Lake Friday

1. Soundtrack: synthesisers glide. At the hip, conjoined silhouettes. Sunglasses under strip lights – invisible tears are shed, and sting. Sipping Evian, through tunnel after tunnel, our world is lit as a sequence of swimming pools. We are the in-between children. After a morning rush, or before evening commuters merge, we are glimpsed at like urban foxes. Rarely, we look at each other; sometimes we text in rhyming couplets, before we grow bored and succumb to free verse. 2. Remember that day we swam? It was a Friday; a lake somewhere. We stayed close to the surface, like tadpoles. Yet still, we swam. And each moment that day was a frozen square, like on Instagram – everyone was smiling; everyone looked bleached and backlit, like in 1979. And everyone looked like you before you turned strange, before you turned cruel.