dispatches from the discotheque: vol one

a regular(ish) series on my tales from the club and beyond (mostly cobbled together prose from my notes app)

I promise I’m not the type of person who goes to the club to find meaning, it’s just that meaning has a habit of finding me there.

Two Sundays ago, I found myself in the loos with an AI tech bro who shuffled in behind me, half-drunk, grinning. “Can you pee on my hands?” he asked, like he was ordering something off-menu. I laughed, but didn’t say no. Later, in the smoking area, a couple approached me with a smile I recognised. “We watched you,” they said. “In the playroom.” You’re not meant to, but I had watched them too. That’s the thing about the club: the void always gazes back.

If the dance floor is a confessional and an altar, what am I confessing today? It’s where grief stretches out beside desire and nods its head to the bpm. It’s where, lately, I’ve been going to be seen, to feel tethered to something. I’ve always liked being looked at, I love being a fun shiny thing that spins out of orbit too quickly to be held.

My calendar is still synced to your email. I haven’t had the heart to take it off. Sometimes I wonder if you notice the purple of my schedule popping up on your phone—briefly—before dissolving, as I realise (yet again) that I’ve clicked the wrong function.

My last big breakup years taught me that love is real, and that I can be loved. The most recent one has taught me that love alone is not enough. I wonder what the next one will teach me. Probably something I’m not ready for.

I’ve been becoming bored of the same venues recently. I keep asking myself: how many versions of our heart have been broken in this room? How many tears shed here, how many keys dirtied with illegal substances, how many things lost never to be seen again? How many hours have we tried to dance the pain away?

And still I keep coming back, I guess for the music, for the bodies that press close to mine, the disgusting drips of the AC on my shoulder, to warm beers in outdoor smoking areas where stories pass like gum. We tell stories. We laugh in the smoking area about someone stealing drugs and someone else stealing everyone’s shoes, escaping on a Lime bike. It happened. I swear.

I think about the stories that fall out of our mouths when we’re loose, and safe, and drunk enough to be honest. I think about meeting Leila Hassan Howe, and how she told me (and a room full of wide-eyed students) stories of her youth. Of resistance. Of sticking it to the man. I am meant to be working on a review of June Givanni: The Making of A Pan-African Cinema Archive by Oneyeka Igwe that is woefully late (as always, apologies to every editor whose emails I have dodged). I think about Onyeka’s central question: Where do these stories live, if we do not keep them?

It’s not that I feel unqualified to write the article. Yes, I have a Letterboxd account, no, I’m not a film bro. But I love Black people. I love whatever we make. To be an archivist is to preserve the known, yes, but maybe more importantly, the unknown. The overlooked. The footnoted. The whispered. The fucked and forgotten.

I started reading the book on the Piccadilly line two months ago, wearing socks that belonged to a friend I lost a few years ago. I remember all of us running back from Queer Picnic in the rain, bottles of rum and tequila clinking in our bags. Bobby took me to their room, peeled off my wet socks and gave me a white pair with cartoon eyes on them. “Don’t worry about giving them back,” they said. The promise of the archive is that we won’t forget what happened. That someone will remember. It’s a big promise to keep.

I think about Steely Dan. A band introduced to me by Greg, who I’m sure loved Bernie Sanders more than he ever liked me. Deacon Blues is my favourite song.

“In a world where Blackness and death continuously have too close a companionship, joy can often be difficult to find... Presence with nature has taught me this.”
—Melz Owusu, Black Joy (2021)

The day of Melz’s funeral, Lily tells me she’s wearing green earrings, even though we were asked to wear white or black, and she tells me it’s for Melz and his love of nature. We sit outside, drink beer, and think about our brother. A green parakeet swoops past us, brilliant in the sun.

Sometimes, when I’m dancing in the sun, I feel untouchable. Sometimes I feel invisible. And sometimes I wonder: if people keep moving through you like you don’t exist, how do you know you’re real?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, what it means to be felt. Really felt. Not just seen across a room, or known in a theoretical way, but sensed. In the chest. In the body. That’s what the club is meant to give us, right? Bass in the sternum. A reminder that we are here. We are alive. We exist.

The last time we went out, we all agreed we didn’t like the venue. It was huge, expansive, full of attractive people, but something was missing. “You can’t feel the beat in your chest,” someone said. “There’s no reverberation. I can’t feel the music,” I emphatically nodded , and found myself thinking there must be a German word for that feeling. That particular kind of emptiness, when the bass doesn’t land and neither do you.

Later, I stood in the queue for a double tequila lemonade, half-listening to the conversation in front of me. That perfect kind of club eavesdropping—close enough to hear, far enough to not feel implicated. One of them, gesturing with a straw, said:

“I ended up having a two-hour DMC with my estranged mother about our ancestral grief…while muscle gays fucked right in front of me.”

I took out my phone and typed it down, straight into my Notes app. I knew I’d want to use it. It was too perfect. One for overheard at the club.

There are things I won’t write about. Things I refuse to put into words. Not because they didn’t happen, but because I don’t want to keep them. But still in the smoking area this weekend I talked about you, another heartbreak, another loss by another posh white boy.

I don’t want your name in ink. I don’t want your touch fossilised in language. I don’t want my words to taste like you.

I don’t want to write about the house, either. I hate you for that. I was happy in that house. But I can’t write about it because your stink was in the walls. And it’s hard to heal when I still feel suffocated by it.

But sometimes I wish I could choke on it.

(your smell)

Is it easier for you to pretend you don’t know what I taste like?

I want to be Eternal Sunshined.
I want to forget the exact weight of your body.
I want to forget the way you asked me to read about love
with your fingers inside me.
How the lines blurred—between what was written and what we were doing.

I don’t want to write about us.
Because I don’t know how to hurt someone the way you hurt me.

But still, is it wrong that sometimes I wish you’d do it again
just so I could feel you
inside me

one last time?