chapter 3 goes...

If it was a dream it was dreamt in the creamy half dark. I wake up with her memory working along the strands of nerves just behind my eyelids. Her face burned onto my unseeing retinas like a silvery tattoo. I can remember parts of what happened but nobody can remember every breath they ever took and now the morning sneaks in under the blinds again like a slip of yellow paper. The part of the morning when everything is blue. It’s what they call the creamy half light. They have poems like that.

Behind the Chinese laundry and the curry kitchen the sun is resting on the horizon, burning up native villages far, far away. If it weren’t for all the buildings you could see the natives jumping crazy along the line with their asses on fire if you had the right binoculars. Grass huts up in cinders. Ash piles where children used to be playing. We don’t get that here because by the time the sun is in this part of the world it’s too high and doesn’t burn your house down. That’s why everybody wants to come here.

But whatever it is it’s the day again and it doesn’t matter what happened last night or how many Nigerians are incinerated in the morning, the point is I’ve got to move and get to work and as usual I wait until the last God damned minute before I have to go to start getting ready. It’s pathology.