We are nowhere.
I find myself thinking about midsummer paths, which refer neither to an actual route or any kind of physical passage. Midsummer itself is inappropriate, as these paths refers to a specific time of last May. A heatwave week where I read John Burnside's Summer of Drowning on the rooftop terrace at work on the fifth floor, where Em and myself took a long Sunday walk along the Thames, and where, before I met Em, I walked across the railway bridge over the Old Shoreham Road. Looking down those rust coloured tracks, and the embankments thick and lustrous and disordered with green. These were the midsummer paths and I don't know why, and they promised to lead somewhere, but didn't and haunted me instead.
Followed me into rainy June, and I lost them by the disillusioned July.
Adrift here on this nowhere time, the midsummer paths seem as near as anywhere - or anytime - else.
I suppose it is cold, but January 16th feels as unreal as a dream or a memory, remembered in some far flung future time.
