The Last of Us

When I got back to my house in Birmingham, I felt like a ghost. While I was home I never really felt that I belonged there, but on coming back here, I felt invisible somehow. Like all memory of living in the U.K for the past year and a half had been completely erased and now I was breathing in the uneasiness of being a stranger in a strange land. Or as if I was gone for 20 years and I came back to a place that existed only in my memory.

I wandered around the house all morning from one place to another. Not knowing what to do with myself. I played some music. I tried to write.
There was only noise. All the pens were empty.
I couldn`t help but wonder if something had happened to me while I was gone. Suddenly I felt this violent urge to talk to someone. To tell them about me. The "me" that left and the me that came back. But there was no one. No cars in the street. No children making any sounds anywhere. Just an unusual silence and a white sun. I felt shrouded in a coma. I could`t feel anything.

So I just sat there at my computer. I stared blankly into the screen for minutes in a row. As time went by, I began to notice the music. It was All Gone. The Last of Us.

I felt my heart being squeezed into a fist.
I realized then and there that while I no longer had a place home, I came back to a place that is utterly indifferent to my existence.
That this city like any other on this planet nurtures its own. Has plans for any other human being within it, but not me. It felt for a second that everything I was going to find here will be a distraction. The nights will always be cold to me. The sky will frown above me and neon will jitter as I walk past it.
The canals, the billboards, the houses and the cars in the driveways. The trash and the strays. The junkies and the crazies. They will all drill a hole within my chest and move within me. And I will carry this miserable landscape with me for who knows how long.

I felt cheated. Defeated. In my absence, the world took from me, in small turning of minutes, everything I knew. The girl with crimson hair, was nowhere to be found.
I wanted to sleep.To crawl into the darkness and breathe there, like a wounded animal, under an orchestra of raindrops against my window. I couldn`t even cry. I just sat there, broken, in silence, in an otherwise perfectly normal world.
This could not be my life.