Shell

I picked up a breath of something during the day. I've forgotten now, or rather, it's been taken by the cold. Its absence clings to my skin, ghost-kiss, hollowed-out shell space of some yearning, some nostalgia. What was it I tasted? No - nothing - surely there would be something left...  but no, it's gone.

I looked around the office at work. The knowledge of Christmas coming lending everything the feel of a time - or place - remembered. Here I was, the year 2048, 76 years old, remembering the place where I worked when I was 40. Old fashioned hairstyle, old fashioned present time. 

Think about a photograph I've never seen. Summer of love 1969, hippies and kaftans (I have no idea what kaftans are). Season of festivals fade, and they're all slightly out of focus, and this photograph is taken at the end of summer, and there is a dark smudge of woodland behind them, like some coming autumn.

I wonder what happened to them, these imagined people three years before I was born?