Desert

And when I woke, I felt the desert here.
I remember the desert from old days, I would drift into it from that flat on Buckingham Street, walking home through cold January nights when I was 35, lost Saturdays evenings after too-long days over the summer of 1995.
I knew the desert would be waiting for me, could feel it in the pale afternoon sleep of yesterday, the listless viewing of a documentary on a Beatles film (Magical Mystery Tour - I dislike the Beatles anyway). I didn't make it to the end of the Beatles film and went to my room instead, wished I had gone down the pub. Lay on my bed, drowsed and listened to music Tactile Gemma and Paul Roland, and between drowsing drank nonsensical cups of tea and read bits of The Mercy Boys by John Burnside.
Fell asleep at some point.
Didn't hear Andy come back from the pub.
Or did I? (some vague recollection of hearing the sound of the front door opening, late Saturday night tread of boots on stairs, the sound of the stairgate).
When I wake this morning, I am in the desert.
I feel it straight away; the sand dunes, undulating into the distance, but leaving me on a flat plane under panic attack-blue skies, and too hot sun. The sun seeps into everything I am, washes out all those nooks and crannies with too bright light, washes away the books and the albums and the DVDs and the daydreams and the drawings. Leaves me witnessing the process of observation, the exhausting mechanics of an absolute vigil. I am not being watched, but I do not know who is being watched, nor who is the watcher. The machinery exhausts me, exhausts me even out of tiredness.
12:15pm. A quarter of an hour into the afternoon.
Through the gaps in the curtain, a shift of blue sky, the sunny tiles of a roof.
There was the sound of a plane passing by.
Now there is nothing, just the desert, and this too is deserted.