A Flash of Realism

by Joe Roche

We sit around in Fiasco’s room, with it’s unused light bulb and its general sense of disorder, listening to songs that were written long before we were born and that not many people our age would give anywhere near a damn about. I look at the time on my phone and think that maybe I should go to bed soon. But then Fiasco speaks up with “Why?” and that’s all he says but it resonates. Without him knowing (he has no idea I’m thinking this, but I’m sure, if pressed, he’d agree with it all) it points out all of the things that I should realise right now, as I fill up my glass and choose the next song off of my current favourite Eels album. We worry that we have essays to hand in in a few days, girls that either love us or don’t, only enough of our student loan left to keep us going until our parents bail us out and, worst of all, not enough cigarettes and cider to keep us going for the rest of the night. And yet we still pretend, oh, we pretend.

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Joe Roche is a student at Kingston University in Surrey. Links to some of his writing can be found here.