The Familiarity of Untravelled Roads

Feeling autumnal tonight, in fact, all day. Sky covered with grey, raining this evening. This time of year feels magickal (spelling very much intended), veils thinned and everything transient and somehow more alive.

The new town out of the window at work begins to grow. From where I sitat my desk, I imagine the sea to be behind me (in fact it is diagonal-right) -as if I am sitting facing north instead of east. The new town swells upwards. The church tower on Ship Street becomes a clock that may be on top of a small and dark museum. On the ascent of the fictional hill, I imagine church spires and a tangle of narrow streets. Upwards and upwards. There is a wood upon the hill, and around the base of the hill there would be larger houses, growing further and further apart, until the last remote houses and estates give way to hills and pine forests, small lochs and knots of tiny streams or burns.

There will be a time when the nights draw in so much that I shall watch the street lights come on over the hill.
Magickal twilight. Ghost-dusk.
Endless nightfall stretched out over hours.

Autumn, that time of year that signals, in fact, the dying of the year always seems so new. Hangovers from the past perhaps; school and universities. New cycles began as we fall, but this time of year both feels full of new beginnings and an ancient-ness. Why should something full of newness feel so old? Perhaps it goes back to the oldest beginnings, when we were born. Our earliest experience - the first experience in fact - being the oldest - the most ancient of all histories. Echoes of that ancient-newness flung down years, and each time we turn up an untravelled road, ghosts of that oldest, most ancient newness make themselves manifest.

Shadows of our birth, remembered in cells and skin and bone and flesh. Histories written in our molecules. DNA diary, a genetic journal.

The lamp has died in my room, and I am forced to recourse to the single bulb hanging down from the ceiling. That and the light from Coronation Street on the television, Macclesfield's cobbled streets, another fictional town - or an unreal region of a real town anyway - and the title-sequence flashes of rain and cats and chimney pots and television aerials seem as heavy with memory as everything else tonight.
(My grandparents red-bricked house in Stone, Coronation Street's melancholic tune cutting through summer holiday evenings, called in from playing in the gardens for dinner and quiet time before bed in that haunted house).
A candle too. A vanilla scented candle. Single flame over by the stereo, a box full of coppers and a tower of compact discs.
I hear the music of the man next door. Muted bass and little else.

If I could switch on the silence like I can't now switch on the lamp, I am sure I could still hear the sea in the middle of it.
I imagine now I can hear the tides in the rain, the cars passing by outside, -in the light, the air, and all the memories that hang round these early autumn nights as thick as ghosts and discarded leaves abandoned to pools, and the pools themselves already abandoned to the early darkness of these coming nights.