Looking around, there are no obstacles. If I wanted to, I could go over straightaway, get this thing completed. I’d banish the mistakes of the real world. But in this cloudy time, these foggy moments, it’s impossible and I’m pinned into my space, impotently gazing across the bar. The flurry of the carnival hazes to a shimmer and, once again, I’m locked in these heavyweight moments of forever, or however long the fantastic bulk of memories are feted to last.

You! You know them too. The blonde blur destined to linger as a scorch on the thoughts that make you go weak at the knees knowing that those dreams carry an impossible edge. But why stop? Why discard even the flimsiest of chances because of the odds of defeat?

She’s laughing now. A homely laugh that betrays a soulful existence. It dims out the bar’s generic fuzz. Now she glances up, still smiling, and then catches my gaze and holds it. Everything shattered again, as though I don’t know myself, as though I never knew anything, no solid facts.

And those memories I had, pointless now, in the light of the eyes. I convince myself that she’s about to look away, that a better object will swiftly catch her attention. But this one burns right through me. It opens up a tantalising infinity. Then there’s that miraculous giggle, then a split-second turn of the eyes, then the gaze back again, immediate.

All knowledge I had and any notion of feeling: reset. It is picked apart, reconstituted and the gaps filled with palpable energy, that galactic and almost unbelievable explosion of a moment. From another place too, my legs are in movement, that energy triggered by an otherworldly force, and I’m floating and nudging bodies out the way. Getting there. At last, after so much time, face to face. Ripe for a remix epiphany.

There is no time, it is nothing here. A white-blonde sun ribbon, gently through the small windows. I say nothing. She does, but, with my heart pounding and the clink of the carnival, whatever it is just drops quietly into the dominant bombast. Lips move but only silence. Yet that mouth, that smile, the smile. I’m gliding and I know there’ll never be a true release from the shock of the moment.

Lost in the thought, I’m tapped on the arm and she places a slip of paper in my palm. I clench it tight. Then I nod and move off, mute, eternally changed. Moving away is the only action I can complete, despite everything. The strength of all other forces isn’t strong enough. Outside, the cold but balmy light is everywhere; carried in on the river’s breezes is some astonishing jungle music, some moment-freezing drum and bass that I know was lost from another time too. I daren’t look at the little paper, but I know what it says.

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