Sam comes in from smoking in the drizzle and requests we dance to Blue Bayou by Roy Orbison. A 4am tea dance, don't use your hips, his eyes might be closed but he's wearing sunglasses. I don't understand why he's so keen to open the patio doors to smoke and keep telling him to go out the front door like he doesn't know it's there, only realise later it might be because then he wouldn't have had to stand outside alone. A bayou, slow moving water in a swamp or a marshy outlet of a river, especially in Southern states of the US. It's true there's a swampiness to being drunk sometimes.

 feel so bad I got a worried mi-ind 
I'm so lonesome all of the time 
Since I left my baby behind o-on Blue Bayou
Savin nickels, savin di-imes 
Workin till the sun don't shine 
Lookin forward to happier times o-on Blue Bayou

There are bats in the palm trees and insects as loud as they were in any account I'd read of such places without ever imagining I'd find myself there. You would be more photogenic than me, except you keep closing your eyes in photos. My mosquito bites show up shining in the camera flash. I worry this was the best time. I worry that I was so close to not going. I demand to see a swamp. I argue with the bartender in a sports bar in Tallahassee about why men go to bars and why women work in them and the two should not be connected.

I have to go to work now. I suppose Duncan has forgiven us. The pub was always dark so we never saw any yellowish tinge. He said he never looked in a mirror. The assistant manager (who asks him the most questions about his time in the Highland Brigade) buys him a set of pyjamas and we all visit him in hospital. If you're asked to forgive someone for just doing their job you are led to question exactly what the purpose of that job was. Maybe we had not done something that needed forgiving, but it felt somehow like a failure of a duty of care.

Joke about how Roy Orbison always has his eyes closed, is always closing his eyes, singing about closing his eyes, wearing sunglasses indoors. I'm wearing a name badge. My lunch is dusty; pea soup and degrading plastic whilst I watch a video of a sinkhole with the sound off where cypress trees disappear like a shipwrecking. There's a banner: 'like the ocean we rise'.

That familiar sunrise through sleepy eye-eyes, how happy I'd be.