- 2020-12-13 21:25:39+01:00
Hammersmith 1987.
In situ dream?
…..overlooking the train tracks that carriages rattle away on, the night rains on gleaming flooded lines flowing behind an Old White Schoolhouse. This house glowers, a little anonymous perhaps, or more accurately described it is secretive whilst hiding those tracks. It is secretive in the space before the road, peering over the large black fence. It is secretive in that it has a ramshackle elegance (a hint of an older and in some aspects more leisurely paced time?) not revealed so easily to the hasty morning commuters or drunk night revellers of the Shepard's Bush Road the other side of that black fence.
So picture yourself now, - early winter morning say – stood in the back bathroom on the second floor landing hearing that wind and watching the waters fall and flow in the tracks in this lamplight. Shivering though you are, you are arrested momentarily to stare at the stark bleakness of the landscape unfurled beneath. The flitting of shadows and the calling of the wind to the traffic stirs your mind down less well traveled avenues. A tube train, beaming yellow windows in the dark morning gloom departs north.
Down less travelled avenues – this phrase reverberates in your mind with implications of perhaps say, surrealistic fantasy or turgid narrative yet it strikes you that the strangeness, the truly ridiculous reality is that which you have lived for the last few months. Ever since you left NYC for the first time in a year those few short months ago (May to today's October) life has not stopped storming through you like a writhing river of joys griefs passions altercations and loves whilst looming ahead always some nameless, formless, but so very present destination. A purposeful blind drive.
Back now in the front bedroom of the house she still sleeps. Unusual for her, brought up as she was in less indolent mores than you hold. Perhaps indeed you have just risen to pee in the middle of the night and will climb back in bed beside her once this strange mood has forsaken you. But isn't that the dawn that cracks the sky open across the road in the green opposite?
London 1987