This Town

This town where I grew up, a watering hole atop a ravaged hill where drink flowed freely and personal demons were never vanquished, just boozed and blurred into temporary submission. Industry and open-cast scars ate like acid into this town’s dying face. The school where pubescence erupted suddenly and savagely into manhood was planted on marshland, sinking slowly by the year. You should never harbor regrets but I can’t help it; the girls I knew but never kissed, possessing neither the looks, dialogue or charm enough to convince them I was alive. Things I did, like painting damp seeping walls and digging deep lonely graves; things I never did and never will I regret most of all. When Autumn leaves burned gloriously from gnarled branches, slate-grey skies fortold harsh Winter on it’s way. This town turned darker, more drab and grey, it’s streets, shops and pubs forlorn structures in architectural disarray. Those many times I would roam it’s decrepit avenues at night, alcohol-charged and wayward and stupid. Always I felt unnoticed, inconsequential, a nobody, a nothing, in this town; derealised, not solid, I felt I wasn’t really there at all. Only in retrospect does it seem sad. At the time I was happy, for I possessed some meagre vision, and an idiot with a flicker of sight in the realm of the terminally blind is closer to being king. But no one in this town knew at the time, least of all me, and I don’t live in this town anymore.