this regret machine

  Honningbarna released an album earlier in this year called Soft Spot that my friend heather described as norwegian black metal, and though i’m no expert in the scene, i wouldn’t call it black metal, i wouldn’t know where to begin with genre boundaries and placement. I don’t have the stomach to be that kinda mark. If i’ve learned anything over the year twenty twenty five, it’s that i’m not made like a know-it-all. I start most conversations with ‘I think it’s interesting that’, and now my mouth is all dry, and my mouth tastes clammier. When i drink water it just goes over my tongue. I haven’t really learned that i’m not made in any specific way. I just know that it’s music with spirit, man. The music has got the fucking spirit. It’s the party that never stops, that never dies, that keeps fucking going. It’s down woodland road at 15:15 without breaks on your back wheel or a helmet. My living has been in the hands of the surrounding world for a long time now, I’m only doing my job...

  I pop ice from its plastic body and they slide across the countertop, taking refuge beneath the dishes again. I pour more coffee than I should be drinking into a glass one of us stole on a night out. I check the photo again, I try to read the words. The people make me smile. I wipe the sweat from my brow and lick it from the back of my palm. I like these people. I always assumed they’d never exist, or be some part of my imagination. They laugh, each in their own way, the same way I laugh, and I see myself in each of them. My phone lives at 10%. There’s rum down the side of the backseat. The music changes. There’s an ancient shipwreck buried beneath the soil. The sun comes by. We pass the same trees at the end of Devon. If we drive through the night we miss them, instead making the same jokes about double suicide or falling asleep behind the wheel. We argue for the fun of it. We raise our voices. I haven’t sung with anybody since I was in a school for boys. I still dream about the...