A Yearning for Houses Beyond the Railway Line

Settling into the summer-ritual of a walk just before I go to sleep at night. I leave the house around 9:00pm, and arrive home about 10:30pm - when I'm not with Em of course. The route does not usually vary that much; that serpent-wind up around St Annes Well Park, then onto the Old Shoreham Road, or the Parallels of Lyndhurst Road, then across the footbridge over the railway line (I used to call it the Morning Bridge, as back in the petrol station days I used to walk this way to work and only see it in the pre-dawn blackness of winter mornings) and finally down that seductive curve of Wilbury Crescent, and then wend my way back to the bedsit again.
I slow down as I pass 35 Wilbury Crescent. Look up at the old flat. I cannot ever imagine having lived there now. I have walked by so many times that the building has been sucked dry of any resonance for me. The lights are always off, the flat is always wreathed in darkness, though someone has moved into the downstairs flat. It struck me the other day that I'm still grieving for that place - in as much as you can grieve for places. I've never moved on from there - and it's two years and a half years since I moved out from there! I might inhabit different rooms and different houses, but I still long for that living room, that vast view out of the window at the huge sky and the trees of gardens, the railway line, the houses beyond.
Deep in the yellow-heights of summer now. The Brighton streets are clogged with English-language students and holiday makers. In the pound-shops and down the Pavilion Gardens, the North Laine and the beach. There is an odd vibe out there tonight. Brighton doesn't feel quite English somehow, as if the city has been transported to some hitherto unknown Mediterranean island. So many people, and an oddly excited -but slightly corrupt- vibe too.
I'm not even going to go out for an evening walk tonight. Think I'll stay in the bedsit and dream of darkening autumn suburbs... or equally waste too much time looking at the covers of old horror comics on the internet...