the beautiful south

On a night out with some people, i found myself chatting to this guy who kept telling me how the place was full of really hot babes. After talking about how hot i find maleness, i unexpectedly found myself knee-deep stuck right in the middle of it. My interlocutor kept pointing me in the direction of this or that hot chick as i kept wondering at what point i should mention that i wasn't exactly his target audience for this. Eventually i did. I didn't, though, to the other straight guy who elected to bond with me with a charming "i wish the fat chick would put her breasts away" and laughed as if he'd said the funniest thing ever. He was drunk.

I guess i'm more used to spending time with people who know i'm gay so i'm generally spared this kind of insight into straightness. But in the midst of a lot of people i didn't know, the good old rule applied: you're straight until proven guilty.

But out of my own environment, lost south of the river, my mind kept drifting back to L. It happens every time i'm in south London. This being his side of town, and him being a little on the lazy side, we would always meet here back in the days when we were getting to know each other. If there had ever been something proper between us, it would have made sense, upon separating, to split something we might have previously shared. The way things stand, we never really shared anything so leaving him the whole south side of the city strikes me as overkill.

Yet it's his. All of it is his playground. I can't set foot there without feeling that i'm on his turf. It's ok, i don't really hang around south london that much so this melancholic nostalgia hits me quite rarely. Every time i go back it feels so far and inconvenient to get to but on the plus side it definitely has an unmistakable taste of him. On my way home on the tube, with the music pumping loud in my iPod in order to block out all the friday night noise around me, as the train takes me back to a much more familiar part of town i feel L draining out of me as though my veins were emptying and my mental capacity starts to return. As my surroundings are familiar again i wonder if i still think maleness is so hot. The answer is yes.