I remember that day for messing around on your parents' bed and hitting each other with pillows. And a fine bed it was too, large and neatly made. But everything in your house was too well kept. And how is it that every house smells different? I don't think yours was the one that smelt of pot pourri, but it was something like that. And what an odd couple your parents were. But you were well disciplined; wreckless and terrified in equal measure. Wreckless and terrified you continued for a while, until you became confident — but suspicious. Yes, time transforms — and sometimes inverts — our relationships, just as love in equal measure seeks to delay such transfigurations.

So they learnt, as they must, that they are now old to you: a force loved but spent; once giants that towered over your childish frame — now figures shrunken in your mind's eye, grey, troubled, and silent.

That whirring of the fan, the orange burn of the cathode ray tube, the twang of the degauss, that imagined summer, that uncertain odour, the bounce of that ball, the edge of those bricks, the tragedy of a fallen tree, the face of a friend, the moving away, the mystery of the departure, the chiselled carpet, the screwed up paper, the hurried illumination, the closed door, the drawn curtain, this place, that road, the taped-up tarmac, the illusion of returning, the competition of loving, the disgust of desire, the regrets of repetition, that must of control. The end.

At midday we still stand under the constellations, but they are hidden from view by our own star's excess of light. Darkness, the progression towards death, reveals more than the disorienting chromaticism of day. We might call entropy the decay of distance, the limitation of our very standing in a place; standing, without staying still. Trembling, unsure, a hand will grasp your shoulder, sheltering, pretending — loving. Love — a defence and a sacrifice — will always say No to the terror of time.