Back through Incense Smoke

Incense burning in my room.
The smell reminds me of the Christmas of 1997, in the second year of my degree at Worcester. I think I had been bought incense sticks of a similar nature. I spent most of that short Christmas - only two days - in the small spare room at my parents then-place at St Columb Major in Cornwall. Endless telephone conversations to my on-off-on-off girlfriend of the time, trying to, as usual, get back together, or find some reason to stay together. I would burn the incense as we talked - and after we talked, and I would stay up late into the night on the internet - the very first year of the internet for me - looking at band pages, and articles on tarot cards. I would read my own cards too, looking for some sign of resolution in the images on the cheaply produced cards. A light-blue feeling, like shallow waters, or the colour of an autumn sky, just after rain.
It was one of those Christmases when the wind would be up all night, howling like it was stuck in an infinity of chimneys that surrounded my room. I can't remember where that room looked out on to - the garden? the side of next door's house? In my imagination, that tiny window just looks out onto a blankness of stars and a tangled, slightly overgrown field, ragged with night, always disordered by the wind.
I can almost taste the cigarette smoke in that small room, the ashtray and the cigarette butts, and time locked away in burning incense and faltering landscapes out of obscured windows.