Barnacled
I’ve been thinking about the micro-moments which cling to us like barnacles of remembrance. Of the two girls from Oxford I met at a small concert at the height of Britpop in 1995 and with whom I shared a cab back to Trafalgar Square. I remember one of them was brunette and the other blonde. I remember finding both of them completely unattainable. I remember the brunette asking me ‘don’t you just love the smell of your lover on the pillow next to you in the morning?’ I remember always thinking what happened to them.
My body is covered in these barnacles. A Davy Jones blanketed in the molluscs of memory. And the older I get the gnarlier I look, consumed by these astonishing tales of the sea. Limpets which act as small breaks of light in the darkness, through which I’m able to remember the briefest of encounters. The stories are on me. Of me. They turn my veins into invertebrate ice. Some of them will chip off in my sleep, lost forever and to be washed away with the next cycle. Some of them storm back in my sleep, raising me from the ocean’s floor, with the promise of treasure but the consequence of nightmare. The locker which serves as eternal home to drowned sailors.
