'Bone'

The first few minutes spent outside were Dark, but once the Ochre was flooding everywhere, making everything it touched its own, illuminating the dancing drizzle and making it delicate and snow-like, I started my awkward journey towards the unlit house barefooted.

A flick of the wrist through the window and I unlatched the door to where my heart once was.

I turned on the lights as soon as I got in, closed the door and rubbed the gravel off the soles of my feet before I entered the living room (not that it made that much of a difference).

I stopped for a while beside the fridge and laundry table and noticed how the wall behind seemed almost like damp corrugated cardboard. A sea's poor sad mimic.

There were holes in the wall.

I opened the door to the living room and switched on the lights there. There was another hole in the wall, next to the empty plastic wastepaper basket. I walked around the room and as I did, the discomfort and realization that the house was thinly layered with dust and more debris from the termite infestation set in.

What was once my room was unlocked after a brief hunt for the key. Posters had given up on hanging on the wall; Faber Castell Tack-Its were no longer faithful to their cause.

I went through the dusty books and folders on the table. Inside one of the folders were pages and pages of printed guitar tablatures from the internet, mostly of songs from bands which I had listened to avidly at the time: Pearl Jam, Radiohead, The Smashing Pumpkins. I had also found tablatures of songs which I had never actually heard, but were (probably) still given to me by friends who thought they were a great find.

I never got to playing Blur's 'You're So Great' properly.

I sat down on my bed upon dusting it and remembered as I went through the papers one by one, brittle bones of some thin familiar dream.

Memories of escaping, running.

I spent the next ten minutes sifting through various objects before settling on three for relocation: a black and white comic trade paperback, a music magazine, and a letter.

( _")