There is a massive feeling in my chest as I enter the cherry-blossom-carpeted road on the rise, a kingdom that seems right at the top of the mountain and gives an eternal view of the city’s light spectrum. An instinct that I am coming home as a hero. A brand of low-key hero. I’m happy that the day is done and the connection-making inside the fledgling house is set for the hours ahead. There is a new kind of glow. The bedroom is already summer – a smouldering gold as I enter, smelling the day-end stagnant, stuffy warmth trapped there, a reminder that an earlier tropical blast heralded the premature spring. (Now it comes to me in a surreal image. Fossilised by time to leave an imprinted mark, like a stamp of a much bigger stretch of feelings.) That singular vision. A post-5pm haze with the landscape ready to blossom and the near-future ready to rise out of it as unseen specialities and minced emotions. The memory of that room, the imagined memory of that room, the combined real and romanticised versions of that lemon room. Wafts of everything, a hint that the future hopes were unbelievably within a whisker of emerging as touchable closeness – the excitement of not knowing the exact shape of the spectacle, but being sure that its core will be good and high-mood-filled. I’m in that room. That vista of calm. I’m incubated by it and it’s a golden cocoon. The cocoon at the top of the hill, ready to be unmatched for years, if ever, and ready to be a capsule mini-portion of the fruitful spring, there to rely on as a sanctuary in case of cloudier moments, the ones that seemed far-off in the flame of perfect squares. (There now, still, the dull feeling that’s become an ache because it’s the used hope of the past, but, nevertheless, the sensation remains; it has to, because I want it to give me a blast of warm air, an encouraging feeling. A replica of the sensation it gave me then. I want it to fill me with that furnace, like in the golden memory. That’s what I crave – a synthetic version, but filled with the heat that I bedded down into one night, a subtly sultry evening. A bold picture that shouldn’t have been realised but was. It was a porcelain-brittle insignia of some liquid moment, when I felt splendid and no age at all. That endless vision.)
© Copyright 2016 John Maher