I miss the books and sometimes the way the fairy lights twinkled and how the room felt just as it was beginning to get dark. The way she would light a candle just as afternoon was fading, and its flame would fight off the daylight. Then we would turn on the lights one by one, and leave the curtains
open to watch darkness falling.

I sought answers in the impossible fading blue of the dusk, the lighted window frames across from me, silhouetted like a Hopper painting, empty-black and shell-like light.

Everything looked better in the darkness, the morning was always a disappointment, and its saturated gloom showed up the objects in the room for what they were: inconsequential.

I left because each day was like the last one and everything looked the same. Each day I had to start again, but always in the same place. Same faces, same routes, same four walls.

The walls were closing in on me. From the shadows I lifted my shadow. To keep on moving, to disappear.

The night room with its shadows and incomplete darkness. In these moments, I plan it all out. Silently, I pull back the curtain and lie as still as possible. The pre-dawn light is grey, and nothing moves. The road outside is quiet except for the otherworldly scream of a fox, solitary and roaming, searching. An ambulance speeds past, its siren turned off. I can feel its motion as it spins past, lights flashing by.

The room by night. I have started to feel that too much is contained in this one room. More than ever now, I keep the light on for as long as possible, waiting to feel the drift away, into sleep. To dispel the tide of thoughts in those moments before sleeping. Sleepless nights and broken sleep, the long reconstruction of scenarios and mistakes. Regret and an ice-cold dread that once it seizes hold, cannot be dispelled. All the things I thought into being lurk here unchallenged, childhood fears and imaginings still inhabit the space.

A parade of images repeating, leading here to where I am inconsolable, at the end of everything. I lost the thread of a simple sentence, of connecting words to who I am. The gap widens until I am staring at the chasm and you can no longer hear me, I am lost to you. It is like trying to talk from the bottom of a pit. No way to be heard, to shout, to climb out. When there is nothing left to do but leave. As the tension slowly dissipates, without moving from the bed, I imagine my departure, frame by frame.

I steal out of the house in the dead of night when everyone is sleeping. I reach the bottom of the stairs, feeling out the keys, to unlock and then gently close the door. No one hears and nobody comes. As silently, I make myself continue. Walking at first. I still my mind into the monotony of my footsteps. I walk a long way without thinking about where I’m going until my feet ache, and I can’t walk any further. Daylight, and I sit in a café drinking coffee. Now would be the time to turn back. The time they are waking and beginning to realise I am not there.

I sit there making plans. A train ride to the city by the coast, I spend a few hours sitting by the docks and watching boats come and go. I can’t shake this stillness, this silence. I am apart, and everything is happening around me. I buy a ticket for a boat, the overnight crossing.

On the boat, on deck. No farewells, just a leave-taking. Looking back as the boat departs. Then the hours at sea, when behind, ahead, and around are the same continuous horizon. 

I take a bus into the city and walk about. I recognise no one. Find a place to spend the night, perhaps a few nights. Here I might find somewhere to stay, to work. But I don’t want to stay in the city. I am here to keep moving, to buy some time, hoping that the shiftless, restless feeling will begin to slip away. Until I no longer know if I want to be found, if I want to be missed. The feeling of numbness remains. There is no going back, no wish to go back.

I spend some days just walking around. All day I walk, and then sit in an empty room at night. Drifting in an unsettled sleep, until morning arrives and I can do it again. I begin to recognize the onset of dawn, each pattern of light and shadow on the walls. It is in this way I start to lose track of time, of days and weeks. Sleep and wakefulness, moving from place to place. Looking for somewhere, a resting place, the place to hide. Will I know it when I find it, the place I am headed, this place I have never seen?

A small town, but big enough to disappear into. I take a job in a café, as a waitress serving coffee. I rent a room above a shop, a window overlooking the street. Existing quietly, half unknown, amongst strangers. A traveller from the mainland. Strangers who let me in but keep their distance, who don’t ask too many questions, about why I am there, so closed and self-contained. They do things differently there. Here life slows to a gentle routine. I fill the hours standing at the counter and cleaning tables. To earn a little money, just enough to pay for my bare and empty room, a book or two. To live for years unknown, to slip away.

The room contains a bed and wardrobe. Next to the bed there is a table and a lamp. A bare desk I never touch as I have begun to empty my mind. To close off the exits. I remember I was always good at being still, lying there motionless, playing sleeping lions. Planning it all out steadies the mind and brings me back to life. As I open the curtains just a little, to the grey morning light.