, tell me im pretty, then throw me out onto these dark streets and Ill fuck the hell outta this city. My favorite memories tend to involve being face down on asphalt. That’s a little weird I guess.

I found this place some time ago, on the edge of the sea and the corner of ‘nobody gets out alive’. And I still can’t understand all these crooked houses, weeping lights and roads that lead round and around and around and just back to themselves. I lit a smoke and counted the cracks in the sidewalk, followed its patterns of shattered glass and cigarette butts until it led me to a pedestrian crossing which I stumbled onto without glancing up. I waited for the sound of screaming tires and wondered what was supposed to kill me first the impact or internal bleeding. Nothing happened and I really should have been more relieved. I skipped up onto the side walk and bounced down the road towards the bottle store weaving through the darkness until it felt like a game. Although, I’m not exactly sure what of.

There is a secret between me and this city, everybody has one and we don’t talk about it, but it grows through the cracks in the pavement and hums through the buzz of a streetlamp. If this town was quiet enough for even just one moment we might hear the secrets of an entire population.I breathed in my smoke as hard as my lungs allowed. I know this shit kills, but so do a lot of things and they don’t make advertisement campaigns for things like climbing trees really drunk, although come to think of it they probably should, or maybe they have already, I don’t know. But that shit leaves fuck-off big bruises.

I breathed smoke and accidently ashed on myself and it looked like snow falling gently down the front of my dress, it was real pretty in the moonlight until it fell on the ground and then it just looked like tar. I kicked it away and followed the lights walking past the church and remembering the time I drunkenly pissed outside it, while giggling and falling over and cursing and hoping to hell that no one was watching. Sending your daughter to Catholic school for 11 years will teach her just enough about religion to mock it for the rest of her life. Jesus fucking Christ, I’m going to hell.

You know, from a young age I became convinced I was going to hell. The first time I heard the Ten Commandments I hardly knew what they meant and assumed Id committed them accidently and was thus doomed to an eternity of fire and brimstone. The things we teach our kids, huh.

The sidewalk became flooded with light as I rounded the corner and came to a STOP sign which straightened its spine once it saw me. Buildings sprouted from the ground like headstones sprawled with graffiti, reading a lonely epitaph to a lonelier city. Telephone poles seemed loose in their sockets. I know I called this city home once, but growing up leads to giving up and you come to realize that home is no longer a house or a town but chemicals and the pursuit of death. I couldn’t breathe the night deep enough into my lungs, I couldn’t breathe much at all actually. I coughed and it came out like a whimper, buildings looked away. I saw my neon salvation flashing up ahead, oh 24 hour bottle store where would I be without you?

I stood at the counter swaying a little and fumbling through my bag for change. I placed my bottles on the counter and mumbled ‘Dunsil Ivers’ which actually meant ‘Dunhill Silvers’ but a bottle of red makes it real hard to produce ‘S’ sounds. I mumbled small talk through black teeth and words rolled down my purple tongue falling limply on the desk between us. I brushed them away and walked back into the night, balancing my wine on my hip like a small child. I waded through the car park, through the rubbish, mice and glass attempting to light my half bent cigarette through the wind, before I was frozen and trembling. Hell is not all about fire and brimstone, it’s the loneliest place on earth it’s an abandoned car park that stretches for centuries. It’s a feeling that the moon seems fake and home’s not a place that fits inside you anymore and the drugs don’t work.