Southampton After Midnight

Falling past midnight. Just shut the windows of my room. Been open for hours while I watched the TV in the other room. Came back in. Sharp night air, and outside the rectangle of blackness, the angles of roofs, the planes of gardens, and all light hidden by stone and brick. Lamps swallowed up by midnight and houses. There is something kind about the night this deep into Hove, halfway between Sackville Road and Portslade. No noise, no disturbance. It feels like night-time here. It never did when I lived in the bedsit.

I rarely think about Southampton.
Too overshadowed by Worcester which came afterwards, and the extended adolescence in the metrolands of Ickenham and Uxbridge. I spent two years living there though. A long time - but not long enough for it ever to seem permanent somehow. A liminal time, an hour neither here nor there, lost minutes, last years, less seconds, and I chip away at the ice that surrounds time and cities. The ice is thinner than I think, and suddenly there is a hole with jagged edges, and through the hole I don't see myself, but what was around me and never saw at the time.

Twenty two years old.
Remember that first Sunday there when my parents left me to unpack in my new room. Alone in the house on Clovelly Road. No-one moving in for a while. Knowing no-one in the city. A sense of euphoric panic and victorious unease. 20 Silk Cut from the local shop where I interrupted an argument between the shopkeeper and a customer. St Marys, the area I lived in seeming restless and untrustworthy, and knowing this because 'the streets were too wide'. The phone box on the corner, and already, the days greying with winter. The mould in the corner of my room, at the back of the house, looking out onto a narrow yard. First album I played there was by the Zero Boys, 'Vicious Circle'. Not an album I was ever particularly fond of. Strange place Southampton, and as I unpacked books and records and posters of Joy Division and the Misfits, balanced my sheep skull on the speaker, I could feel the coldness of Southampton coming.
I would like to say I never remember Southampton with blue skies, but that would be a lie.
Sometimes the sun would shine.

Crouched on my bed, and I really need to get to sleep. I feel like a cigarette for the first time in ages and I don't know why. The lamp on the boxes by my bed illume a pillow in a pillow case I accidentally stole from someone I once lived with. A pot of ink. Work trousers on the bed.
I really must go to sleep.