Always on the Fringes

Sad Saturday afternoon in Prague. Fifth cigarette to irritate my aching throat. Everyone is leaving. I am alone in this huge flat. I can hear the echoes of my footsteps for hours. Or maybe it is the throbbing if my pained head. I’ll light another one and watch the hours pass silently. I feel just like it is 1991, alone with my thoughts in the apartment I shared with John, trying to pen some inane poem to rot in a notebook until my eyes hunger for some sort of absurd nostalgia.

I have always been one to talk of the thrill of change, but now it tears at me like a feral beast. Humans begin to scurry in and out, removing Jenicek’s and Viking’s things, eyes always avoiding my own when I chance out of my cloister and into the emptiness of the remainder of the flat. This is an alien place after my time in Bosnia, in Munich. I am blind with hatred of the arena at which I have stared for two years, never quite joining the fray - always on the fringes.