A party for my wife’s 34th birthday.  I dance with the woman I crazily love.  Is this why I threw the party?  Back-up fiddles swirl: Dylan’s Hurricane.  We are too far past the shallows to realise, or to care, that all present, including my wife, exchange looks, eyebrows ascended.  We cling, eyes closed.  My hot hands feel her bra straps, I smell her hair, everybody’s hearts beating faster.  When the long ballad ends we snap back, step apart, reprising our roles of being just good friends, but tension has gate-crashed that party.  Her husband, hissing, marches her into the kitchen.  The rest of us overact normality like soapie characters.  Voices murmur.  One pronounces: Drunk, the party’s volume slowly returning after a kind of breathless silence except for the music had hung there.

Those wives, that music, the way I got so much wrong wishing love was perfect, pure, which it certainly wasn’t, are lodged in the uneasy past that you can’t change anyway, in a haze of muted melancholy usually remembered when evening falls.  Sometimes I talk to myself.  Only way to enjoy a good conversation, I joke.  Living like a hermit I sit alone, book forgotten, pages splayed, my leg gone to sleep.  I try to lift it, to feel something.  Dead.  Then pins and needles, the slow return of blood, a kind of pain, circling, as if far-off.  How could I dance now with a leg like this?

After a long half-guilty productive seclusion with my craft, when I see those characters again nestling in the comfort of Facebook clichés which I read rarely, I am struck by the great distance between us now.  Imagining a meteorite shower battering a dwarf planet exiled to orbit at the far reaches of our universe, I am burdened by a persistence of loss.  We know scraps of each other’s lives since those crowded hours, details blurred by both truth and lies, different values, interests.  One photograph includes me.  I can’t recall where or when, or even who the ghost shooting us was.

A Pacific gull fixing me with a prosecutor’s eye, I crouched like a forensics expert finding several unexplainable tarnished pre-decimal coins near a deserted carpark’s rubbish bin.  Holidaying alone, thinking of disappearing years since those coins were minted, the possible secrets behind their discovery, I was discarding hand-written palimpsests to avoid leaving them with everyday rubbish in my sea view rental.  The past bearing me back, stupidity and cowardice hovered like linked viruses.  Although I have only been nuts about one woman I believed she might irritate me if we were together and she hadn’t changed.  I sure had.  The cold dawn smelling like weary sex, I factored in reasons for this, sharing the beach with early runners.

My Facebook curiosity morphs into morbid fascination summonsing dark winds of the past, another hour of my life frittered.  Despite pop-up tags propping up memory, identification of some ageing faces eludes me.  Children’s grins glow, echoes of ours, their poses as generic  as bouquets of flowers.  In that photograph I hold a bottle in one hand, a drink in the other – time capsule accuracy – looking haggard, prematurely old.  The feeling cloaking me, familiar, conflicting, is of unregretted reason weighted with too late’s intangible lament padding in soft as cat’s paws, transfixing me.  I like privacy, suiting myself, know that other life would madden me now, but there is a limit

Sweating, toil my antidote for roiling insomnia, weakens introspection, tiring me.  I rake a dead bird, then a rat, from mulch.  Disturbed whiskery mosquitoes rise from fecund beds of leaf litter in the shade near graves of pets.  I pause passing the disused sandpit I fashioned under Japanese lanterns where children played while their parents celebrated in song, showed off, spilled wine, here, then, that play space laden with echoes now invaded by ivy.  Back inside these old musty-tidy empty rooms, showered, all done, I turn to the solace (indulgence?) of sweet music, piano and cello: Koechlin’s composition, Chansons Bretonnes.  Les Laboreurs reminds me, as usual. Of joy gone.