The Boy Between

A boy kneels on a bed looks out of the window. The ink-creases on the quilt of his bed look like blood. Beyond the pencil window frame is an even vaguer pencil landscape. Poplar tree smudges, a bluster of an imagined autumn. The taste of his room is of apples and attics, and on the wall above his bed (not even a pencil mark yet for this) is a poster of a sci-fi show he watches every Saturday afternoon called The Lost Ship.
To get the pose of the boy right - or at least vaguely accurate - I used the self timer on my camera and leant against my own windowsill. Not even a pencil autumn here. My curtains were closed and it wad night. I look at the photograph of myself afterwards. A 40 year old man in the attitude of a child. I still stare out of the window in the same way.
I don't know who the boy in the drawing is. Tempting to say that he might be, I don't think this is quite true. Yesterday afternoon, while between calls at work, I thought - suddenly and with a startling clarity - that I was creating another childhood.
Or recreating one?
I am not sure I can do anything that isn't autobiographical in some way. The ink on my fingers is the ink on the creases of his unreal bed. Creeping Sunday shadows, and windows open to cold skies, though whether it is autumn or spring I can't tell.
Yesterday it felt like I was chipping away at something, a bit at a time, then in a sudden shatter, that something shattered like ice, and now in the paper is a hole - no, a window - into this other place. A window looking onto a window, and a boy between.