013. Itch

After the gig a skinny kid with a green mohawk strolls up with two beers and hands me one. He tips his bottle at Skim and grins madly.
Don't trust her, Monkey he says. She'll tie a noose out of that pretty song and watch you hang yourself

Skim scowls at him. This is the first time I meet Itch but it's not my first encounter with one of Skims exes. She likes to handle these situations.

"Fuck off, Itch"

That's how she's handles it.

But Itch grew up on the barricades. He was twelve when he molotoved his first police van. At thirteen he became something of a mascot for the student riots and the cops started to recognize him. An angry red scar runs across and under his mohawk. Itch has been lounging where he's unwanted for most of his life and does not fuck off gently.

He also has excellent taste in music and keeps buying me beer. Pretty soon we're lost in our own little corner at the club. Planning the revolution and bickering over the soundtrack. Itch can't stand the Smiths but I make a heartfelt, drunken stand and declare it doomsday music.

"To die by your side, Itch! Well, the privilege is mine!”

I'm being a horrible boyfriend but Skim is forgiving. There aren't that many people our age left here and I haven't made a new friend in what feels like forever.

Some weeks later when we walk home from another night out I tell Itch about my dad and the plans he had for me. And how it's now physically impossible for me to live up to any of it. I'll never mine the rings of Saturn for unobtanium. Itch, who once threw himself naked on the royal Rolls Royce and screamed about social equality through cross-class pollination, puts a hand on my shoulder.

"Man, that spaceship exploding could be the best thing that ever happened to you. Everybody needs boundaries.”

This from the man who spent two months planning and then another six executing a scheme just to piss in the Prime Ministers tea kettle.

"We all need something to bounce off of. Without friction, there's no motion.”

The most unhinged person I know points towards the sky and says

“If I could go anywhere in the world? If I could do anything I wanted to, no limits, I'd just end up at home. On my couch. Wanking away at the possibilities".