It's the series that makes Gossip Girl look like Sweet Valley with contrived connivances. It's British. It has some of the most breathtaking, lavishly languid photography I have every seen since Wong Kar-wai teamed up with Christopher Doyle. It has a tastefully rockin' and eclectic soundtrack each episode and lots of cleverly written scenes. It has such tragically beautiful characters like a delusional anorexic slut, a desperate trampy girlfriend and a confused teenage Pakistani. It's honest, unapologetically funny and spot on. No series has ever captured contemporary chemically driven teenage angst like this series has. It's like a hazy trip down memory lane.
It's the series almost everyone I know has mentioned at least once since last year but only a few have seen. And because I was finally compelled by a bootlegged copy I fatefully ran into a few days ago, and yesterday was a such a painfully boring hot day, I lit a joint and spent the whole afternoon and evening with the first season.
I gotta say, anything that can reinvent an old song and put new deeper images to each syllable is a winner in my book. So for now I'll let Cat Stevens linger in my auditory memory and pinch me over and over.
And then there are those times when I feel a dire uncontrollable wanting to have the power to turn back time. During those times, I think so hard that, for a fleeting moment, I convince myself that I can. I go back to different parts of the past and make all those changes. Then I'm left wondering the repercussions of things I would change and making those different permutations of effects by those decisions. It's chronic malignancy on my personality that will probably still be with there decades later. I get a form of comfort and catharsis in these moments but sometimes I feel like I'm getting less than for the time I have bargained. Sometimes it just gets so bad that I tell the universe to grant me this one wish, even if I just go back to somewhere not far back, like earlier this year. I beg so hard that I start breathing uneasily.
There was a time then when I hung out with this bunch of people. We would all meet up, go out in events, hobnob and most especially get high on ecstasy and ketamine, and at times, by accident, cocaine. It would go on for days never ending, like the end was the next hour. It was such a thrilling experience for me. That was the time when I experienced it all. I didn't think, I just let the moment flood through me and take it all in in between fluid compounding breathes. It felt so overwhelming, this comfort, this infinite and interminable happiness I felt in the presence of such fine strangers and it felt like they shared that feeling with me, like we were all moving in this speedy uniform revolution, that trailed fire, and in perfect unison. That was the most fascinating part of it all. Apart from all the minor and seemingly innocuous things I learned about them in the short time I knew them, there were never really any intimate details that was filed in my head, the kind that only two or a few more people grow to share in fondness built through time, but it felt like they were more familiar and closer to me than my own family. I loved them for that.
My brain works so weird sometimes. I don't pause to think about what's happening but rather record all the awe inspiring details and nuances of that moment and store it for later assessment. Sometimes, those details are scattered in the vastness of my memory, bits and pieces of it scattered, hovering like dust particles do in space. I'm not an expert in organizing thoughts after all. Eventually, in an exact and perfect timing, those details will find each other and build this bigger picture until finally there is no more piece left to fill it up.
Last night, in the last hours of my birthday, I bumped into one of them after not seeing him in such a long time. It felt strange now that their absence in my routine is the one providing me comfort. I started avoiding them for all the things I fear they think of me, things I realized when my brain, in its always tauntingly timing of pausing, stopped to think about what these people really think of me and what they mean to me.
I've heard stories about what happened to the rest after I left through the usual grapevine, faraway from their sights. It seems everyone else has moved on to live and do their own things. Some have stopped dropping ecstasy and snorting ketamine. Most of them still do see each other. I still do see some of them once in a while. It just feels strange now that we're reduced to usual pleasantries and casual conversations and to that cold feeling of realizing that that person is, after all these years of getting high in the darkness and communing on shared hits, in the harshness of the fluorescent lights, a total stranger you are currently sharing an awkward moment with and nothing else to talk about. I've thought about it a thousand times, trying to reason out those things that seem like failures to connect, wondering about what exactly were the facts and where we could've gone wrong.
Last night as we were leaving another birthday party, when I greeted that guy, gave him a quick beso on the cheeks and politely explained that we were already leaving, I realized that no matter what happened then, all the details that compose the real truth, all the facts will never be revealed to any of us. We will all be left with our version or maybe a consolidated one but never the absolute real version. The matter of the fact is, none of us will ever figure out what really went wrong, and that it was simply and irreversibly the end of those days and that picture has no more piece left to build it on.
