Windows Reminiscent of Other Windows, now Lost

In the sunlight of day, (or in the churchyard-gray if your day is like my day was), you forget about this. You forget about these rooms, as days turn into weeks and weeks to months and months to years to a lifetime, however long that might be. You come back to places like this sometimes, to nights when the ceiling seems too low, and the window too reminiscent of some other window, some lost window, from a childhood home perhaps, that you can't quite remember. You might think about watching a film, but the thought of the television screen fills you with a dismal kind of euphony. I've not been here for years - forgotten these places existed, I mean really existed. I might have been aware of them in half remembered dreams, or afternoon daydreams on peculiarly rainy and spring-cold days. These places are real all right, and now I'm here again, they don't seem to have changed at all... except they're more ragged, more ramshackle, more seemingly prone to a kind of internal collapse at any moment than they seemed to be before... Not that they will collapse though. They can't. These places only exist because they are constant. Immutable architecture, an unholy spirit made out of concrete. It is us who are transient, but wherever we are, these rooms always exist, in their silence, in their Saturday nights with the ceilings too low and the windows reminiscent of other lost windows, whose locations you now can't recall.

The White Sky Days are Here

The sun has gone in.
The white sky days are here.

They hang over the shallow streets with a torpid portentousness, a superstitious tangle of memory and fear. Restless days, nowhere and everywhere. Walking back from Em's this afternoon, and everyone I pass seems flat and not there, and I taste the blossoms in the air. A taste that has not been there for years.

Greeted like an old friend.
I am afraid some places might remain locked and lost forever.

I get to thinking about rainy Sunday afternoons, watching it get dark on obscure streets, and the air all church spire wet and Sunday evening melancholy.
Oh yes, the white sky days are here.

What was Found in an Old Notebook

When I was getting ready for work this morning, I picked up an old notebook that had been lying around my room lately. This is just one of a legion of notebooks and sketchbooks that follow me around everywhere. They pop up, disturbed for a while because I am sorting through some old drawer or a cardboard box, then vanish again, until the next time they are disturbed. Sometimes I open them, sometimes I don't.
I had noticed the red A4 notebook about a few times over the past week or so. I think it was disturbed from it's resting place when I was looking for wage slips for the students loans. I knew it dated from 1999 - and as I opened it, I was expecting to see song lyrics from the days when I would try to write songs back in Worcester. I found a story instead, and reading it made me feel oddly nervous - a nervousness that only makes sense if you read yesterday's post about Worcester and why it continues to haunt me. I wrote in there about how Worcester - in the 'heavily mythologised' guise of Clovelly Heath - used to feature frequently in the stories I wrote in my first few years of Brighton.
The story that is in the old notebook is one of them. It is called 'Vanished' and starts with a description of the view outside of my then window up in Moulscoombe in Brighton. The narrator in the story (obviously myself) begins to remember:

'Clovelly Heath - walking along the paths of the river Nerve in an autumn only a handful of years - the dark red of an October night - a raw cold clutching him - clutching them, for he had not been alone then - underneath the brooding curves and angles of the vast cathedral and the boughs of trees that probably remembered Oliver Cromwell and civil wars...'

In my post yesterday I asked 'what is it that brings me back again and again to that place?' There was another passage a little further on that spookily seemed to answer that:

'He was not fooled by his memories into believing that he had been happy then, but he did believe that he had felt more alive then. Life then, though certainly more difficult, more painful than now... seemed to have been full of a potential ...'

I wrote that story back in the autumn of 2000. I was 28 years old. I wonder what I would have thought had I known that I was writing an answer to a question I would ask twelve years later when I had just turned 40?
As I wrote yesterday, only Clovelly Heath is real.
Only Clovelly Heath will continue to be.