Categories: uncategorized
Date: 21 June 2007 13:12:55
I was sobering up.
In the active sense, that is, not the passive. Surrounded by a number of people who had drunk rather more units of alcohol than their tender years had prepared them for I was actively trying to bring their systems back to normal. At some point in the early hours we'd decided to leave the house and walk in some nearby woods. Not a place I'd been for years, but I recalled from my childhood that there was a hill with, at its top, quite a large clearing. So there we were, as dawn was approaching, walking round in large circles (small ones would have induced a dizziness contrary to our aim) trying to get as much fresh air as is possible when surrounded by a metropolis. It had been a good night, I suppose. I was with a group of friends who I was not embarrassed to call friends, and who I did not expect to be an embarrassment to, and the novelty of this had not yet worn off. I was learning, not so much to stretch my wings, as just learning that I had wings. I'd left behind a quite horrible situation and was in a much better spot. I suppose I must have known even then that I wouldn't be there long though and, indeed, within six months I'd lost all contact with all but two of the people there that night. Now I can't remember the names of more than three or four of them, or the faces of many more. But it happened, that I can still recall. We walked around and around in the woods, and it was pleasant. You only get to have an eighteenth birthday once, and I hadn't completely messed it up. It wasn't perfect, but like the dim lightening glow in the sky as we walked, it was a lot better than what had gone before, and an indication of an even brighter future.