Xmas nausea mileage
“All gifts are given and all food is eaten, you can forget everything until tomorrow”.
I can tell he hates Christmas like i do today, although i’m not usually so cynical. In fact i reprieve cynicism. Not today, no. He looks me in the mirror and tells me it’s good to go for a walk, you do two hours in the shops, two hours in front of TV. It’s good to go for a walk, too.
It’s better when it’s dry. He hates the rain. It’s better when it’s dry, better than the snow. He says let’s build a roof over the road, a roof all over the city, so we can drop off customers without them getting wet. Let’s cover the sky.
He plays kazakh music and i repress to roll down the window, I feel nauseous but I wouldn’t want to disperse the sound waves. I don’t want to puke either, it would run down the window, wouldn’t want to have him pay for it.
He gets into the station and tells me he doesn’t take card. He takes me to Tesco and my card won’t spit out cash. My train’s about to leave and I run away.
I chase the time on my phone screen and catch the train, back down ; I sit and read an obscure critique of what is said to be the pharmaco-pornographic state of the world, I feel pretentious and aware of class in this northern train with kids screaming 6 7 over and over again and their mother, staring into space absent-mindedly.
I vomit the city as it disappears into the winter mid-afternoon darkness. I vomit the small ugly houses harbouring feeble christmas lights, for equally feeble smiles, children picking and tugging at Asda xmas tree branches. I vomit the huge apartment buildings towering behind crummy houses, white surgical lights that protect the environment and hammer down depression and anxiety on the lower classes. I think of babies that need warming up in egg-shaped medical boxes, right after bursting from the womb, bloodied and blue and spastic. I see human shapes covered in eggshells walking under surgical light, white like snow like plastic trees. Preparing to re-enter the womb, A womb of sorts, hard metallic edges of the super-speed train digging deep into the London crust. I’ve always hated the heat of the underground tube, but now i get its comforting breath, going down our necks, incubating men-machines for good work and good morals, making the city come alive. Now, where am I going ? I only now that this egg is no better than any other, I just need the transposition, the movement, the transfusion. Get it going through my veins.
A heavy mist exhaled by humming mouths, hovering above the shivering train tracks, coalesces slowly, and coats the train windows, suppository rocketing through space-time, or in this case, a slithering leeds-london journey. I would rather this than suburban sedentarianism. Is.That.Even.A.Word. A sadness that cannot be sequestred.
The rocket rolls on and I realise lately i am only ever writing on and about trains; perhaps my ideas are rolled in motion by the constant come-and-go, the trembling of the engine ? Perhaps the neon lights bring about the feeling of your gaze, the feeling that you are everywhere in this mist. And, terrifyingly so, perhaps only under your gaze can I write. Write as if you were God, when you’re quite the opposite. In any case, it certainly feels like you own the city i’m entering. And you’re above me, and I almost want you like this, towering, punishing. Want your moral stature when i know it’s gone, poof, you’re fucking ridiculous now aren’t you. Still, i want this badly and can only transcribe the want into writing, it’s a delicious feeling on the keyboard, as your erotica withers but still glows, dying red rose if you know what i mean.
Dying red rose against a landscape that i vomit, a technological infusion that’s come under my skin. Inhabiting me -