Commonword Blogs

So here it is. Asda Car park, Asda closed. Around midnight, July, a warm breeze, a threat of rain. I get out of my car. Its one of those places of ugly beauty. Why am I drawn to such places? Feels like a splayed, dead rat, like ripped curtains blowing into a derelict window frame. I imagine a thousand rats crawling under the tarmac. Yet tarmac has good vibes for me. In my boyhood we’d play on tarmac streets like this, in the dark, loving it. And R would have been the last to quit. Back than in our boyhood he was the genius, still the best footballer I ever watched in my life. And he crashed and burned. Became a Jay Z lyric, did the whole hustler thing and lost. The emptiness maybe absorbs me. I had this aching loneliness as a kid, got to know it, came to live with it, became comfortable with solitariness / my own company. A car park empty. I never drove to one in my 20’s to get jiggy with some girl. Never drove till my 30’s. The bushes on the perimeter. That time when I was homeless I’d seek places like this. Sleep with a knife under my bag, one eye open, deep in the bushes.

A train flies by. A belligerent rush of noise. Shooting through. There is one car saying don’t notice me in a corner. Empty. And mine. I’m wary stepping out of mine for the photo, keep my keys on me. Two shots and my camera batteries die. I get back in the car. As I leave, another car pulls in.