1999

Time comes. Time goes. Days advance. Days pass.

I never see that blonde girl with the bag any more. Her path and mine do not cross any longer, even at any time of the morning. All my ducks were sitting in a row. I wish that we did still see each other – I miss her and the frequency of her passing, the metronome that ticks off the days that mark out the weeks, the weeks that mark months, the months that mark years and the years that mark the decades. I thought I met her at Robert’s house. Maybe I didn’t. It sure looked like her. I saw her out of the corner of my eye and from that moment sprang all of this. All pouring out like a torrential downward stream. Anger. Venting. Frustration. Boredom. Paradigms. Netted nerves surround me. Ironic investments. The stupidity of others; I have nearly no feelings for my fellow man. This is the abstract diary of an abstract sociopath.

Anyway.

Some came from staring out of windows. Falling through glass. Waking from a coma. Life on the road. The hissing of the tyres as they pass endless windows in a concrete building where no light lies. Shuffling papers. Toasting machines. They give me neither delight nor hope. Oh I really love my work.

All of it is fantasy. All of it is real. Some is the truth. Some is a lie.

My life is filled with lies. I’m partly indignant about this. Clever man, she called me. That kind of sarcasm sets me aback, usually. I haven’t seen her for…years. Was it her husband who visited me that time? How did she ever get married anyway, with a palsied face like that? I know why. She had Faith. She found that perfect partner in her area, the land of the Old Town where nothing matters as long as you never look back. There’s a place for us. But not here.

Ah well. The schedule returns with the daylight. And we’re all getting fucked getting there.

And from sadness comes the look on another’s face as she ditches her baby’s body in the rainy cemetery. No pretence is necessary. We just endure it. Nothing can save us from that. I can take almost anything but not his absence. Absence and loss. I didn’t even blink. I can pick out one or two counterparts, the ghost of their younger faces etched into the faces of their parents. No electricity ever crackles in these parts between people. Don’t look back. Keep driving. Pass through. Life on the road. The hissing of the tyres. I still pass through the unwisest area of all sometimes. Just to punish my memory. He did it all for my mother and me. Days like that would have me sitting by the sea, hopefully staring out to the horizon wishing a boat would come in. Or leave. Either way, I’d be on it. Snapped on a doorstep in stark, creased and worn monochrome on thin card because there is no other possible way to remember these ghosts of people I really ought to know more about.

We’re standing on the business edge of tomorrow, they told me. I could not care. I had no idea what the phrase even meant. I still do not. I sit at night in the darkness, with you snoring quietly in the bed beside me, creeping empty inches towards and away. Advancing. Passing. Coming and going. Never sleeping.

I come. I go. I take. I give. You and me.

We live out our lifetimes together. Always happy.

Forever in love.

Growing older. Never dying.