Streetlight coronas

I found myself surrounded by chirping tongues, relaxed into pure smooth verbose declarations by the thick blue smoke. I watched, an outsider, the chatter palpitating in the warm orange ambience of Chris’s lounge, and considered saying something lewd or extreme to catch attention. Laughing and getting shouted at. Talking about the billion-year-old information stored in our cells. It was all fun. Unknown faces argued over opinions when every individual viewpoint was correct in its own right and there was no absolute answer. Chris nodded to Steve, who now sketched languidly on white paper with a joint cocked idly between the fingers of his weaker hand. Chris turned to me, ‘That is art. Steve is art!’ He laughed beautifully, again to Ste: ‘How does it feel to be a relic?’
We leapt into the night with bright hysterics and easy feet, the football dribbling beyond our control as we ran down the street into the safety of the sodium glow that lit the road all the way down to the beach. Outside the line of streetlight coronas the night was dark-blue and close. Dull tired clouds congregated round the skyline. We kept our games inside the lamp’s warm girdle and formed a compact circle to begin one-bounce. The game was truly on. A lot of my participation consisted of various observations on the efficiency of our ball-control in the cerulean darkness, and I watched in amused awe as skill-ridden moves that defied space and time danced before my eyes. That didn’t mean our assumed formation had any concrete consistency, and I cried in stoned joy as I watched Gaz chase a badly judged pass down the road in manic silhouette, his limbs stretching and popping to keep the ball up in the defiant luminescence and looking like a Western cowboy breaking-in a wild black horse.
We often played here at about three in the morning. There was always a general desire to improve our game after a mammoth bout of jamming and smoking shenanigans had ensued. But tonight something was different, magical. Directly adjacent to the street lay a golf course separated from the road only by a large green wire fence and very seldom did we lose the ball to this honeycomb rampart, that happening only occasionally which was quickly rectified by the para-training Gaz had received. He would fly over the fence with the most minimal of effort and disturbance. Tonight, however, the ball had other plans. The ball was walloped by someone I can’t remember who and we all watched in silent lament its fearful trajectory in slow time, together willing the ball pleading with the physics of the cosmos that our small fluorescent sphere be spared in all this lovely madness. It was not. The trajectory was bad, the ball skimmed the top of the fence and descended into a grassy bleak marsh beyond. Not so unlucky: we left it to Gaz and had the ball between our feet again in no time. But the passion was strong this night, the ego was now a communal presence, I could smell it in the air. We wanted to tame the ball, to make it our own, part of the group. But the urge ate its own head and the ball floated with consummate ease into the golfery once again. The impetus to climb the fence was beginning to falter so instead Dan took the long walk round to the small broken entrance and it was all beginning to get too much. Again the ball was retrieved and before long, as if swayed by some mysterious astronomical array looking down on us in playful trickster guise, the ball resumed its spot over the fence. I broke down to my knees in tears and giggles and I listened detachedly as my silly laughter heaved and swelled in the dark and across the fields and over the sooty chimney tops and cracked roofs. Everybody was in stitches, but our explicit amusement was cut short by the gruff scolding bellow from the bedroom window of the house nearest us at the edge of the park. The neighbourhood was alive to our noise - which had never happened - and this made me feel very merry and good that we were having the time of our lives and nothing mattered right now. We wandered down the road until our distance was less obtrusive, kicking the ball in front of us. Play began again for another five minutes but our co-ordination faculties were all knotted up and things would not get going as completely as they had done. It was no matter, and we all returned to Ben’s house with the warm blood pumping in our ears as if it flowed audibly on the passing wind.