Golden shadows of my past continue to haunt me. I pass corners of streets I remember as filthy, rat-ridden, miserable, and a ray of light suddenly illuminates a memory with a clarity that hits my gut. Forceful as a bolt of chili, straight to the heartburn.
In the everyday I am alone. I am mechanical, stiff, lifeless. I miss these ghostly shadows. Fleeting, they are gone, leaving a strange hollowness. This vacuum of feeling, empty, void. No longer relevant. I shake myself and go on with life. Passing occasionally to cross the road and wonder at changes I see. Proof that life goes on.
And the gold-dusty haze of memory settles on the flat screen of my life. I see things in monochrome, shades of brown and orange. As if through a sheet of bathroom-school-pane glass, everything looks mottled, grainy. And somehow more significant to my story than the things I can touch and smell and taste today in harsh and vivid colour.
Katherine Shirley 