Sinister: saturday night/sunday morning

[Dimitra Daisy]

'It’s hard to be happy when you always want something you haven't got', Ian 
said. As I walk around the streets of this city lists of the things that I 
terribly miss make themselves in my head. I come back and Yo La Tengo sing 
‘just be thankful for what you’ve got’. It’s the week before Easter, it’s 
spring, it gets dark quite late –though not as late as in Scotland. Or even 
London. There’s a part of my mind dedicated to thinking about another place, 
sometimes I worry that it is bigger than the one that thinks about the world 
here. Then I go out, and I am overwhelmed by light and colours and smells 
and by the clarity of it all. In and between all that, I realised it’s 
easier to be a little sad than to be a little happy. It’s easy to pine for 
what you don’t have. It hard to acknowledge the fact that the world around 
you is a lively colourful place and there a lot of things for which you can 
be thankful and a little bit happy. Even though you don’t have a lot of what 
you long for.

Yesterday I spend most of the day in a house in the country, or, well, 
somewhere outside the city. I spend most of the day in it and only came out 
when it was almost dark, and got wet running around and in and under and 
between green things. It would be nice if I were a fairy in another 
lifetime. When I took the bus back into the city, it felt a bit different to 
be there, in the way things feel when you’ve been away to somewhere 
different and come back. I got off at the wrong bus stop and ended up 
walking quite a bit to get home, and I felt a bit like a ten year old coming 
back from a school excursion. I came back to a big dark silent flat that 
seemed to hang there, four flours above the ground just to let the night 
wind blow through it and to have music played in it.

I went out again for a bit, on the way up I remembered to look right and up 
as I was crossing a big street, I saw the fullish moon rising above a 
mountain and looking orange, and were surprised even if it was the fourth 
time in a row this had happened. On the way down I looked again, then I took 
another way down, and run for half of it. Sometimes I think of Lazy Line 
Painter Jane when I start running in the street, sometimes I think of Ian, 
sometimes I don’t think at all. Or I think of different things. This time I 
wanted to cry, not out of sadness, but out of something else I didn’t have 
words about. It had something to do with the night and with the lists of the 
things I terribly miss in my head.

Then I came back (again), to find Ian had written:

Saturday night:
I have days when I want to hug the world.  I want to run up to each person I 
see, clamp them between my thighs, and plant a huge smacker on their 
rosy-red lips. I want to sing, dance, and shout. I want to raise the world 
in a great big, happy, revolution.
Thankfully, these are few and far between.  And I am able to resist such 
urges. The masses do not want to be woken in a happy revolution, they find 
their joy in separation and disdain.  Such behaviour would earn me nothing 
but opprobrium and a bruised face.  And there's nothing special about that. 
I can get that simply by visiting Coventry.

I read it holding my breath and I wanted to cry again. It took me a while 
but I realised that the reason I wanted to cry when running down the street 
was, as I put it last night, ‘because the world is a big, mysterious, 
magical place, just as the night stretching out around me was, but people 
don't pay notice to it. And the world, instead of being what Ian called a 
happy revolution, is a place of separation and disdain’.

Do you know why I like Belle and Sebastian? Do you know why my favourite 
film is Together (Tillsammans, by Lukas Moodysson) ? Do you know why I like 
you?

Well, for lots of little reasons too. But mostly cause they’re all part of 
that happy revolution. Now I know what I have been telling you to keep the 
faith in all along.

zoziepop

xx


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