The return of Legend

Since New Year I've heard whispers he'd been spotted around town, and true enough when I left work last Friday I crossed the street to see his skinny, high cheek-boned frame ambling across my path at that familiar high-speed gait that tells of urgency bordering anxiety.

It's been well over a year since I last saw Legend, and my last photograph of him featured here was taken way back in 2010; again, snapped pounding the asphalt around the streets of Reading town, as if he exists only in the arena of the outdoors, like Baudelaire's flaneur, "hurrying, searching. But searching for what?"

Now that I think about it I cannot remember the last time I sat with him in a bar or relaxed atmosphere, or even indoors for that matter. Calm or stillness seems an impossibility for the guy, and he rather comes across as a perpetually taught spring, a vibration, disinclined to rest, incapable of being slaked. It's one of the most apparent and curious things about him, that hints at the unwell and whatever queer psychological processes are taking place beneath.

His disappearance until now was a self-imposed exile from a social contingent, or perhaps more accurately a world, in which heroin, crack and gambling was readily available to him. Indeed, there's a certain predisposition toward decadence in the guy, in-built and apparent since our friendship kindled proper at age 16, which probably warrants the taking of such drastic action.

Friends have an understandable tendency to leave the party when hard drugs get involved, particularly heroin, but I've thus far been disinclined to partake in any such abandonment. I've known Legend since I was three, he was responsible for helping me land my first job out of university which has since 'opened doors', and despite having tried to sleep with a couple of girlfriends in the past and having an unhealthy disposition toward drugs and gambling, I feel he's inherently much more a displaced scallywag than he is an overtly 'bad' person.

The fact I've opted to write a veritable essay about him is probably testament enough to how good it was to see him again. True enough, the above photograph shows him outside a Coral with betting slip in hand - but when it comes down to it, one can only hope.