It's all restless out there tonight, windy-rainy autumn evening. Peel back the curtains of my room and in the darkness - perfect pitch black- there are windows across the space between this flat and Drurys Coffee Shop, a bathroom, or a kitchen perhaps. I can't tell this deep at night.
Only ten to eleven, and it feels far later.
Alone in the flat - Andy at work, presumably - or disappeared and about to start a career as a mystery - and the wind through the open window rattles the door. For some reason - lack of knowledge and a superstitious misunderstanding of devices - I imagine the rain and wind out there responsible for my dreadful internet connection.
I talk with Em on the phone, in Worcester, returning tomorrow, and she says she is having trouble with her internet connection too. On the floor, to my right, is a half finished drawing of London Road in Worcester at night. A legendary place that I have written of dreaming about before. Em is only twenty minutes walk away from what
I am drawing.
I am in the bottom right of the picture, a pencil (waiting to be inked) avatar of myself. I can't tell whether I'm turned away walking up this unreal London Road hill, or toward me, coming forward.
I can feel the icy-cold beneath the paper, a trapped night from another town I imagine in which there is a part of me walking forever, like a haunting, like falling in love.
There are spaces in the picture where I would like to lay words, but my pen has been mute and I have filled notebook pages today at work with mute sentences and broken phrases. The two white spaces lie blank and accusing, perfect pieces cut from a forever unreal London road.