ninjacodemonkey

Haunting Familiar Yet I Can't Seem To Place It

Wanted to make a proper breakfast for me and Lol, but slept through my alarm, and only woke up when my mechanic called, told me he’d have to wait for parts but the car was fine to drive and I could come pick it up. So, hopped a couple of buses to go back to Agbrigg, where this mechanic is. Also where I happened to spend the first 18 years of my life.

It was kind of a funky trip. It’s not far but I don’t go there. Everyone I knew has moved away, and nothing else would take me back there because for the most part there’s.. well.. nothing there.

I caught two buses, and while I was waiting for the second I realised I was outside the now closed-down cinema where I went for my first date with my first girlfriend. Emma. We saw Gremlins, and then I spotted the lobby to the mall where we waited for her dad to pick her up, and had our first kiss. It wasn’t my first kiss, but it was the first one that wasn’t with some random girl at the all ages disco at Casanova’s, engaged, as was I, in snogging as many members of the opposite sex as possible before our parents came to collect us then comparing (and exaggerating) scores with our friends. It was also the first time I realised kissing could be other than some sort of chupacabra facelock.

Then the following decade until I moved to the US just sort of played out like a movie reel. Huge distracting nostalgia trip, like a completely lucid LCD flashback. I got off the bus at Agbrigg road, next to the bowling alley that used to be a nightclub where my mother worked before she met my stepdad, and across from the house where Emma and I first had sex (9 years after our first date…. boy am *I* a fast mover), and where I broke up with her for the fourth last time. By that time my brain had treated me to a review of every high school and college relationship, several concerts, a lot of sexual fumbling, a shitload of math lectures and a wedding where there were 11 ex girlfriends in attendance, including the bride. Emma.

Never really much liked weddings after that one, which makes it even odder that I became a Minister.

I’m not going to go over every detail, mainly because a lot of it is embarrassing. Broken condoms, a discovery of a latex allergy, the realisation that menthol lube and private parts are a REALLY bad mix, eating so much hash I was paralysed, practicing unhooking bras on my best friend and taking *forever* to get the trick (I wonder if she ever worked out I was failing just to keep my hands inside her blouse), and playing strip rummy because no-one knew how to play poker are just some of the lowlights.

I went to where I’d carved my name with a succession of girl’s names on the inside of the slide at the rec, but it had been obliterated by 20 years of other names, layered on top of each other and mashed together like the dead sea scrolls, black with decades of hands greasy from the chipshop next to the park.

Closed down now too.

I didn’t go by the old house. My brother showed up with the spare key for the mini before I’d let my nostalgia talk me into it, and once I was in the mini again I really just wanted to go home.

(reposted from my journal, Feb 28th)

Notes:

1. brerfly liked this
2. eyetwitch reblogged this from ninjacodemonkey and added:

   these stories because you blab when drinkin’....you’re back in England,

3. ninjacodemonkey posted this