I often long for that time when youth was newly upon me, when it still tasted slightly foreign and against my face felt full and fresh. I long for it, as it was then that everything was new. I traveled frequently in those days, sat against the cool marble of railway station floors in Nice or in Rome, or some other place, and felt the sweat of summer drench my shirt through a too-big backpack. I skipped across countries like chess squares and the days unfolded like crinkled maps.
Once I lay on a Croatian deckchair and felt the sun encase my skin, read with oil stained hands the thoughts of beautiful and terrible people. I felt the plastic of the seat melt with the Adriatic's prickle. I made notes in the side-columns of the Communist Manifesto - I annotated everything. It was a time of learning, a time of doing. If I wanted things, I would take them, if I made plans they were executed.
Once I hid in the furnace room of a cheap London hostel and laughed casually as things that were not casual were told to me in earnest. The boy in question was going to become a doctor once he left this dead-end job, or at least that’s what he said. For if you are youthful, you can believe what you like and pretend nothing matters, you can ignore the telephone calls and voice-mail messages as if they were scribbled notes on paper airplanes that were interceded or torn up.
When youth was eating me, when it ate me, I was in a university room in Southwest England; I took a bus home in the morning and buried the incident away. Everything was ‘sound’ and ‘lush’ then, except for those few small October regrets.
I would like to feel - again - the thrill of youth upon me, the surge of a billion ideologies all calling out my name. The shouted lines of boozed-up club promoters as they descend into a Lagos gutter (full of vomit and too much vodka), the words of a dear friend as they speak the final ‘good night’ into our darkened sleeper rail carriage. Everything was new and pulsating then, every phrase was filled with light.
