A Milk of Magnesia Sky

From the call centre, through the newly tinted windows, I watch the sea. A patch of sun, far out, near the horizon. I watch a fishing boat drift into the sun, then out again. On the very horizon itself, a larger vessel, heading, perhaps, for Europe. An industrial junk. I think that's the word. A Chinese ship of sorts.
There were paintings of them everywhere in the seventies.

The other day, moving through the gloom of the late January North Laine, I saw a ghost. An echo really. Looked like a friend of mine, but how she would have been ten years before. She walked the same, smiled the same, but as she would have been if she was, say fifteen. I felt time do that weird flipping thing - if she was a ghost, then what was I? A premonition?

The bedsit breeds a curious restlessness. It is only possible to sleep here, and to lose oneself in watching DVDs - Buffy the Vampire Slayer again. I do not know why it is so hard to do, well, anything here. Even reading seems to require an effort that is exhausting in its complexity.
The man next door is playing his banjo again.
Oh God. He 's started singing again.

A woman on the phone today at work was telling me about the weather where she was. That kind of grey gloomy weather with 'creamy, horrible clouds'.
She called it a Milk of Magnesia sky.