urbanmorbiditties

[urbanmorbiditties]

Lo-Fi

I've seen the many faces of this city, and the many faces in it. Most of them have been constantly surprised at how hard it is to connect with someone here, hopefully in a meaningful way.

There's the crowd favorite - the one night stand where you don't remember the name of the person five minutes after you've screamed it at the top of your lungs. Then there are the relationships and the marriages, the carefully sculpted edifices standing atop the underground labyrinths of compromise and self deception. What's left? Just the crafting of your own set of experiences, without any labels, to fit your taste.

Everyone's trying to build the perfect body and the perfect mind for a moment in time that's never going to materialize. Everyone is constantly on the lookout for something better. Better sex, better jobs, better parking spots. You lean on your crutches ever so often as you hurt yourself running this race - a dose of depravity or a bong hit to cushion the 9-5 or 11-8 onslaught of corporate tedium, followed by those passive LinkedIn easy apply jobs where no one has ever received a reply.

The multifarious voices made static feed into your inertia. No one wants to drive downtown to meet the girl with the nice ass and the cute smile and those flirtatious one liners that seem suspiciously AI generated, only to be disappointed with her utter inability to form coherent sentences when speaking in person. But you, you're doing the exact same thing, pretending to be someone else, working the angles and lighting in your favour. Trying to fill the human shaped voids in your consumerist yuppie lifestyle with the smog born of post coital cigarettes and joints.

Wine tasting sessions. Go karting. Dancing to generic EDM, drinking overpriced and possibly dubious liquor in a mid-tier club filled with mid-tier hopefuls. Eyeing that girl in a blue cocktail dress who's flashing a smile that could either be for your or for the seven other guys dancing around you. The beer tinted glasses you have on tell you it's you.

It's the weekend, you've been thinking. Your girl is out of town and you've gotten a new haircut. You look good in this shirt which still fits you after three years. You go up to her and smile, asking her if she'd like to join. She says she is with someone, and you say it's just a dance. You can read her eyes, she's wearing the same glasses as you.

The ants of anticipation crawl from your fingers to her hip, inch around her waist and get to your other hand, tremors originating from the thumping bass travelling from foot to brain, passing through the beating hearts which feel nothing, and are yet glorified by poetic licenses that no government body would ideally grant. They're a symptom, not the disease itself. The disease is an excess of life, certain to cause death, and it flows through the notes and the tempo and courses through both of your arteries like a fiery, all consuming fuel.

There's a power in conviction which skews all parameters and trumps all rationality. When you know it's going to happen, it does. Like a dying cat finding a secluded spot. Or a dog howling in the middle of the night, sensing an earthquake that's arriving in ten.

For a brief moment, you hesitate when she pulls you closer, tugging at your shirt, and her face flashes, and you remember that you do love her, in your own way. As much as you're capable of being in love.  You kiss the lips in front of you anyway. You're good at lying to everyone, including yourself. What you relish is not just the taste of those tequila flavoured lips, but that of the large but finite guilt that fills you up, and then silently leaches out through the cracks  in your soul.