Empty Town

I'm not really sure what to say about this...

Empty town. Every so often I force myself to visit. See what I have seen before. The shoes I move reluctantly towards the streets I had once known. The sound is foreign, breathing, life is foreign and new. It is empty town. It is not dead. It is gone. No ghosts, just houses, no whispers just silence. The old bulletin boards have papers that are curled like the bark of the eucalyptus trees. They are the same. They are forgotten. Or at least they want to be.

I make myself look. Nothing here should be lost. I will not let it. I will preserve it. The lights of the houses flicker off. Their power is gone. They must leave too. Goodbye lights. Goodbye, goodbye. You will never shine again, but yet you are still there. That is empty town. The roads have the blackness of skid marks tattooed onto it. Life once made that. Life was once here. I know it. I feel it. But empty town is deserted now. Life is absent. Death is absent. There is only place now.

Empty Town is past, it is not in the present, it will not appear in the future. It is just there. Waiting expectantly to be picked up again, to be played with again, to be loved again. But it will wait in vain. It will never be played with again, the lights will not turn on again. It will just be visited, but it will not be the same. I want it to be the life that it was but it is not. It only is life when it is real, when it happens. It has happened, it cannot be repeated. It’s time has passed. Memory is just a fake. A bootleg of the original. My visits are short. They just confirm what I knew already. Empty town is empty. It once was special. Now it is just there. The dregs of my brain, what is left after the tea has been drunk.