BLACKOUT

I wake up on someone’s floor, dawn light is creeping through the curtains and there’s some random next to me asleep and naked.  I reach for my mobile.  The messages on it start at ‘Hey darling, hope you’re having a good time.  Do you want me to pick you up from anywhere?’ and finish at ‘Where are you?  I’m worried sick!  It’s 5am for fuck’s sake.  CALL ME!’  It’s 7am now and I won’t attempt a phone conversation with a bird cage bottom mouth.  I’ll just go home.
 
I put my clothes on as I find them.  I’m trying to work out where and how all this began and where and how it will end.   I shouldn’t have picked up my guitar and started to write music again, that was what caused the questions.  Am I happy?  Is this it?  Is this all?  A relationship, a mortgage and a dead end job, yeah, that’s it.  What did I do to deserve three life sentences?  Maybe we should’ve had kids.  Thank God we didn’t.

What’s the alternative now?  The presence of the random says I’ve still got it, but can I use it?  If I went home and fessed up, my cage door would fly open and I’d be propelled out of it faster than a cork from last night’s Prosecco.  I’d be flung into shitty rented rooms and would sit on lumpy beds eating nutrition-free garbage from the Kebab shop.  The random would be first in a long line of shallower, younger imitations.  I’d go to the pub to live it up like the old days and find it full of strangers.  My settled down friends would think me a joke.  They went home before midnight last night.  God knows how I ended up here.

Huh, I’ll return home with a sorry smile and some elaborate story that you couldn’t make up.  I will accept the frosty silence that will stretch on to the evening and welcome the gradual thawing of relations sometime next week.  I’ll even put in an effort and invest in a romantic weekend away ...

Of course, I’ve learned my lesson.  If a night like last night ever happens again, I won’t get so drunk that I can’t remember the brief, heavenly taste of freedom.