14.08.15

In a dark and damp sub basement I stand witness to three sad travellers.  One addicted to meth and sorrow, one to loss and shame, and the last an addict of lies, misinterpretations and embellishment.  He was creating the story he wanted to be told.  It would be lavish and the core of everyone else's envy.  For me it would be nothing more than a cowards tale and an avoidance of truth and responsibility.  

A twenty something year old is caught in an inappropriate relationship with his caretaker.  A lover with severe autism makes the best sort of lover after-all.  How could he resist.  How could he say no.  How could he say yes... I knew goddamned well he had a daughter and immediately regretted the question as it passed my lips.  The drink had gone to my head and I was not in the right mind to remember that he had lost her several years back.  After the suicide of his long term American girlfriend, she herself (to prove a point no doubt) put a handful of pills in her belly and took to the tracks soon coming face to face with a speeding locomotive.  He said it was a sore subject and asked me about my art.  

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I am stuck somewhere between now and yesterday.  I am tired  And afraid.  Not of the outcome but of myself.  I will be the death of me.  These words I go over in my head.  I will be the death of me and it shall come in the form of a spotted tongued woman with weathered hair trailing the dry earth behind her, followed cautiously by two cross-eyed white cats.  

We are no longer on speaking terms.  It was I that ended the relationship and it was also i that tried so hard to build it back.  But my focus is now elsewhere and I can feel the cancerous tumour in my abdomen slowly shrinking in size.  Frozen.  Beneath a thick layer of salt water fed in by the Irish sea.  Fifteen feet below I can see my pale eyes and nothing more, yet I can hear a song resonating through the ice.  I am singing.  It is a song of joy and I have resurfaced only to be met with the blank stares of two crossed-eyed white cats.  I reach to touch their fur coats but they quickly retreat.  We coexist.  But not together.  

It has been only a week since the boys returned to Glasgow and I left Ramelton.  But I have found being back on the boat in Baltimore with the cats a welcomed change of pace.  There is much left to be done on securing the new beams and shelf.  I've received an email.  I've been accepted.  I'm off to Wales.