NOSTALGIA
- Feb 13
- 1 min read
By Shannon Éilis
The view from my childhood estate remains the same
as I’m looking out for a black Audi at 3am.
Waiting to cry in that familiar back seat.
Trying to ignore the screams of a neighbour who drowned
his daughter in the bathtub.
The sirens in the background
as you drunkenly said that this place is a failed suicide net,
and I reminisce on how us girls just wanted to be abused
in the ways advertised.
When we’re barely legal,
on the back of mopeds circling roundabouts
like carousels,
asking you to buy us an ounce for our seventeenth
because we were spending our lives trying not to die.
Then suddenly, I’m six and running barefoot
through the same neighbourhood,
the heat of the pavement
burning blisters into my feet
because I realised home
was too far to crawl the distance.
And you’re fifteen on your stolen BMX.
The synaesthesia of a downhill street
with no end
forcing you forward.
Our innocence hanging from the monkey bars.
Because the estate is like someone you fucked
who won’t climb off from above you.
It’s inside you.
It won’t leave like the neighbour
clawing at the police,
clinging onto the doorway
with his damp fingertips.
Because this place is a nettle sting the dock leaf won’t fix.