#rc-30

*note for the listener: please use headphones

I wake up on a spring matress in a tiny city flat. The room looks hungover, with the remains of yesterday's party scattered across the floor. Crown caps, balloons, dirty socks. The other people are still sleeping. I rise in silence and eat my breakfast on the balcony. It is the first warm day of the year. The air is soft.

Minutes later I walk through the city with my coat draped over my arm, and I smell the weeds that grow alongside the pavement. The traffic is busy, but there is a kind of wooliness in the air that has slowed down the world so everything seems to be a slow motion version of itself. My pace carries out a ritenuto as well, until I find myself standing still at the bus stop. The grass behind me is the greenest green. The sky above me the bluest blue.

People in the bus talk about summer. I think about days yet to come, when the air will be so hot that all I can do is sleep and read in a hammock in the shadow of a chestnut tree, only leaving it to make more lemonade.

I eat my lunch in the train. It is no weather to be in a train- a world that only exists to move between other worlds. An artificial coolness sliding rapidly through a world that that wants to lie down and become completely zen in the sunbeams. It is weather to be present in the now, to fully enjoy it. But I'm in a train, and so my thoughts become a train.

As we approach Amsterdam station, Blink 182's What's My Age Again blasts through the train compartment. Someone must have forgotten to plug in their earphones. They realise it just before the chorus, and cut it off. I hear the rest of the song in my head, through memories of a car radio in a long lost universe. An evening drive along the water. An endless row of street lights like a connect-the-dots-drawing in front of us. Raindrops dripping over the windshield, being swept away by the patiently swinging wipers. Appearing again. Being swept away again. I can hear them whisper. How to disappear completely?