Rez

The VHS footage of the rave on Youtube cracks and loses focus.  I’ve collected days like this.  The music has been dubbed in.  The fashions say 1990 but the music is at least five years later.  That makes it harder to look for him.

The camera noses through the crowd as if exploring a deep sea trench; shining light on sweating torsos, shiny lycra, on staring eyes. He never escaped this moment; gesticulating, tendons straining as if failing to hold a place in the world.   I try to lip read the clubbers as they speak to the unseen camera person.

I only found him again in his last few months. Even my mother hasn’t any photographs. He wouldn’t let me say ‘Dad’.  He left behind nothing. No wisdom, just a pile of records and debts.  A friend to everyone; like the fractal projections, nothing resolving.

He called me ‘mate.’ Forgot my name.  We buried him.

A man in white dungarees dances on a podium.  It might be him.  I screengrab, try to zoom, but there’s never enough resolution.  No more detail to be seen.  I can’t get closer, there’s just the same details bigger until they don’t make sense.