it's autumn & nighttime has already started creeping around this neighbourhood earlier & earlier. afternoons collide into evenings faster & i awake from a good book to find i have been straining my eyes for a good while, trying to glean the words off the pages which i now see are very much bathed in shadow.

the wind has been howling all afternoon, throwing its weight against the window panes & whipping up the rubbish noisily in the back street. the soles of my feet are black & i realise i've been foot-first in soot for a while, nestling in the armchair by the fireplace. there's always a soot fall when it's windy & there's no point brushing it up until the winds die down.

i turn on the lamp and the corners of the room come into focus. i'm deliciously alone. the kind of alone where there is a pure kind of silence to inhale, in a languid time where the second hand appears to take the scenic route around the clock face & there is space to reconcile. this moment is my fortress, i am separating myself from the past year in the same way a child delights in evenly & calmly ripping strips of velcro apart, prising off each of bad fortune's fingers from around my wrists, wriggling free & disassociating myself from the last twelve months; it is me and that time now.

i will only inhabit the present now, where the wind whips around the lampposts & they creak and sway, causing pendulums of light to run back and forth over the floorboards beneath the window & i leave black footprints in every room that i begin to dance in.