The dust settles in my mind

Then it hit me. You were no longer there just a distant memory of you still existed echoing in the depths of my being and I blinked to get you back and just like that. You were gone. No excuses, no fuss. Nothing. And it was back to me again. Little old me who cries at every film and hides behind a smile because I know it’s just another disappointment to add to the trunk I have hidden in the basement. My face scarred with so many past failures visible for all the world to see. There didn’t seem to be enough room or an appropriate place to put this one. What was I supposed to do with it? Apart from jump back inside my own head which is filled with my memories and dreams of times that have past and some that are yet to come. Some stories of pirate ships, with broken sails and some of you being at the centre of it all with a balloon tied around your wrist like someone’s new toy. It was silly I guess to think this was different. To think that somehow I could erase all of those memories...

No. Most definitely it was you. I’m still in a state of shock that you changed me so much I mean I’m nearly thirty years old for goodness sake surely I have grown up and become set in my ways by now. Well so I thought. You are the piece of me that was missing the little bit between the cracks, like a smile that’s faded away and not duplicated with the eyes. You just know or so they say. Well I did know. What’s next?  I hear you cry. Well I decided it was time to allow myself the joy of getting to know you.  I stumbled across my first few words feeling slightly out of my depth but knowing I was safe somehow. You made it that way and I carried on trying to get the words right so I was able to be on your level. I managed it sometimes and I saw your disappointment when I so often didn’t. But then you always said you didn’t need me to be perfect you needed me to be real. And real I am, with all stains of times gone by, shown so easily across my face. I’m not here to prete...

It was always you, you never even knew it but I had my heart fixed on you from the moment I took my first steps. Not you in all your glory done up, made perfect with a lick of paint and the wardrobe doors fixed up, but you broken, battered and bruised like someone’s old shoes that have seen better days. I couldn’t resist you and that’s when it all changed. I was no longer dazzled by the lights of London or the glimmer of hope and familiarity of childhood dreams that shone from the corner of the city that I called home for so many years. I was never completed satisfied, there was that incessant need of mine that I could never quite capture and fulfil.