Zephyr

It was a breeze of joy that blew me back.

My feet remembered all the names of the streets. Sure, there were new bumps – on the road and on my feet – but the recall was there, more or less. And as they remembered the streets, so the calibration of distance followed. Things seemed further or harder-won and yet concurrently smaller. Diminished by the mountains that I’d forgotten. Beautiful. Eternal. All that crap is true, specially when you don’t see it every day.

So my eyes remembered the mountains, maybe for the first time, and my heart or whatever followed straight away. Whoosh. More bumps, I suppose, tumbling upwards through the millennia. A long time. So long to be meaningless. And then I remembered, with my imagination, that I was about four or five years late for a meeting here on this street overlooked by mountains.

“We’ll just remember to do it,” we vowed. “Ten years from now, no matter where we are in the world, no matter what we are doing, probably married with kids or whatever or musicians or maybe a real job ha ha. We’ll come back. Do you promise to remember?”

We both did. I wonder if you did go there; maybe on the way to work, or just for a walk to see the mountains in their autumn clothes, not knowing the reason.  I did think of it a few years back. I wonder if that was ten years. No matter, there was nobody there to verify and anyway I wasn’t home, I was chugging and plugging around, chasing or running away from reality. I have given up trying to unpick that one by now, it’s enough to make you die mad and ranting.

I wondered whether that had already happened.

I walked the same streets: the high street stacked now with charity shops and estate agents and coffee houses; the Asda on hallowed ground where I ebulliently volleyed an orange wide of where the goal used to be, in my mind; I swerved around the barriers where I used to play and now where a Brutalist, brutish, delayed fuckup monster was yawning slowly awake, crusted with mistakes and all the usual nearly-there hometown skewiff glee.

I walked in new places, new corridors, classrooms, seminars: this I didn’t remember, not properly, because I was allowed – meant – to be there. Not an interloper with a blagged card; nobody signing me in, despite my cider-skinhead burbling oafishness; no us and them and get the fuck out of here. The problem with long-held mysteries is that they more often than not end up as vehicles to disguise something that’s banal and ultimately obvious.

I didn’t get around to picking up a guitar properly. Cajoled, eventually, into intermittent noise, yes. But in between something had gone. A snapped string somewhere. I’d forgotten how much energy it took to try and believe in nothing, or to disbelieve in everything. I think that’s a kind of death, too.

It hit me; I was a ghost. It was the only explanation for this floating around these familiar streets, where my feet no longer made a sound. Not a sprite, not a poltergeist, not even a lost soul wailing for what can never be. An echo of myself. An echo of a whelp that was. What may have been. My feet remembered the streets, but now I knew it: the streets never promised to remember anyone.

I floated, and whispered, and the wind whiled me away again.