Sliding JayeLs (5)

We ran all the way down Dame Lane, across Trinity Street, Dame Street and down past College Green where the Nitelink fleet waited, growling at their inebriated clientele. Went to queue for a ticket at the Ticket Bus (what a bizarre life for a bus, giving out tickets but never taking passengers. One of those City Imps that Elizabeth… may have painted in the hope that it would live a normal, active bus life. So sad.). The queue was too long. Ran to the Centra on the corner of Eden Quay and Westmoreland Street, skipped the (sparse and dishevelled) queue and bought the tickets for the bus there. Not a lot of people know you can get tickets there. Anyway, hopped on the bus, up the top and to the front due to the large drunken arsehole quotient at the back. The bus took off and we never stopped talking. Emer is a film student and wants to direct. She loves Fritz Lang and Stanley Kubrick. I bought “2001” on DVD last week, but she hadn’t seen it. And that’s what I’m talking about; I like the quirkiness. I’m quirky; I’ve seen all sorts of films but I bet I’ve never seen any that you mention to me. And she’s the same; she’d regard herself as a Stanley Kubrick fan and yet she hasn’t seen his best-known film. She never saw “A.I.” either. And yet we found so much to talk about.

Before I knew it, we were under the orange glow of the streetlights here and had to get off. I put my arm around her as we started to walk home, just rubbing her back because she said she was cold. I took it away, but she said to leave it there. So here I am, walking up the estate with a girl I’ve known all my life but never met til now. It’s a clear, still night cold enough for her to appreciate my arm around her. There’s no cars, scooters, nothing. No dogs barking, no alarms, no distant shouting. No patrol cars. Just us two walking up the green. I stopped us for a second and looked up. She liked to look up too. If you could only see this place, maybe I like it because I’m close to home when I’m there. It’s a diagonal path across an acre of grass and half way up this path are two large, bare trees. The path looks like it leads straight up to the back of my house, at the end of a terrace of five. It’s the familarity of it all, the way the streetlight stand behind the left tree, the way the light in our bathroom is to the right of that, the way the trees’ branches entwine at the bottom above the path and how they run through my hair every time I come home. But I told Emer about this, and she liked it. And that was nice.

Emer lives around the corner, so I walked her around. I told her about the decision I faced earlier on that night on Crow Street; whether to go home and sleep or stay out. And imagine if I hadn’t; what would my Friday night have been like then? I’d have moped around the house, tried to type something and failed. Then I’d have stayed up til 4 reading. And I’d never have known about the chance I had to meet the girl around the corner. She said to text her the next day, she liked texting. We were to be friends, and that was that. This night was no one-off, we were going to meet up and go places again. I hugged Emer, waited for her to find the key to get in and walked home in shock. “That….was….so….cool” It’s about the most JayeL thing that’s ever happened to me; if you want a definition of Joe, it’s a night like that. Not romance, not sex, not material goods; just that night. Quite literally, a dream come true.

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