An electric surge muscle spasm. Hand touching stick touching air touching drum. Repetitions, like a heart throb in your ear when you're running. The song is that close, close like running is close, it tries to go faster but it's held by the percussion, the drumming, the thronging. But, it also, mystically progresses. Each moment is almost the same, but, then, here, it is different. It is tight, it is taught. It is the verge. It is an anthropomorphic dream. It is how we would sound if we were cyborgs. It is a switch turning on an off, it is a pulse. It shudders, it rips, it loses control. She's lost control. Electronic music these days ain't got shit.

Sitting on the single bed in Jim's room, laughing and throwing my head back, a mane of shaggy hair sliding under my 'vivisection sucks' t-shirt, some sliding down the rivulets of the mottled-by-damp relief wallpaper. The room is moist--there is mould in the corners, and mould on the ceiling. It's downstairs. The house is also set into the Henderson bush--a lush wet spongy rainforest--but here is populated by wetas and skinks, and Jim. This concentrates the smells of the room--dominated by damp boy, sweat and gism, cigarettes and weed. Jim sits on the bed with me, a shy gawky kid of 17. He's got skin-tight
black jeans, so tight he can kiss goodbye to having children, and a matted red jersey with the sleeves with unravelled thumbhooks. He's wearing docs, and is head is a number 1 all over. He's pale--real pale. Folded up in two, he's as thin and gaunt as a rubbish sack of old clothes. When he brings his fingers to his mouth to draw his fingers of one hand over his chin you can see these dark niccotine stains, the deposit of grime, the marks of his days. He looks at me, his eyes sideways, not his head, and smiles only vaguely. I'm sucking on a cigarette, dragging it in between words. "Hey maybe we should go back upstairs to the party," I say, not moving. I feel out of my depth, swallowed up by the room, the drugs in my brain create a swamp. I am dulled, blunted, thick. Jim seems somewhere else. I can't help filling in the gaps with more babble--"Fuck this is a great song."
"You like Joy Division?" he says, suddenly there.
"Yeah" I says, "My brother bought me Closer."

Later we went upstairs and danced to 'love will tear us apart', we were that out of it.

In my room, by myself, where the talk didn't matter, where I wasted away, where I would stare at my hands for hours, tracing the wrinkles on my fingers, I would marvel at anything close up, I would listen to Substance over and over andoverand. "She's lost control" would take me into the spiral, what I thought was the spiral of pain and death. I was dry and hard inside, built up with greiving, as if someone had died, as if I had died. I couldn't begin, I couldn't get over. Sometimes I would lie on my side, like you have to when you're pissed and nauseous and trying to settle it all down--bathing in the electronic pulse from my 70s wood veneer stereo, a lake, washing through me. I would imagine myself floating away, hoping for release, wanting to sleep and to dream. I would hear things in my ears, not trusting they were part of the external world around me. I was so tired most of the time I couldn't get the talk together, and the talk, and the music, mattered as much as any other kind of sustenance.

But, now I can remember listening to Joy Division with Jim, and in the re-imagining of him I avoid distilling the bi-polarity of my life: everything is reductive to fear and desire. I curdle the simple things together, like curling my foot around his leg, laughing and kissing him, wriggling like snakes in his single bed. I think of them sensorally; with my ears, eyes, and fingers grasping. I hear you Jim, I smell your red jumper, I touch your veino us arm. You are here.