It's somewhere that way

We are not alone my friends. You are not alone for you have me, your humble narrator for this, my ongoing adventure. I am glad you could have made it.

She said it didn’t matter…

You see I was in this little town for a week, sheep a plenty. A town where if you had the television and radio switched off, you could almost feel like you were back in the 30’s. Pastille coloured art deco buildings lined the streets along with visitors from far and wide to appreciate this town’s festival, which was happening this very weekend. A festival where the prerequisites, apparently, was to frock up in your finest tuxedo with suspenders whilst the ladies gowned up to show off to no one but themselves. A swing band was playing in the amphitheatre whilst children threw volcanic sand at one another on the ocean shore to the annoyance of their mothers. It was there I saw her.

Everyone talked funny in this town. It was similar but jaded. A lacklustre attempt at pronouncing their i’s. It wasn’t enough to make you think you were in another country but definitely enough to make you think you were an outsider. Not that I cared mind you. They seemed nice but really, who where they? What was their purpose? I came to this thought when I was trying to buy fresh mint from the local supermarket. All I could find was Vietnamese mint, not your normal run of the mill variety. Great for a spring roll, sure, but not in your favourite golden rum waiting to be drunk, alone. It was at that point that I became suspicious.

On the second night I drove down to one of their larger towns, a few hours drive from where I was staying. I went to a gig there to pass the time. The band apparently had been going strong for decades and decades but their lead singer seemed to defy the age of age and looked like he should have been attending his first year of college. This confused me.

To compound this already confused state, Ioju, your humble narrator, was sitting down in a bar with his friend, after the gig, discussing out of all things the nature of bird flight paths when a girl came up to us for a chat. She said that our apparent relaxed nature invited her to join our conversation. We said that that was fine as long as she understood that the only way to join the conversation was to be able to intellectually contribute to our banter about the flight of birds. We had had a few drinks by this stage. She laughed as if we weren’t being serious and introduced herself as Catherine.

Catherine liked to talk about herself. She was very good at it too. I found out that she recently tried to be a journalist but found the going tough so she fell back to her old job as a financial consultant. She advised me that she made oodles of money and she liked to dabble with cocaine here and there but she was definitely not an abuser of it. It just made her feel better about herself from time to time. She found out nothing about myself.

My friend at that stage started walking away which made me anxious. You see, the one thing that I hadn’t told you was that we were planning to sleep in my friend’s car that night since both of us were too broke to afford the $30 hostel dorm prices. I had $20 and no one was going to tell me that I wasn’t going to be spending it at the bar. The problem with my friend walking away was that I realised I had no idea where I was. If I lost him, it would have been an arduous task telling a cab driver, ‘It’s somewhere that way’, pointing straight ahead of me, thinking that that would be north which was my only clue to where the car was. I had had many many drinks by this stage. I was thinking about this as my friend started drifting away and as Catherine came in for the kill to fuck a boy for the night, that boy being your humble narrator. I panicked, shoved her aside and went to find my friend who just went around the corner. I found him pissing in the alleyway, which made no sense to me when we were in a bar that obviously had facilities. Once asked, he looked at me in puzzlement and admitted that it made no sense to him either. The rest of the evening was uneventful and blurry. We caught a taxi. We found our car. We got in and I slept a dreamless sleep…