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ghosts' stories

what was the best part of all this.
how was it that we ever even got to be here.
we've been together for such a long time now
but for the life of me i fail to remember how it was again that we met.

you wore an oscillating green outfit and i played a flute and sold hamburgers from the back of a caravan whilst you competed in the 27th international hula hoop championships on the Norfolk Broads as fireworks played war games that resounded forever in our ears.

just for fun.

we lived through all of this unawares
without seeing hide nor hair of the other
you worked as an alcoholic check out girl on a duty free stand in Wyoming
i danced a tango with wild unnecessarily violent bald orange men on the White Cliffs of Dover

yet you have forgotten it all.

forsaken i took to calling you peter.

we don't know each other
our lives have never really been
i fail to exist without you
and quite possibly despise your name.

a zither plays from deep inside a gothic sewer.
the lights all come on to show nothing more than a battered chuck taylor all star shoe,
stranded incongruously on a parquet floor,
that turns out to have been improbably owned by a single named eastern European silent film star.

listless and slightly bemused you stand frozen in a momentarily lost thought
enraptured
searching for a silence you thought you heard
whose breeze would have explained it all.
Simon Friel