1995 and our hero prepares to launch a musical career

New Years Eve, 1995, Edinburgh. Gaby and I tried bar after bar in the freezing cold, wandering down Leith Walk and all the way up through the Cowgate. Everywhere full, ticket-holders only. The streets were deserted. Eventually, in desperation, we broke our vow not to go near the art school bar, and as I walked in, Sarah-Jane appeared on the other side of the door. As if it was a mirror. We kissed without saying anything, we danced. After midnight, I left with her and a friend, drunken pirouettes on a bus down the hill to Morningside. She nearly toppled out of the doors, I grabbed her by the coat. Possibly it saved her life, we were too drunk to tell. The streets were full of excited, shouting people.

We slept in her sister’s bed, in the quiet of W------ Terrace. She kissed me, she thought I was sleeping, it made my heart skip a beat, shiver a little, dilate in wonder and terrified joy. Later, I opened my eyes; the snow was falling in bursts and flurries, gleaming under lampposts, a foreground to the deep, vacuous night. She was sleeping peacefully, it filled me with love and wonder. I said ‘look at the snow, it’s magical, magical’. It kept falling all through the night, but when the morning came, it had stopped. We split up a few weeks later.

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At the end of the whole affair, I sat in Mrs. R’s kitchen, writing a letter to Sarah. I imagined it in my head as some sort of voiceover delivered by Marcello Mastroianni to images of Monica Vitti. It was easy to think these sort of thoughts as a student when you had a lot of free time and nothing had really tested you. It began ‘I can’t explain how I have failed, but it has lead me to believe that happiness can only exist in dreams'. (I was reading a lot of surrealist literature and aping it in a crude and sentimental way, but I liked how you didn't need to be make sense, just being exicitedly rhetorical was enough.) 'Today, in the square', I went on, 'I think my eyes saw beyond my reason, and I longed for something I had never known. And it was you.’ I cried when I finished it, I thought it was beautiful, I wanted to set it to music and launch it as the elegantly surreal edge of the Britpop thing that was happening at the time. It also, regrettably, mentioned 'our longing' spinning away like a ‘ghostly carousel’ into ‘the aporia of the night’. The term ‘aporia’, used as a noun, was twinned in my mind as the point where propositions collapse through innate contradictions in philosophy, but somehow also the mysterious darkness, the inhuman, glacier-mint blues of the Edinburgh afternoon turning into a night that would burn the edges of your ears, that always fell with a slight sense of dread.

We got back together again after a while; there was talk about living in Italy. The rest is pretty much described elsewhere, mostly on Suburban Light.