The late evening rain is pattering gently outside in the empty street, the pavements splashed here and there with a sheen of amber from firefly streetlamps. It’s wistful and lonely and beautiful as well. I think of songs, romantic in different ways: one filled with a yearning for a love far away and the other longing for an Elysium only glimpsed by the imagination. I think of a girl murdered ‘because she was a woman’ and the terrible loneliness of her death, discarded in an alleyway at the time of night when foxes and thieves are kings in the orange-dimmed streets. The memory haunts me still.

A boy and a girl pass below my window and I wonder at their lives. I wonder what secrets their hearts keep, what shadows from their past may lengthen and darken future days. Maybe they are in love and their hearts are lit-up, too bright for any shadows to hold. If so, long may it continue. Who knows?

I’m writing in the near-dark now. The rain has stopped and the breeze stirs the bushes outside. The headlights of a car pass by and a plane roars distantly in the sky above. The world moves on and so must I. I shall pick up my guitar and sing a song of a love far away.

See ya,

Jimbob