BEFOREANDAFTERDAWN

When my bestie Dawn Whelan died after a long battle with face cancer I was getting butt fucked. Outside. On a secret London pedestrian overpass at 2:22am. Up against a wire fence. Cars travelling below me into a tunnel. Earlier that day I was by her side. I'd said my goodbyes as we were warned to expect the worst, soon. Everything about her unrecognisable, hanging on at the edge of life in a old age nursing home in Poole which stank of shit and bleach. Not at the beach as I promised when we heard it was terminal, like when Meg died at sunset on Home and Away. (We made the plans, but it turns out, the iller someone gets the more power you relinquish)................ Dawn, Dawny DawnDawn..... what a bond, she was me... I was her..... we were unique.... and we had each other on the floor.... and I've not laughed so hard since...... a beautiful soul with a Barbara Windsor laugh and a Dolly Parton rack of boobs. Now a frial body, blind and a weirdly swollen head, an alien really, with just that last flicker of candle light remaining... listening to inane stories being uttered amongst her guests all around her in the room, as she faced the end, THE END. The end of 'this' existence, and whatever it all means....... Me wanting one last time to pull her the fuck away from it all.... I stumbled out the nursing home and headed for the train. It took me 10 hours to get home to London. I'd disembark at random places with names like Wrongly Bottom and vomit on the platform and cry and pace and want to bang my head against stone walls...........I finally pulled into Waterloo at 1am, distraught. A zombie on the DLR, arriving back to Limehouse, walking back into her home that I was tending, not knowing how to feel, but surely suicidal.... Staring at apps through wet eyes on my phone, clicking in and clicking out, not knowing what to do with my own living body which felt dead inside. I unexpectedly found solace via a random guy on Grindr willing to listen to my day, and he was warm, and funny and helpful and sexy. An East London stranger promising a bag of weed and offering up his large uncut penis.... Sit in the dark or fuck...... Uber!.... Outside his house the guy whispered 'this way' and walked me onto an unused, narrow walkway/bridge, in the pitch blackness, blew weed into my lungs and kissed me hard... Flipping me round, the view from the was bridge profound, as I bounced off of and clung to the chicken wire fence. Peaches' fuck the pain away playing in my head..... Cars below none the wiser as I took in my surroundings finally feeling alive. my own pulse. poppers, blood racing, dangerous. A story I'd have told Dawn the very first the very next day....... I got my camera out and filmed the tunnel slowmo, somehow necessary, such poignance. and how fitting. Dawn and I confided every sexual fantasy and experience. There was no-one either of us were more close to when it came to our deepest feelings. Both turned on by doing stuff so wrong it was right...... Looking back I know that there was nothing else I should have been doing at that very moment. PRRRRRP... PRRRRRP... The filming was interupted by a call. Fuck, the family. 'I have to take this'. Distraught they told me she'd gone.... I want to say I was ashamed at that point, trousers around my ankles and a man breathing deeply in my hair as I answered a phone I couldn't not answer.... Instead I felt warmth, and peace, and I smiled without remorse. Dawn had already checked out weeks before, she'd told me during the visit I'd enforced which she'd prohibited, when things were taking a turn towards the end. "No visitors" But I went anyway to her family home, and she told me to fuck off, and I insisted on a cup of tea. And she finally cooled, and we sat in her porch and ended up smoking and giggling again. and crying as she told me that she was losing sight in one of her eyes. then dead straight, 'if I go blind, please fucking shoot me'. And eventually? she did... and I didn't. So distanced I'd become. So desperate to be by her side. Until all that was left was a husk in a home that stank of shit and bleach waiting to just no longer, be. So her going finally was an instantanious release. For us both. It was elating, celebratory, and I suddenly no longer feared death, as I felt her instantly with me, like she'd teleportated with the snap of a finger onto my shoulder as soon as I'd put the phone down, and she has been here ever since. She's with Kelly, and Chris and Chris and Jean and Sally and Twigs. Dawn and I now laugh together at things we used to laugh at, together.... As the cum dribbled down my thigh, I could hear her giggle in my ear saying. 'fackin ell daff, i'm busy dying and your ere busy facking?'......... I love you Whelan so fucking hard. Every day. And know that on October 7 2023 as I write this, I'm finally happy again. And so I wrote this to mark it. .......Rest in Peace (and... Sorry I was fucking.)