Please imagine a house of brick and memories, of the psychic remnants of the long dead past. Of red brick and glass, symmetry, and the imprinted narratives of its generations. A house made organic by the centuries of blood from which its foundations were cut, in a street given consciousness by the weight of history, by the ancient tides of the forgotten Quaggy, the Ravensbourne – waters defaced by the flexing of the Thames wet muscle, abandoned, anonymous, (mere) tributary, never RIVER!
The swimming pool, filled in, became the grave they had imagined. A grave for six dead boys, marked with a circle of six grey stones. The freshly patted soil all scattered with grass seed, silently pecked at by the troupes of birds that line the streets in the dusk. It would grow patchy at first but thick with time, hair over a scar, the injury itself relegated to stories and anecdotes. The stones would soon wash away in the rain like a forgotten conversation. The truth is too frail to stand – fiction spreads through it like cancer, forming something truer still in its misremembered quotes, accidental embellishments, considered adaption’s, daydreamed happenings. Fiction makes new truth, thinks it into happening, a thousand different histories all authentic, all correct. And the six now amidst the layers of death that make a city, assimilated into London structure for the rest of time. They become it. It’s how cities are made. The concrete, steel and bricks are flourishes adorning a surface. The city as a concept grows of liquefying tissues, starved neuronal exchanges, voiceless apologies, unlived futures, unrecorded memories. Lucas and Tanya hold hands like lovers or children and watch the To Let sign hammered into the gravel in the front garden. As it was, as it always will be. Death always happens. It’s nothing, however much we might want it to be everything. Nothing changed. There are a thousand ways it could have happened but the end would always be the same. From the end comes the beginning. The To Let sign falters in the wind which blows the workman’s sparse fringe from his brow. And in that gentle movement, and in Lucas’s warm smile, and in the pools of Tanya’s eyes, it’s so perfectly clear. This is the end. The To Let sign, faltering in the wind which blows the workman’s sparse fringe from his brow.
Please imagine everything.
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