The Walk Home
It's getting to that time of year, it would have been light at this time a couple of months back. The street lights flick on as I walk from the station to make my way through town and home. They glow softly as a light fog begins to descend over the area, making them look like the comfort lights I had when I was afraid of the dark. As I walk further the fog thickens, falling from the sky like rain in super slow motion. I stop for a moment by a street light and wonder what a time lapse film of the fog would look like, neither liquid or gas, falling and enveloping everything around it. While my mind plays around with time I hold the lamppost and spin around until my body wraps around it, going back and wondering what led me to this moment. When I stop spinning I'm facing a hoarding around a dilapidated building, plastered in layer upon layer of posters and flyers. Faces of rocks gods and movie stars staring out at me, quotes from newspapers and magazines bleeding into each other to sell the movie of the year by the band that will change your life. I pick at the corners of the paper to reveal what lies underneath, slowly pealing off each layer, pieces tearing unevenly and leaving white streaks over the underlying images. The wall slowly becomes a tangled mess of faces from past and present, spatters of graffiti mixing with cast lists and tag lines, album artwork and production credits. It begins to take shape as more and more pieces come away, taking me back through the months and years I've been here until I'm clawing at the paint and the wood underneath. I step back and look at what I have done whilst picking the sticky white pulp from under my nails, scanning the sea of faces one sticks out of the confusion. It's then that I realise the face is mine, from a time long forgotten, less wrinkled and with more hair. The memories are as faded as the poster now. I take out my camera and capture my creation to give the memory a little more permanence, before turning away and making my way back home, returning to what my 5 minutes of fame paid for. I can just about see the end of the street through the thickening fog and the temperature has dropped in the time since I stopped here. Wrapping my coat tight around my chest I walk on into the orange glow of the night.