Katie-Lumsden
Manhattan stands tall, and I have not been here before. I watch the skyline of this empty, alien place, where I know no one and no one knows me. I am used to London, to familiar streets, and now, here, on the edge of this place I stop, hesitate, panic, look back and forth. Then I smile, and enter the city.
She laid her withered hand on his, and looked away, waiting for the movement of his hand. It did not come, and she knew, as she glanced back at the bed, her eyes filling up with tears, that it never would again.
The terrain split beneath her feet, like the crack of a spoon on a crème brûlée.
Returning to this place, fifteen years on, I feel a strange sense of discomposure, as though in some way outside of reality. I can half remember it here, and yet parts of the town are unfamiliar, unknown, new. I do not like that. I should like to return to the past, and yet all I have found is a muddled different future.
I could hear the lambs beyond the window, and I drew the curtains to shut out the farm, to shut out life, and worse than life, new life, with its noisy scrambling beauty. I wanted silence. I wanted the sounds of death, not the sounds of life.
You've been sentenced to sentences, and that is all. You are stuck in words, and reality is closed from you. Its operations, its strange movements, the tangled muddle of thoughts that people usually experience - that is all gone. You shall be stuck forever in sentences, in ordered rational thoughts, unable to say what you mean, unable even to think it.