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You're on your own kid, you always have been

Day 1 - Sharm el-Sheikh
It's been over a decade since we first set out for the orient, that orient in our youthful naivety being almost everywhere. Times change and people change and sometimes people don't change and either way seems disagreeable to me. Cut to dramatisation...
The man trudges on, weary and dirtied by the disappointment of boundless and groundless expectation. Life's virginal simplicity has been given up to the advancing years. He moves through the little personal landscape he's been cultivating to death for some time. Enough back-breaking hours have been put into it though now and it is time to leave. He squints to see the lush meadows that he knows lie beyond. What the fuck has happened there!? A smoking ruin of bleached earth is all he can see. And now, suddenly, he is in it. His salty tears are consumed by the fractured earth and they quench nothing, heal nothing. They run on and on but all that seems to mean is that the balance is overwhelmed and the ecosystem cannot right itself with a thunderstorm and a promise to be better anymore. He tries to retrace his steps back towards himself, or a version of that isn't slowly crumpling inwards like a plastic bottle sinking to the depths of the ocean. A version that isn't poisoning the same well he drinks from. But the way back is barred and onward is the only option though if a direction could be directionless then this would be. Still, thinks he has problems does he? Well get in line, the queue for sympathy starts at tower bridge. A haze glimmers and smudges the desert's horizon and months have passed. It is an oasis or a mirage? Perhaps, he muses, a mirage of a remembered joy. But now just a hollow pastiche of friendship as he sees it. Two weeks of going through laboured and tiring motions. If you love someone let them go, as they say. If you hate them then you should also let them go he suspects. To summarise, let people go. Otherwise you find yourself trying to turn the head of a well-worn screw. The higher the pressure and the greater the effort the more pieces break off from the unyielding fixing. And so what then is modern friendship? It feel to him like a tribute act recounting the hits with grim repetition. They'd play the new stuff but there isn't any. Still, he trudges on towards the mirage that may be nothing though it is somehow something. He long to be warm again, to be held in a Mediterranean embrace. Starved of intimacy or even contact he settles for that.'
Scene ends.
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Location: Naama Bay, Egypt

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