As I look down my arms and stare at the pale and veiny hands clasped to the handlebars I come to the conclusion that they can't possibly be mine. The tint of these hands resemble the skin you'd find on a piglet after a rough beating, a greasy pink with a touch of blue-ish and yellow bruises. These hands can't be mine at all because my skin feels like it must be a shade of gold, perhaps even golden silk, wrapped perfectly around every finger, every limb of my body. For six hours I haven't taken off my headphones and even though they are forming a sweating ring in the hair behind my ears, they feel like they've grown stuck to my head in a way where the mainstream radio hits blaring into my brain seem like a completely natural and synchronized appendix to my being. I race away on my bike, so smooth and easily that it would seem like someone is tugging at each end of the asphalt to straighten it out just for me. My thoughts center around what would have been a mandatory holiday visit to a foreign museum to look at generic foreign art, had it not been for a certain painting from which I could not tear my attention. I'm sure my imagination has provided additional colours and textures to the canvas but I clearly recall my instinctive fascination of this one piece, and even though it was riddled with ambiguous and otherwise repulsive imagery of biblical characters, to my relief referring to Irish history and not to praise the superstition itself, I was struggling with a beguiling urge to carefully lift the painting off the wall, bring it back home with me and hang it on my ceiling to stare at every night before I go to sleep. Besides the faceless imaginary saints and what I remember as being smeared Irish flags and other generic symbols of Irish and Northern Irish nationality, the painting had two or three lines of writing on it, of which I sadly only remember the first but keep very dearly to my heart, and on this day in this very moment, I feel with everything I am:
I see now that there is a different kind of love.
