Resolution

In autumn, as the leaves turn into a haze of reds oranges golds and yellows, I am always reminded of the sound of footsteps of creaking stairs, or of aching joints cracking. The trees are dying and the leaves are making a last bid for freedom, rats from a sinking ship.

This time next year, my heart will be beating in iambic pentameter and my footsteps in three/four time: I will waltz down the streets, singing in my head. My nerves will be calm, as still as rivers in winter that look like ice, so still that everything is reflected, the ripples and tides frozen still. It is a clear day today and the sun is bright, so bright that it hurts my eyes.

I have wrapped my past love letters in the remnants of the wallpaper that I used to decorate my house with. From my walls I have removed all traces of the past, all the posters and the drawings that were once pinned there. Do you remember how varied the textures and colours were before, Lisa? My bedroom is now a barren blue room; it has never looked so big.

When you said goodbye, your eyes dulled. Grey blue, they swirled under your eyelids like overcast oceans and slate roofs. Your auburn hair elegantly tousled, and wearing men’s shoes, you clutched my hand tightly in yours and didn’t say anything and then I didn’t see you again.

Now it is November, and it is already dark in the afternoon. December is hovering around the corner and with that comes my Birthday but this year there won’t be a party or a celebration. I will drink a bottle of wine on my own in my house. I will eat a box of chocolate liquors but stay sober and feel sick. Since my birthday is after Christmas, I will eat five tangerines every day, but still end up with a cold, despite my body being flush with Vitamin C. Log after log will be burnt but the house will still be cold.

I have two typewriters. There is the dull metal grey one that sits on my desk grinning a wide toothy grin, obtrusive and loud, and there is the one that my girlfriend made for me. This typewriter is purple and blue and made of felt and it does not type anything. The keys are made of old buttons; the one that is where a K would be on a normal QWERTY keyboard is a button in the shape of a mushroom. Thick yellow stitches hold it together, diving in and out of the felt like glimmers of sunlight on rising and falling waves. It is a work of art, and sits smiling brightly. I will throw away the first one. People who are besotted with the idea of writing and those nostalgic for times before they were born own typewriters and whilst I fit into both of those categories and I do not want to anymore. I prefer pens; the susurrus of the scratch of the nib on a piece of paper much more satisfactory than the heavy clatter of typewriter keys.

As a testament to the past, the flickering memories of my former radicalism, I will go outside in the dead of night and I will climb onto the roof of the Antique Centre. My best friend will not be there with me, drunk, like we used to be, and it will feel empty stupid and pointless. I will, like old days, throw my empty gin bottle from the roof and hear it shatter in the subterranean darkness. I will talk aloud to myself, and I will talk about girls, like I used to. “I’m worried, man.” I will say. “I’m getting in too deep.” I will feel self-conscious and so I will smoke a cigarette. The last will linger in my mouth, Lisa, the thing that you hated most about smoking. When it gets too cold, I will climb down from the roof and steal a road sign. ‘Woodfield Avenue’, it says. I don’t know what I am going to do with it, so I will probably throw it in the hedges.

Do you remember being young? I do, but I stopped being young at about sixteen. Every time I took drugs I became wistful and melancholy in thinking about when I was really young. Acid, that one time I took it, made memories flood back to me from when I was six, when I felt safe and happy. I had a number of drug-fuelled revelations, one of which (that I remember most clearly) being that all we do for all our lives is try and get back that security of childhood. The future is a scary thing. Now we’re living in the future, and it is not flying cars or teleportation but it is responsibility and decisions.

I don’t know, perhaps rose-tinted glasses don’t suit me, but they are surgically attached now. There was a period of time when I started basing myself on Bob Dylan in the 1960’s, between Bringing it all Back Home and Blonde on Blonde. Mumbling and wearing black, tousled curls and dark glasses. I thought that suited me. Stream-of-consciousness writing and poems that were nothing more than lines of prose stapled together. I was unique, like everybody else. I don’t try and define myself anymore.

Nobody can make a cup of tea that I find drinkable except for me. Usually the tea has to be brewed in a pot for about four minutes, and should be slightly milky, a colour somewhere between gold and ginger; like the lighter coloured leaves in autumn. There should be one and a half sugar. I know, I am very pernickety, so my resolution is this: from now on I will stop drinking tea. It is too complicated and it will inevitably end in disappointment.

You told me, “Wait for the moment to arrive before you make decisions.” I have waited long enough.