kills memory

The vampiric intensity with which I devoured content intended for other adults rather than children seems very strange now that I watch that material back, as I still do once every couple of years. It was all-consuming and I invited it with open arms, a welcome escape from what was otherwise a soul-crushingly dull day-to-day experience, the irrelevance of which felt so acutely by a teenager. One of my clearest memories of that time was from the point of view of my grandmother’s steps outside the back of her small house in Mickleton, a village close to mine. The weather was that grim mixture of hot sun and cold air, combined in a way that meant the clothes on your back become irritatingly warm but the heat doesn’t reach any further, and so internally you’re perpetually cold. It made me feel ill, and like kicking something. I had walked ahead of my father and grandmother (a bad habit that I still maintain) and was waiting for them to catch up, standing on the middle step, maybe trying to balance on the steel handrail that accompanied it. Whether I was listening to it on my red iPod Nano Chromatic or just had it stuck in my head on a tape loop, half a lyric from The Kills’ third record is attached to that memory like a caption, stamped into the image with a hot letter press. cute cut wrist cute cut wrist cute cut wrist cue? Cue cut wrist? What the fuck does that mean? cute cut cute cut with the with your cute cut wrist getting down with it cute cute cute and as I listened to that I watched the sun on the patio slabs and on the moss and the bird shit that was on the patio slabs and on the gap between the bottom of the door and step up from the patio slabs and I must not have seen any of it at the time because my thoughts were miles away, situated in my self-approximated location of the creators of this sweet sound at that time, somewhere interesting, really great, that didn’t have steel handrails on all the steps. The image of that place was empty of architectural structure but was bright and hued kind of red, with a grain on it, most likely a mental abstraction of the album cover. I would also spend a lot of time staring at that picture, trying to figure out if they were really on that bed or not, whether they’d been cut out and pasted on there with all that other stuff, the pictures and notebooks. But now, for whatever reason, I remember the place in which my body happened to be situated very well. I often wonder which allowed for the mental retention of the other.