raw-1

I had lived with Ben for three long raw winter months. The flowers that lay on the table had become as wilted and as dusty as my bones. That morning he had been rather pissed to find some of his f**s were gone. He'd looked around almost trying to find the unnamed culprit,but he gave up and went without nicotine for the morning. The thing most people don't realise is that we need you to exist.    Without humans we fade into nothing.We go somewhere worse than hell. A prison of satin that we're kept within forever.A prison that is covered in soggy old cards and petals of objects left by reliatives that have forgotten you the moment you say your last goodbye to their fat smug faces. As a child I'd been bullied everyday. I was walking home one day in a stupor with battered and bruised skin. I was usually in a rush to get home on a thursday.It was the only day my father would'nt drink so he could be there for me when I came in from school.My mother would prepare tea for the both of us as we sat watching the afternoon war film, cheering on whoever was fighting who.My father saw me as more of son than a daughter.My big brother had stopped coming through the door anymore after big school to give me hugs and annoy me so my father used these moments to almost console him.I was his little grief couselour & His son.   My name was Lou for godsake!     This day I did'nt rush home ,but instead I sat down down on the severed body of an old oak tree to tie my laces which my brother had taught me how to do on the first day of school.I dropped my bowie lunchbox out of the clumsiness that often got me the belt in school and bent down to pick it from the grass. A girl who had been siting next to me without me realising handed it to me instead , and gave a slight cautious nod.She was a bit older than me and her clothes were dated and not as brash as the styles we had at that point of the seventies.    neither of us spoke a word but we somehow did'nt need to.We both were able to feel the emotions of each other and through it we spoke more than any matter of phrases or silly sentences of a child could. we both watched as a squirrel with hair as red as hers approahed and watched us.    I turned to speak to the girl but without me knowing she had left and the little squirrel with her. I ran home as fast as my legs would carry me and burst into the kitchen to my mother exclaiming i'd made the most incredible friend who loved me for me. My parents that night had sat in the flicker of the bulb and worried about their daughter of twelve that still had imaginary friends. "she'll grow out of it",my mother had said as she smoothed down her apron and my father agreed,It was only a little phase I was going through.   They were wrong.     if you ever were alone through the pain crystalised in adolesence or if you ever talked to someone who was'nt there or if you had a friend who could'nt be took to tea or who you could'nt play hopscotch with then theres a chance we were there with you. Its children and a minority of adults that keep as alive. People who's eyes have not dimmed to life yet.   I left my home with my donkey jacket stuck to my arms and my cigarette disapearing as fast as myself. I found myself outside a train station almost through no choice of my own.I was being guided or dragged like a bag in the wind and before I could breath I was flying through fields and towns in a metal series of boxes.   I rested my head against the window like I did when I was alive. I loved how it would shake my head and as I looked out at passing life it did it like it used to.I fell into dreamless sleep with the sounds of voices &  transport in my head. I reached my destination with such a bang that I fell out of my chair among discharded chip packets and  peoples various shoes; some stylish,clean and others bizzare and dirty. I filtered out with a group and found myself in manchester in an area I could only feel a deja vu about although I'd never visited.   Among the crowds we are visible.The lost faces in a crowd and the ones who no one seems to notice even though they're there.    I walked for so long that if my lungs were still there I would have crumbled in a weezy bag of laziness on the ground.I drifted so long I worried I was no longer there,but that was then I saw him.   The first time I saw Ben he was sitting over his flat's balconey railing with a thousand yard stare. He was listening to music on his record player that I often listened to on lonely nights too.Ben stuck out a mile but faded into obscurity.He looked as if he knew the bad...and good...and ugly sides of life.   I stopped and looked from below like an angel that had fallen to earth. He could see me and with that, I had found a Home......and a cigarette supplier....