The U-Bahn zooms

Doppelgänger epiphanies

Regurgitated set pieces splinter through the subway. Clean spring air freshener. Italian plushness. Regal mini-routes. The clock towers boast their dials, magisterial and luminous in the dusk. The U-Bahn zooms. Footsteps lightly drift through. A swish of loneliness, terracotta rooftops. Azure unblemished skies are the canvas. City-bike lines, cutting across speedy traffic. Footprinting echoes. Semblance flickers – other-time faces dart. Mustard-yellow walls. My stoic residency in the quiet courtyards, my stoic kingdom.

Now the night was coming down all around me, a weird embracing canvas that I couldn’t help but want to hug back. In the persistent drizzle all of the scene’s lights were made liquidy, so as to be not fixed, less attainable, and more disorientating. Some of those colours gave the impression they were bleeding into the other features, and that everything was, in stages, becoming different sections of the same mass. They were diluted fireworks, sparkling then fading into darknesses across the expanse.

It was one of those grainy atmospheric occasions when I simultaneously wanted to be back in the snug false heat of the flat’s living room and in the abyss that I felt was giving me a space in which to wallow. Even though I walked briskly, I felt as though I was floating. Gliding through these streets as the surroundings melted, the late year becoming a mush, and winter increasing its effect. There I was, it seemed, in the centre, inviting it all towards me because I needed a strange sort of peace – an arena where nothing was fixed. Where eras could crack and communities break up, in some situations because of arbitrary events, and the madness of energies, forces pulling in different directions.

I wanted the boredom of monotony to be smashed, so I became part of the stream that I imagined, considered that the whole facade could crumble at any point – it made not just me feel alive but also the sleeping outer boroughs that needed a rekindling, they needed the rawness of risk to be regenerated. Otherwise all this would have turned to grey, as the peepless houses remained gloomily proud, simply content to be dark, and dim. At times such as this I began to turn inward, I guess because I didn’t know how the gestation period was going to pan out – would I attempt to bring all these things within my power, to no avail? Then I would be knackered and with no result to soften the hurt: occasionally I would stop trying before I even really got into a groove, knowing that I couldn’t hack any more wasted energy.

Yet I couldn’t ever entirely resist the lure of those kaleidoscopic road-zones, the meaning behind the imagined meaning, the secondary thoughts that were replicant signifiers from a never-finishing and deeply inherent past. The lure of every lantern and fiery curtained-over room would entice me back: deep down I realised that this would continue to be my home, where my spirit nestled, despite the real distance I placed between myself and it. My territory when I had delved into some thoughts that opened up my untouched fabric.

In these streets, within the surreal, cluttered array of substations, 24-hour off-licences, mini-sanctuary bus stops and the steam rising off the rooftops, I got close to the core of myself. At one point I truly felt that I didn’t need to learn anything new, that I somehow had all the answers in terms of knowing how to operate at full strength. Now I see that it was an illusion, one that nevertheless, for a moment, felt like a caring cloak.

Infinite abyss. Urban dereliction: all that awaited me, and I wasn’t too bothered. The unease came from not knowing the exact kind of obscurity it would be made up of, and how knowing might have given me a chance to prepare. The glare of that future weighing down on me. Shredded plans. Across the panorama a fantastic lightstream deep somewhere in the valley. The bowl-shaped expanse.

With the flash of the lightning splitting a dark vista in two with its luminous white smile, I was shaken back into a Roman past. The photograph of it showed the purple sky and a range of moody mountains, a digitised edition of memory, dunking me back in Italian streets and scorched by evil midday sun. The slippery redacted vibes. Clasped rinse. Doppelganger epiphanies. I’m thinking in circles trying to shake off the illusions, and instead pluck out more authentic feelings or miniscule connections. Hot-summer imperfections: degrading memories patched in, distorted by heat. I will always return to some of those rooms, lover-heavy and friendship-basking.

So I spread myself out with real intent as I slashed the months between myself and what I believed would be the pinnacle. August grass fragrances. Perspiration, the Shimano hilltops, southern fortress tree-shadow roads. The middle-class jungle. Already the receding spectre of an unbeatable careening. But in my head there I was in the square, my back to the fountain, in the azure slow-motion dusk, feeling Mediterranean niceair on my face and neck. A perma-residence in the era-specked annuls.

There is something flickering, a ghost spark – electricity clinging. After-downpour bark aromas followed by an almost dusky fading light. Neoclassical slo-mo rewind. Each and every mini area evolves in my mind, and is signified by a colour. Primitive convo chunks so distant they are see-through. Church-side lostness. Capital city sweat-coats, sunscreen-watery hands. Anniversary flashbacks. A late-night jog, then bracken-dew perfume. Traffic cackle beyond hedgerows. The illuminated square. Boulevards just red lines visible from the plane. Gusty purple airstream. Ha, excellent behaviour. ‘Latch’ massive through the headphones. It goes heftily through my mind, despite the flimsy broken thoughts.

I went sleepwalking through the suburbs, largely during the winter, all foggy shrouded lanterns and damp air-wafts. I don’t know how long I’d been in the city, but it probably wasn’t as extensive as I believed it to be. I attempted to imagine here without anything to give it context, I wanted to be a stranger, just like at the beginning. But I couldn’t untangle the nagging patterns of the last years, they stayed with me as though permanent markers.

Afterrain evening gathering eternity. There the figure approaches the station concourse. I know her, but not well. Brixton dusk bustle. My whole life but I do not know it. An incredible fortress. Where’s that lightning bolt that is not yet charged? One moment to freeze forever. Lifetimes glitched, capturing the future. Bottling a perfect emotion: hope in stasis. But there it went. Temporary, the saddest hug. A brittle dream. I hold the moment, recycle the single memory, the faintest ghost of the notion, knowing it’s damaged and fragile. Incredible ghost. Through the massiveness of the haze I remembered the twinge, a nugget from other eras. From this ether, from this nowhereland, cavernous vibes, brilliant embers. Within it I acknowledged that a real colourful feeling was there, and it was growing – I knew the genre, shimmering intensity, housing much more than was real or nascent, but I was always clinging to the thought that it would only take a fraction of these imaginings to be authentic for my dreams to gain a sense a purpose and be placed in context, a context of goodness with an end point.