Town on Thursday Morning

I hear the gulls calling, and for a moment I am filled with an overwhelming need to be back by the sea. I need to be back in Cornwall's seaside town of St. Ives, the one of my past, not as it is now. The main high street, chain stores popping up daily as they kill off the family run greasy pasty shop. It'd be bursting with tourists, I imagine the scene in my mind, pushing and shoving, stomachs swelling over their shorts, podgy soft shoulders red or peeling from the sun. The gritty cigarette butts... trodden into the pavement with the hard grey gum circles, and buried in the sand along with the cat's piss and dog shit, as the children dig for treasure inches away.

I close my eyes where I am, and I am sitting on the sea soaked stone harbour wall with the salty sea wind blowing my tangled hair into my eyes, and sand into my teeth. I am looking at the white lighthouse and the almost clear blue sky with the few puffs of cloud here and there. A grey cloud hangs in the corner of the view, I sternly ignore it. My sandy bare feet dangle over the edge of the wall , where the light dances on the clear aqua blue shallows creating enchanting diamond patterns on the dunes of sand inches below the surface. The scaley bottoms of my sandy feet see the harbour enclosed beach below where the rotting dingies and red bouyes bob and dance in the cold calm of the atlantic. I feel the sun warming my bare knees as they poke out from the bottom of my cut up self styled denim shorts, which are damp and sandy from the days paddling. A vanilla ice cream with a flake 99 in my hand, the sound of the gulls calling in my ears. The urge to be here is so strong I start thinking of train tickets and petrol costs. Which leads to think of my mum, her car, not mine. My bank account...dwindling as unemployment bites.
I've been standing still too long.
I wake out of my day dream as a red rover rumbles over the gravel and brown puddles of the chelmsford car park. My eyes open to see the GAP, and the alleyway leading to Chelmsford High Street. I smile to myself enjoying the left over happy from my fantasy, and carry on my way through the carpark to the blessed Essex County Library, to get a work of fiction to take me some place else other than here. I am, nicely put, a gap year student, or be cool... or depressing, a university drop out. The book will do for now.