Twitching your nose, you smell burger vans serving up endless portions of cheesy chips as leaves crunch beneath your worn pair of Dr. Martens. With Mogwai blaring on your headphones so loud and desolate and magnificent that you know you’ll end up crying if you don’t lower the volume, you roll a cigarette as those around town walk head down and focused on a future that never materialises. Wasting time as if it were a crime not to, you trawl through a shopping arcade ten minutes before closing. Soon after they kick you out, you purchase several packets of crisps and a few chocolate bars from a gas station that’s weeks from going out of business. When it does, it’ll remain empty for years and as haunted as all those other buildings that were once full of life now reduced to nothing but mere graveyards. There are so many echoes of what has been and so many outlines of those that have gone before, and sometimes when you’re drunk you can just about see them, but as quickly as they come they disappear in the time it takes to finish your drink. The crisps and chocolate bars will make for a nourishing meal upon returning home, but for now, there’s more ambling to be done. There are alleyways that lead to fields and fields that take you to old train lines that have been out of action since before you were even born. Stepping from one rotten sleeper to the next, a light rain begins to fall, and for a second or so, everything is beautiful, and there’s romance in the air, the type you write about but let no one else see. You can feel it in your bones, and as each drop of water hits your upturned face, there’s no sadness, and no looking back, only the simple joy of being alive. Yeah, it might be short-lived, and when you get home and sit in front of the TV eating your packets of pickled onion Monster Munch, such romance will have faded, but as long as you felt it, and as long as you embraced it, that’s the only thing that matters.
Author S. K. Nicholas 
Leave a reply to jimmicampkin Cancel reply