DAYLIGHT FADING

twenty eight | and i never meant to cause you trouble

I spend two weeks sweating and shaking in Louisa’s spare room until she finally lets me out, having deemed the worst as over. It feels odd to have nothing in my bloodstream. Even as Angel there was nicotine and alcohol. I don’t think I’ve been free of anything for this long is the past three years.

The date on the calendar tells me that we’ve just passed into September. It was July when I was last in Eastfields and I can’t really remember most of August. All of the tourists will have left, the beaches now free for the few teenagers to run and share beer cans snuck out of their parents’ cupboards.

There are perhaps about fifteen teenagers in Eastfields at a time and you’re so isolated from people your own age you barely ever meet them except through the bus stop for St. Valentines. I’d never run into kids my own age when I was going to private school but despite the relative affluence of our tiny neighbourhood most parents chose to send their kids to state.

It seemed such a stupid coincidence that perhaps the only four people my age in town who played instruments just happened to play the ones I really needed them to. What were the chances of a third of the younger generation of the town being born in the same year and being raised on Radiohead records?

Some people might call it fate. I would too, if I hadn’t learnt better than to be superstitious.

That and it hadn’t exactly turned out like how fate probably would’ve planned it.

Apparently Louisa has found a compromise, confiscating all of my weed and leaving cigarettes in their place. I could probably run with my clean streak, do away with the cigarettes completely, except it would be strange without them. I am a smoker and I have been for such a long time that it has become a piece of myself, the simple act of lighting up when I’m nervous.

The first thing I do is take the small suitcase of my things I’d taken on tour back to my house. Louisa is reluctant to let me go but I need the space for my own thoughts, rather than having her hovering over me as though I am about to relapse any minute.

It’s no use. If the acid taught me anything, it is that Adam Marr is too deeply ingrained in me to be dismissed by something as simple as a chemical compound.

I have to rely on old tricks, which is how I find myself sat in front of a bookshelf that holds vinyl records instead of novels, trying to decide what album fits my mood. Nothing seems to fit quite right, either too melancholy for a recovering cannabis addict or too happy for the same.

Even so, I turn the sleeves over in my hands, mapping out the artwork with my fingers. It is soothing, the simplicity of it, the lack of expectation for a certain reaction. There is no one here to tell me that this or that album isn’t actually good or that I don’t really understand what one set of lyrics is saying. It is just me and my music.

That is, until the doorbell breaks through the stillness of the half-dusty house.

There are not many people who would call on me, especially now. In fact, I can think of only three and I am not particularly sure I want to see an alcoholic, a bassist with anger management issues or a teenager with shadows across her eyes.

However, I owe every single one of them the right to listen to what they have to say, so I gather myself up from the floor, placing my latest album sleeve down on the floor so I can continue my perusal later.

The only item in the living room that doesn’t have a fine layer of dust on it is the piano. I’ve had plenty of time for cleaning but I didn’t really have the heart to do it for anything that I had no need for.

The walls are a comforting shade of baby blue. I suppose it is no coincidence that my type is blue eyed men. All of the most comforting things in my life were blue – the walls I saw when I got back home, my mother’s eyes and my first guitar.