Moulsecoomb Hill.

I came inside and dwelled in the artificial light emanated from my laptop, mark 2. As I finished the sentence I saw the last two carriages vanish behind my half-drawn curtain. The lights of Moulsecoomb Hill (as I like to call it) burn endlessly. It is always a curious thought that the lights at the bottom seem a little more feeble; intermittent, and less bright than those higher up. It could simply be wandering branches trespassing across the view, but to me, it seems these lights are always the first to go out. As though a slow flooding is occurring; extinguishing whatever left they were glowing for late into the night. I never see the upper levels diminish, though I suppose they must do.

I stub out my menthol cigarette on the wall of which holds the door I must pass through. Sat, in quite casual clothes, quite casually unshaven; this is casualty. Two brand new tops, one of which I have worn more or less since arriving home from my excursion to town alone. It is my independence. The sky, a passionate rouge; almost bleeding all around me.

I never imagined that my love and my future would be such a desolate landscape (although I did joke). But it’s not just me; nobody chooses to be unsuccessful with love...it just sort of happens to you. The frog was kissed but it was only a frog. The screen of my laptop went black and Hollywood could not have prepared timing better than that. Must there come a point in anyone’s life where the belief in romance must take its final bow and retire into obscurity, or else live the rest of its professional life within the construct of pantomime? Another train makes its way toward Brighton railway station. I, for one, do not wish to live at the bottom of Moulsecoomb Hill. But I feel whatever burning that once existed must slowly suffer this suffocated fate. There appears to be no romanticised outcome to a romanticised beginning. The prongs of time pinned deeply in perpetuation within our flesh: too stubborn to yield to the reasoning of the heart. The mind has informed time that ‘now’ is not ‘then’, and to prize the teeth of these hands back would be cheating.

There are so many coincidences and parallels that with time I can only assume the quantity of which extends beyond rationale. One is able to read into the falling of a flower in front of your route. Perhaps it is just a flower. Until the romance inside has succumbed to the flooding of Moulsecoomb Hill I will persist to see more than the flower, and will wish to see nothing less. I will peel each singular petal from its source, having planned which statement will yield an agreeable consequence. As though I have any control.

The scariest thing about Moulsecoomb Hill is not knowing how much time remains before the bottom lights finally go out, and I am left looking above at those still alight.