For the Last Twenty Years

The call centre becomes a tower as darkness falls. The roofs of Brighton below adopt a more sinister and beguiling aspect. Instead of the sea seen between the buildings there is now only a black void rumouring tides.
I think of the waves crashing on the pebbles, the silent merry-go-round, the empty space where the bookstall was over summer.

I didn't have to be in work until 11:00am this morning, so spent my few extra morning hours drawing and watching 'Jeremy Kyle' on the television, the latter an echo from the unemployed summer where I would wake every day especially for it.
The grey morning gave way to a rainy afternoon. Soaked walking home, the rain on my glasses fracturing everything into imperfect diamonds, a deep-autumn blindness. A void like the sea.

As I walked back home, I started thinking about the autumn of 1990. How could this be two decades ago? I was eighteen back then, a fifth of a decade, but it doesn't seem that far back. I thought back to what I was doing then -at Uxbridge College studying for my art A-level, buying Star Trek on VHS video and drawing unfinished horror comic illustrations. I had my i-pod on random, and as I thought of that far back autumn, the song 'All I Wanted' by the band Leatherface came on. I had bought the album back then over that autumn, buying it again on cd two and a bit years ago (I had bought the original on vinyl from the Our Price on Uxbridge High Street).
The chorus jarred me 'for the last twenty years, the same old song...'
A coincidence obviously, but it left me with a vague undefinable quiet.

I think of London Road in Worcester, of being there on Friday evening with Emily just before twilight. The four terraced houses contained the house I once lived in, 136. The four houses, in my memory, seem situated on top of a small hill, and there is a red sun hanging behind them. Blood-glimpses through the undressing trees, the air tasting of leaves and fire and a certain kind of sleep.
London Road is still there now, across miles of dark countryside and unnamed towns, a ghost-machine still operating on the fringes of my awareness.
The smell of fire-smoke, the Esso garage I used to work at, the Seacrest fish'n'chips bar, the Sebright Pub, 'Odds and Sods', the junk shop that opened up there when I lived there.
The dark waters of the canal, the brooding currents of the Severn drifting through that unmapped countryside beyond the Diglis Weir...

A draught blows under my door, car horns on the street outside, that curious silence that rain brings. Time trips on, stumbling into November, and Christmas, then into the new year, the dark January geography, the grey fields of February.
Bright and yellow spring, fresh and unexpected as always.

Life passes by so quickly, I wish I could pause time, so certain afternoons could last forever, and there would always be enough time to sleep and daydream.