This Cold is a Means of Travel

Cold and exhausted, like some collision between the winter of 1996 and recovering from the flu in February 2005. Waiting for the water to heat up so I can avoid using the shower in the so-cold-its-haunted morning, echoes of the black petrol station dawns of 2002. Listening to some drum'n'bass album from the summer of 1998. Drifting into the dying year of Worcester. The first petrol station. My room looking out over that long garden. Winter 1995, Southampton, and dark and lost in a room looking out onto a street I didn't dare walk at night. Yellow light of being 23 years old. Records and turntables and grey, shallow St Marys Skies.
This cold is a way of travelling backwards.
Slip out the front door here, and I might be 30 or 33 or 23 or 25, and there might be any road out there but this one.
And what would I do if I slipped out into St Johns and it was the winter of 1996? Would I come back here to Bransford Road - Is this where I am now, and I'm only dreaming of a future by the sea, about to turn 40 and working in a call centre?
Perhaps I am asleep on that bed, and all that future that is my past is about to begin.