I missed the turn and now I’m lying in the grass next to a lamppost that looks equally deserted. It’s here that I compose my first poem. Don’t know how long it took me, relativity theory has its own reality in a state of severe inebriation. But even so, cycling is so much of an automated activity that one needs neither consciousness nor active coordination for it. Until you miss a turn that is. A turn to the right, maybe that explains it all, maybe I’m just better at turning left. The poem is irrelevant. Not that morning, grass wet from morning dew, darkness of the night retreating, but for this story that isn’t really a story. It’s just introduction.

The jacket I’m wearing is not my own. Mine got lost, or stolen, at this club where the garderobe is nothing more than a closet to throw coats and excess clothing in. It’s to be expected, I don’t blame them. I’ve shedded skin, like a snake, and now I’m wearing a new jacket that closely resembles mine but doesn’t feel like me. It has the same style, the same colour, same material even, just a bit more ragged, kept together with safety pins. It feels uncomfortable. I bet someone else feels the same. Jackets are expendible, like we are. Everything feels expendible as a teenager. God blesses the young with romantic fatalism. Nothing romantic really, come to think of it. Silly form of self-obsession.

I don’t know why I do this, going to a club to drink myself into oblivion, do some solitary dancing, hopefully close to a nice girl, any girl, hoping for something that never happens, has never happened before. I’m not asking for much, a bit of kissing to temporarily numb this feeling of loneliness, nothing more. My friends are here. Outwardly I seem to have fun and ridicule the world. Like all lonely snobs I operate in my own reality. A clever me would have realised all girls dance to U2, the stubborn, self-obsessed me ignores the cue and moves in solitude to Bauhaus or The Cure as long as the DJ, confronted by an empty dancefloor, allows this music to play. All to make a point. Lonely but at the right side of musical history.

Say goodbye to my friend the lamppost. Tighten the jacket that isn’t mine. Memorise the poem, rush home, suddenly not drunk anymore. Behind my desk I watch the sun come up, chewing on my pencil, thinking, not because I forgot the poem, not because I don’t know what to write anymore (it’s only 3 lines, abstract, no rhyme), but because my thoughts keep going back to the lampost , how it transforms electricity into light, how its existence is a constant divorcing from what it is to be a lamppost. I should have hugged it, I should have told my dear friend the lamppost that loneliness is only loneliness in the absence of company.