Remember (Walking In The Sand)

August is the strangest month of the year. It's limbo. My life is in limbo, and I blame August.

Ash died on the 20-somethingth of August. One of these days. You'd think that would be a date that I'd remember, but I don't.

It occured to me today, sitting in Oxfam, staring out the window mindlessly listening to Sade's By Your Side and feeling a little romantically nostalgic, that Ash exists nowhere but inside my head, inside my dusty memories. It's a weird thought. I mean of course his parents remember him, and the odd friend of his either in Ireland or Soho, but their memories aren't of him - only I really, truly knew who he was as a person. So he only truly lives on in my memories. It's a strange, lonely thought that brings me no comfort.

I can't bear the burden sometimes. Of having to do justice to him by remembering him not just how I want to remember him, but to remember him for who he was, accurately and honestly. Not to paint him in too shiny a gloss, neither to dull down his colours. I think it's only right that somebody in the world owes him that. Admittedly I'm bad at the middle ground and find myself either keeping him in my head as this figure of incomparable love and warmth, the elusive 'first love', or a figure of darkness and abandonment forever holding me back, the monkey on my back.

That's only when I think really deeply about it though - I've actually made my peace with what happened and funnily enough, out of all of life's experiences, this one isn't one that haunts me. It happened, and I got over it. And now I have some beautiful, terrible memories, of a boy who loved a girl and never got to know her as a woman. If only everything were that simple to figure out.

But,

I don't remember the colour of his eyes.

Right now I find that sad and confusing, but natural. But it's okay because I remember other, more important things. Like how he looked to me when I first saw him, sitting on a bench in the midst of a crowded, busy Oxford Street, wearing his black 'Ash on tour' t-shirt and eating cherries from a blue plastic bag looking, to me, so very still. An oasis of calm amidst a sea of rushing, blurring faces. When his eyes met mine, I felt stilled. I remember it like it was a photograph, or a scene from a favourite film. I even remember the soundtrack - I had 'Some Day' playing on my cd player.

And I remember exactly how he kissed me. In the beginning, before everything got so.. messy. He would pull me close, always, so our faces were right in front of each other, and his eyes would linger on mine, just for a split second too long, so that when our lips met it was never just a kiss, rather a meeting of the souls. Every time he kissed me, I fell a little bit more in love with him.

And I remember the sound of his voice, his lilting accent, the way his dark hair fell across his brow, the way his jaw clenched ever so slightly when he was concentrating on something, the way our eyes met like confidantes when he would light my cigarette and then his own. I remember his scrawling handwriting when he scribbled down lyrics as I lazily played piano, and how he couldn't make a decent cup of tea no matter how hard he tried, and how he would watch me when I spoke about things and I knew he was actually listening, not just waiting for his turn to talk.

And I remember how sad and how quiet he could get sometimes. And how useless I would feel just sitting there, watching him look out the window, smoking, with this distant, faraway look in his eyes. Sometimes I catch myself looking out of windows with that same look in my eyes, and to this day I wonder what it was that made him look like that.

I remember the change in him when he drank too much, how he became aggressive and self-centered and would treat everything, including me, with a bitter disdain. And how I hated him. And how my life fell apart, and re-made itself around him. And how naive we were, and felt, even in the grown-up situations we found ourselves in. And I remember how separate he was from everything, from everyone else - and how much I loved being without him sometimes, knowing that what we had was mine. My own, private secret treasure.

I remember what he was wearing the last time I saw him alive. He had a suit jacket on, and a little silver earring, he hadn't shaved and he had tears in his eyes. He was a young man of 19, but to me he was a little, lost boy. I remember him walking past me, guitar and backpack in hand, and I felt the tiniest gust of cold air as he brushed past. Even then, he was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

I remember running down hospital corridors, pushing open doors, the smell of sanitised death and illness, the little dank room with its hard metal tables, the sudden greyness of everything, the greyness of his skin, the stillness of the air, the sick irony of my heart pounding so loudly in my ears and the heat from my breath going in and out of my mouth so quickly, when he was so cold and still.

It's funny, all these memories sit comfortably in my heart, in my past, in a movie of somebody else's life. They don't bother me, and I don't bother them. And when I do think of him, it's with fondness but surprisingly little raw emotion. I've sort of got other things to worry about these days like, well, my life. And the real, living people that are in it. Which, five years down the line, is healthy to say the least!

But every now and then, I'll wake up in the middle of the night in a panic. And I'll wrack my brain for memories, and destroy my room looking for pictures of him, or diary entries, and desperately work myself into a frenzy. Because I can't remember what colour his eyes are..

And if I don't remember what colour his eyes were, that's lost forever.

Maybe I am a little haunted.

But that's alright, because I remember the important things. And if living my life and making new memories means that old ones get pushed aside, or rewritten, or start to fade.. then that's just the way it's got to be. I may now have forgotten the colour of his eyes, and maybe some day I'll forget his smile, or the way he laughed, or that thing he said to me once upon a time, but he will always be a part of my story. Even if just as a fleeting image of a boy, sitting on a bench, eating cherries from a blue plastic bag.

So here's to you, babe. You were, and continue to be, the only boy this lonely girl ever really loved. Even if you only now exist in dusty, sad memories of better times.


Some day, we'll leave this town.
It wears us down.
We'll leave somehow..
All it's harms, and all it's charms.

Oh some day, we'll leave behind
All this time that has turned sour,
Far behind and out of mind

Some day,
We'll leave this life far behind,
And fade in time.
We'll look down on this sad town, some day.

Safe from harm.. Was it a dream I had?
Was it a dream I had?
When did it turn bad?
Oh safe from harm.. Was it a dream?

Some day we'll leave behind this sad life
And all it's lies
All it's harm, and all it's charms

Some day, we shall see with clarity
And we won't look back.