The Echo

 Of yesterday. 

I lie in bed and listen to the voices from outside my door. I try to plaster your names, your faces – all that is familiar to me, to the sounds, but it doesn’t work. Try as I might, I can’t make the echo of yesterday overshadow the noise of today. In the safety of my room I might pretend, and for a few days I thought I could, but the weekend brings spare time; time to hear foreign voices, and for foreign voices to remind me. You’re not here; you’re scattered all over. 

So I escape into my head, and for a few minutes I watch a normal Saturday unfold. I would knock on your door and you wouldn’t answer. I would probably knock some more, even though I know you’re in the shower – for that’s how “good” our timing is. In the kitchen everyone would gather, one way or the other, and we would talk of yesterday and today and tomorrow. At some point you would come in with wet hair and ask if it was me who knocked on your door. I would laugh while you’d sigh at how this happens time and time again. We would plan our Lidl-date and ponder upon when to do laundry. I would end up doing mine in the middle of the night, whilst you would postpone till Sunday. Or Monday. Or Tuesday. Or next weekend. 

But that’s how it was, and today I awake in another’s home. Today you have rehearsals all day, so today I go to Lidl on my own. 

Ah… hahaha, now look at that cheesy, melancholic shizzle. Really, I should be writing tragedies. Jupp, that’s it, in a few years you’ll find me writing sappy, bad tragedies made up of far too cliché lines. 

You might say all flats on campus are the same; white corridors ending in a kitchen with several rooms along it. You’d only be half right. It’s surprising how quickly you can make somewhere your haven, and while this new flat has the same layout and the same colours and corners and counters as mine did, it still has the feel of a strangers home and I’m intruding.