Touch yourself. Forget yourself. Take a sideways step and watch those faces blur into a mess of half-remembered memories of drunken nights on the town and hungover mornings spent in the arms of a lover who’s now a stranger. Walk the grounds of a hospital where a younger version of yourself is stood outside the maternity wing smoking rollups while looking down at his feet in silent despair. Walk through shopping centres that were once green fields back in the day when your grandparents were alive and in love with a future that has long since passed. There was a time when Saturday afternoons brought the thrill of hunting down toys to buy with pocket money and visits to McDonald’s and sometimes the indoor market where I would get my hair cut by a lady who had the prettiest brown eyes you could ever imagine. There were also trips to St Alban’s to visit my great grandmother who would give me five pounds to dust all of her cat ornaments. She’s been dead nearly twenty years now. Some of those ornaments are in a box under my bed, and the books I’d buy with the money she gave me are in my wardrobe. In the woods near where she lived, I would sometimes go and pick flowers, think they were blue bottles, and when there were enough, I’d put them in a vase and place them on the table in her dining room to which she would always thank me with the sweetest of smiles. In the boarded-up pub at the bottom of the road, there are squatters who are junkies. Directly opposite there’s an old people’s home the queen visited earlier in the week. While the streets were lined with onlookers ready to catch a glimpse of her, I was asleep in my bed dreaming of a girl I used to know. She flashed her breasts at me once, and in my dream, I was walking along a beach looking for her so I could touch and suckle and kiss what she had to offer. When she was within my grasp, she lifted up her top and blinded me. Reaching out, I felt her nipples with tingly fingers only for the sand beneath my feet to swallow me up. There was yellow and orange everywhere, and as the light poured out of me, I was no longer an outsider but alive and existing within the dreams of everyone.
Author S. K. Nicholas 
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