The Narrow Time

These days that drift like dust.
The window rattles against the frame, but I don't remember any wind when I was walking home. More incessant now. Cathy perhaps? A poor Heathcliff I would make though. I'll jam the knife between window frame and window, stop these ghosts from getting in.
Pass like dreams. Strange hours. Not winter and not spring. Some days freezing cold, but with an air as fluid as March, and others bright and shining, but kept with the chill of January. Adrift on seas, on this ocean of a fifth season. Twilight time. Dawn time.
Wake up before the alarm in mornings still dripping with dreams. Last night, Barack Obama as the call centre manager. We went out for a coffee to Costas. Put off getting out of bed for as long as possible. A shower in the freezing, unfriendly bathroom.
Walk to work listening to songs I can't remember come nightfall, pass by the early morning newsagents, the dog walkers. A man lighting a tiny cigarette, hunched over, nursing his tobacco wound. Winding down the hill, past the churchyard and the road that runs to Brighton Station. Pass Jen's House. Marley's News, dark and foreboding, nameless now the sign has gone, workmen carrying out display cases and newspaper bundles.
Through the empty atrium at the call centre. Look up at those strips of sky however many storeys above. Listen to my footsteps clicking out time as I walk past the giant chessboard no-one uses, the coffee machines that no longer accept coppers.
Walk home through night-dark, everything orange and black. Pass by windows whose curtains are undrawn. Look up at one second storey room. A painting hanging on a wall of a street scene. Perfect light in an empty room. No-one passes, nothing breaks this perfect frame.
Up the stairs in this house of bedsits. The smell of bubblebath as comforting as half lost childhood memories. Cooking. Lamb and mint. A Sunday dinner on a Tuesday night. Old Sunday nights. The gloom before returning to school, that heavy heart, reluctant and terminal switching off weekend lights.
Fall asleep before midnight, forget to turn the lamp off, until I wake in the small hours.
Nowhere time.
The end of winter; February a narrow room made of wood and the light of grey afternoons heavy with rain.