•
Rating: "You can say you truly know a person only after spending the dawn together." Sunshine.
Fourth month in London. Fire and Damnation Lamentation! Personal Experience...
I met Pit in January this year, it was a cold afternoon, the trees were shaken by the wind and an icy stream drenched my face. Having slipped into a vortex that dragged me down, I decided to visit the Mental Health Center to get an idea of what continuing the climb toward self-destruction could lead to.
The Center was composed of 4 adjacent houses located in the northern part of the city, not far from Kentish Town. It was all very neat and cold. Entering a waiting room, I faced a tall, thin doctor with a wrinkled, oval face. He politely asked if I was there for a visit or needed help. I didn't respond with words, but a look was enough for the doctor to understand that I needed a preventive visit. He accompanied me down the long corridor to a sky-blue door. He opened the door courteously and told me to enter and be aware of the "green guy." I entered with my heart pounding as the doctor quickly stepped away.
The room was small and accommodating, seemingly empty, stripped of everything. There was only an unmade bed and a nightstand full of empty beer bottles, an attic with moldy fruit that could have been there for months. Surprised by the unexpected emptiness of the room, I headed towards the bathroom, relieved myself, flushed, and washed my hands with coconut soap. As I exited the bathroom, accompanied by a C major chord, Pit Doherty materialized in front of me with a guitar. I blushed nervously, and he responded with a smile, awkward yet sensual, and began singing the first words of our diegetic meeting.
"I was a trouble teen, put an advert in a magazine, to the annoyance of my imaginary lover, she question my integrity and this is what she say to me, she say, oh, you, you're green, you don’t know what love means, oh let me tell you".
My reaction was natural; I continued with the song, accompanying him with my voice and alternately clapping my hands and feet in a street dance. He smiled again, and it was then that the psych activity of the room produced vibrations that resonated throughout the entire structure. There was nothing outside the room anymore, just Pit and me, poetry lingered in the air as the rain beat on the windows outside.
Image: the gray of the city, the green painted on our faces.
We spent the evening together, between one song and another, we shared the bitterness of certain days, the reasons that brought us there, our "favourite books," the positive experiences, and inherent paranoias in our subconscious. We also spent other moments in silence, and he was always available like a mother changing her child's diaper. We fell in love artistically, drawing our dreams and writing our best poems on the spot. His body emitted a scent of sweat and gin, but I never thought it was a stench; rather, it was an animal smell, the truth of Pit. Everything happened according to ancient and archaic anarchic laws, without judgments or preconceptions, without poses or positions, we were ourselves, not our projections. We spent the night together without sleeping, until dawn (or "Till death do us apart"), my body, now just a shell of low-cost beer, drifted into a heavy sleep. In the morning, I found two tickets for the Camden concert on the pillow. That morning, Pit left early from the prison he had built for himself, ready to play and sing his songs without artificial chemical paradises.
Invincible and fragile like Sophocles' Ajax, he climbed the stage and seemed different from that night. Only a month had passed, but his body had changed, his gaze was absent, focused on emptiness. People screamed, and girls showed their bras. The situation had completely changed; now he avoided people's gazes, ignored those rabid fans trying to climb the stage to impose themselves on his attention. At that moment, I understood that Pit was a normal person, not the character of the record company. He was an available and fleeting artist, sad and sunny, young and old, empty and full. I enjoyed the concert for the songs and the atmosphere but will never forget those fifteen hours spent in the past. I met a real guy, not the overhyped phenomenon pursued by paparazzi. I was left with the bitterness in the mouth of someone forced to share an older brother with the bidet-less populace. I withdrew into a dreamlike state in my hostel, tired and depressed. I took the beer, the guitar, the joint of weed, which I immediately lit, and without thinking, sang the song that most reminds me of that experience, which became less intense and warm as time passed...
I get around to singing about
That gang of gin I'm in
Then you'll know most certainly
The kind of game I'm in
You sound around to swinging about
The gang of gin I'm rolling in, oh
Then you'll know
The kind of
Loading comments slowly
