Between a grim urinal gone brown from years of concentrated piss and the sick of some, a closed stall door, and the firm eyes of a bathroom attendant beneath a baseball cap which communicated no sense of uniform, nor provided any proof that it was indeed the man’s job to stand there by the sinks, you told me about your new position at one of the leading accountancy firms in the country.

It was late and turning early. The air sat stiff atop itself and the mirrors bounced back and forth with the drum of sound. I could not breathe. Just off the extreme left edge of my peripheral V stood a figure in a denim fishing hat, hand on dick but not pissing, asking everyone who entered the O2less space how their night was going. Grand Yeah and Nice Cock seemed to be the general consensus from the endless flow of twisted faces.

“It’s all grey,” you informed me. “People think it’s black and white, but it’s not.”

Then, from behind the stall door, came the shining sound of a sneeze in retrograde.

“Let’s get fucking on it tonight boyos!”

I shot a glance over to the baseball-capped bathroom attendant, curious to see if he’d do something that remotely resembled a job. He did not. Just stood there, hands hovering over crotch, watching, smiling.

And so I returned swiftly back to you, a set of buoyant lips fapping up and down in constant concession, a once real supple pink now turned a bluish bone white and caked in that hard flaking spit of some non-stop talk.

Beware, I thought, in that cinematic voice I sometimes do, The unconscious state that is the Boogahead’s goldmine, the dehydrating of one’s own sour soul as a means to speak without pause and think without self.

I know you mean all well, but you’re just a block of wood with some hair on it man, an upright mop wearing a collard shirt, a clenched fist with two drawn-on eyebrows. Dull describes things which are likened to you and death via holding one’s own breath is a serious consideration when trapped inside your path of chat.

And how it all made zero sense to me, but also did at the same time. The dead oak quality to that vacuous plot just past your eyes. The consistent numbness people tend to claim as The Draw. For the first time in my life, I saw it all right there in-front of me, what I didn’t have and what I did, and why it would always be you. Safe and dull and happy.

I mean, what do people genuinely seek in others? Just someone else? I guess.

But surely someone a little less intense though. Because, by this point, you hadn’t blinked for nearly six minutes straight. Your eyes, vibrant and bugging, floated in a milk-toned pool and stared right out through me.

I wondered if it was impolite to remind you to breathe, but also sensed that it wouldn’t have helped, nor have even been heard — That I was merely in the middle of your gaze, rather than at its pointed end. Just some fuzzy inert blob, but one you liked having there because you thought it was listening.

Then a urinal. I moved to claim it.

Grip was an extinct concept here. As in some kind of life-sized air hockey game, shoes floated millimetres above the glossy tiled ground. So I glided ghostlike across the mucusy membrane made up of piss-scented sludge, droplets shaken from barely washed hands, and some half-condensed sweat evaporated from the skins of all the young men penned in like unloved chickens, all dressed in the same Carhartt jacket and Dickie’s slacks, waiting to be slaughtered.

You followed close behind, floating too, keeping up the talk, of course. Sci-fi sounding words somehow related to making money pecked at the back door to my skull as I arrived at the newly freed-up urinal.

I tried hard to tune you down and out and into a distant thrum. In fact, I needed to. A routine. I needed to fold into myself now, into my mind, pretend I was alone by thinking in abstract modes about what it actually means to be alone. It takes me complete derealisation to pee inside a crowded restroom. I almost have to convince myself that I don’t exist in order to fully relax. I have to see myself as this formless seed of consciousness buried beneath thick walls of flesh and blood to get the flow even close to up and running.

This is a form of meditation. This is how lost college graduates practice mindfulness.

I looked for an answer dead ahead. Hundreds of adverts, torn and soaked and defaced, plastered the damp chequered wall like the inside of an insane asylum cell of someone obsessed with the amateur Dublin techno scene.

The overhead fluorescent bulbs burned brighter in this corner of the room. Nothing left in shade. Every contour, key, vein, and pupil in full HD. A life in what 2009 would have defined as Blu Ray.

I then unzipped and unfurled and thought of Blue Ray to ease myself into a bifurcated stream. I had to forget that I was being flanked by two dozen other bladder-bursting men, all praying for me to quickly overcome the pressure.

I had to forget that I was me. And it was tough. I kept thinking of childhood. How Dad and I used to watch Blue Ray films together. Me being young innocent and unbroken and him being a hero. Glistering memories sometimes like holidays, whisking me away from the bleak reality of where I actually am to a place where the senses can take a brief break from the self.

But is only ever brief. Only ever lasts a moment before I’m back concentrating on the task at hand, and in this case, the dick in my fist and the thick piss which flowed strong at first before dying a slow death, like some kind of frenzied, full-lunged scream.

My shoulders stood hunched, my neck turtled, my diaphragm concaved as if to protect the golden poison which now streamed out from inside of me and down around the brown porcelain shell, across the face of an empty plastic baggy, and then down further into the unholy plumbing of the place.

Great, DNA will be here forever now, I recall as the regret.

I was certainly a long way from home here. A long way from childhood. A long way from where I once drew the line. Rapture me right now, I thought, as the sphincter squeezed out the final dribble. Straight into the heavens above allow my body to rise and leave this all behind. My soaking shoelaces sliding up the faces of those around me. The denim fishing hat dropping to his knees and weeping at the divine sight of my flying cock. You, the future of this economy, snorting another bump off the side of your fist, continuing to talk at the space where I once was, and the baseball-capped bathroom attendant still just fucking standing there, watching, doing nothing.

Up through the ceiling is where I wanted to travel, if only you had let me. High above the Georgian peaks and past the clouds and then beyond and beyond, and maybe hoped that you’d never let me stop rising. For I knew, so long as I no longer had to smell the waft of dark hot shit blown out the backsides of twenty or so evolved apes on speed, that cheap vinegary aftershave you can’t help but taste, and that old sick of some, I would smile.