IF I WERE TO WRITE A STORY, THIS SNEAKY BIT WOULD SNEAK IN SNEAKILY

   "The city was far bigger than I had remembered. Its vast silver woodlands buzzed with a sleepless excitement that I could not recall. I had been away for too long, and resented how unfamiliar it felt to stand in the grand shadows of the buildings here, like colossal sculptures whittled up from the cracked pavement. Nor could I pace myself for the harsh contrast of the dirty snow that seemed somehow less pure here than in the bleak countryside I had occupied for so long. I felt, again, somewhat like an abandoned child, eternally crooning for the love of a family long lost behind a smoky curtain of relentlessly questionable time. I could not revive any memory of the monstrous cars here, which knocked me back with the force of their passing, nor the deep rumble of heavy footsteps growling in sardonic unison along the footpaths. I often left the house nowadays only to decide that life out in the city was not as fulfilling as I was led to believe, and spent unimaginable stretches of time confined to my four, nicotine-yellow walls. It seemed somewhat amusing to refer to this house as ‘mine’. It rung with a musty smell that clawed unwelcoming at my lungs every time I entered it; a dissatisfying glaze played across the worktops in the fumble of a hazy city sun; a harsh wooden fencing broke the land outside a large bay window into cold, uninhabitable districts of unnaturally lime-green grass. Nothing here felt homely to me at all. I constantly rued my naïve decision to preserve my life now that I had invented a means of doing so.
I recall very little of my time in the house around this period. In fact, I recall very little of my life there at all. It feels almost as though it were all a dream - a misty, questionable memory from a distant reality. Who can say if these memories are real or not? It would make little difference to me now that I am but a desperately aging man trapped helplessly in the uncomfortably familiar skin of my secluded youth. Life, love, time - I have traded it all for a feast upon my own insufferable gluttony, but, as with all things, I had not counted on its swift decay. I have sold my very soul to the faithful demons of my abhorrent curiosity. Which God, in His infinite wisdom, would direct me to the celestial gates of heaven now? "


Over and out