Dreams Of Houses

At night I dream of houses. Ones I haven’t seen in years, places I used to live, or stay at, or simply just visited once, some long time ago. Retracing the layout of the rooms in my mind, floor plans and blueprints etched out in perpetuity in the architecture of my mind.

Yet always still there’s grey areas in these maps, smoke-filled absences at the edges of my mind. Houses where people’s bedrooms remained unseen behind permanently shut doors. Basements or lofts never entered. Garages always locked.

These places are always nothing but shadows to me. Even now, there could be anything back there.

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Notes:

1. Written on November 10th, 2022

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Whisky

There’s an empty bottle of whisky on my desk. It’s been there 10 years now, maybe a little bit more. Longer than the desk, in any case. Longer than any of the furniture in the room.

Johnnie Walker. Red label. Old enough to be measured in fluid ozs and percentage proofs.

I don’t drink whisky and never really have. I don’t drink at all these days. I assume my dad drank all this one and then I kept the bottle for some reason, because it’s nice and old, because it was there, because it gives me something to look at more interesting than the wall.

We got it fifteen, twenty years ago from the cupboards of a neighbour’s house after she’d died and we were helping clean up, this and various other archaic bottles of unopened spirits. I have no idea where they went, or what they were.

Shamefully, I don’t even remember her name. Maybe I never knew it. I used to talk to her in the mornings while waiting for the bus. She was kind of funny. I think she thought I was odd, weird.

I was odd, weird. I still am. It’s too late to change. Some lack I’ll always have.

I don’t know why I keep it, the bottle. But I couldn’t imagine throwing it away. If I’d left the top off it’d be full of dust by now.

Next to it there’s a milk bottle with a feather in it. No memories attach themselves to those.

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Notes:

1. Written on the 17th July, 2022

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Menthol

I still remember sometimes my friends smoking menthol cigarettes when we were 14 or 15 or so. I don’t know exactly, but round about then. Walking through fields in the dark, sitting on the sea wall, or the swings in the park, the only light the fading glow of the town behind us and the flicker of cigarettes in their mouths, occasional match bursts of flame between cupped palms. Practised movements copied from older brothers, older sisters, older kids, parents, films.

“They make your lungs bleed, you know?”

That’s what I remember. Not who said it, not any discussion of the point, no disputes to its veracity. Just the claim that menthol cigarettes make your lungs bleed.

Not even the smell of the cigarettes remains now, the taste of the menthol, how it affected the smoke. My memories are visual, verbal. Non linear. Patchwork. Collage. Who knows how much of this is true, how many memories its stitched together from, how many lies I’ve told here that I no longer remember are lies.

“They make your lungs bleed, you know?”

Across the river, the nuclear power plant hums in the dark. Sound of boats in the distance, ropes slapping against metal masts in the winds and on the tides.

Sometimes I wonder if they still make menthol cigarettes. Think about buying some in the newsagents to see what the medical warnings might say.

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Notes:

1. Written on the 15th July, 2022

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(a memory)

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Notes:

1. Written on the 25th February 2021
2. And animated on the 26th February, 2021
3. And based on a memory from 1983
4. Or thereabouts
5. I can still remember the shame
6. And the embarrassment
7. More so than the horror
8. Although I expect there was horror there too.
9. Also this was made using the figures from A Bad Dream
10. For thematic reasons I suppose
11. But also because I found them in a tub in my cupboard this morning
12. All sealed up and dust free and pristine
13. Just begging to be used again

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There Was A Forest Here. It’s Gone Now

When I was about five, I got lost in the woods.

I still remember the panic rising in me as I realised I was alone. This all consuming terror that filled me up until all I could do was run and scream and weep.

Flashbacks of the clothes I was wearing, shimmering blue nylon shorts, some plain coloured t-shirt, cheap white trainers, neon socks.

Yet is any of that true? If I was sent back there, to watch from afar, would that be what I was wearing. Would the sun be as bright, the trees as dense, the woods as empty…

And would my screams be as loud as they are in my dreams? If I was passing by, would I even register that that child – that child that was me – was even, in that moment, in distress? Have I externalised, in these long years since, what was always then internalised, taken those silent screams, those blinked back tears, and given them voice, amplified them in the hauntings of my mind.

Eventually I found my parents. Sprinted into their arms across the clearing. Wrapped my arms round my mum’s legs, wept into her dress. Lost myself in the folds of it, the depth of it, the warmth and the comfort of her endless kindness.

As we made our way back to the car, I looked up finally, my tears wiped away on my mother’s clothes, my eyes too young for glasses, my vision as clear as it would ever be. 

I did not recognise my parents at all.

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Notes:

1. Written in September 2020
2. The title’s a Silent Hill reference
3. (obviously)

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