The heat feels like being beaten relentlessly by pillows and the gaze of an angry god all at once. The beach looks like a Where’s Wally illustration. Everything is a lot, all at once. But if you find the shade, catch your breath, maybe take in a medicinal margarita you can start making sense of the everything of it all.
Focusing on one vignette a young woman in long green dress is posing with a mother board, her parents clumsy with pride taking photos framing the beaming girl with the tourist boats and gulls behind her. I can’t help fast forward ten years and when people ask about that photo, now framed on a wall in a house somewhere within maximum security suburbia, they talk about their “crazy” years iin Brighton before they settled down into a grey little town with a pension and Duncan from Blue turning on the Christmas lights.
Brighton, we become a flashback, a blur of sunshine, 3am walks home, a smash cut of carnivals and colour, of body’s falling against each other on dirty sheets, grey dramatic skies, warm cans, rolled cigarettes, seagull screams and if you listen hard enough the soothing shooosh of the waves over shale.
To the lady in the suburbs Brighton will become a fond island of Hartley’s other country that’ll be unreachable even on the couple of day trips she takes.
So what does that say about us, those that choose to live in the blur, actually considering the cost of living, that *fight* to live here? That weather the grey parts of the year and explode into the summer full pedal to the floor, an explosion of colour and sound and fury signifying nothing? I don’t think I could live anywhere else but this werewolf of a city, another mismatched square in a patchwork of weirdness.
Brighton is a city lousy with beauty, glitter lies on the street like dirt next to the litter and the inflatable penis from last night hen-do. Living here takes a certain type of romance in the soul and the rare ability to see the beauty in the glamour and the decay.
If we’re lucky we chose our places, we can work for our corner of the new build, or we can embrace the blur. It’s luckier still when those places embrace us back.
My heart is buried under the beach with the bottle caps and hag stones, and whether your here for three years or ten the smell of Tuaca will always remind of a night rapidly going feral, sunsets will will make you dream of a stone coast, and the salt will always be in your blood.