We Never Felt Joy...

We never felt joy the day that Osama Bin Laden died. An immediate grin crept across our faces but it wasn't a grin of elation, nor relief, it was of anxiety and anticipation. A prikly sweat attempted to push through my skin but didn't break. I could have jumped, but remained static. We looked at each other and our grins turned to confusion. It meant nothing, something was still up and desperately desperately wrong. When I think back to the circumstances everything was off. An unusual double bank holiday, a royal wedding, a pagan celebration, bewildering fun, exploration and copulation, and an absinthe fuelled hangover (more real than the usual). The death of notoriety. I realised that I had barely even reacted, I asked around and found everyone else was the same. Unable to feel sad, unable to feel joyous we were all just stumped. We wanted to be angry, or sad, or controversial, or ecstatic but all those emotions were so far out of reach that we remained. We just carried on.

We never could affiliate ourselves to a side, we stayed strictly down the center, in the light. So centeral that we realised everybody else was to the left or to the right. We owned that space. Even then we could find no joy, only ignorance.