I see the moon as I leave. Ivory white. Ivory yellow. Waning. It will be a new moon soon. There are no lights in any houses. The world is fresh and alive.

I walk the dirty road to the garage, passing the sound of plates being stacked from a dark unlit window above. I recognise the man at the window in the garage. It is a ritual of unsaids. I know we are both grateful for this brief twilight interaction. Every nod is a conversation – “20 marlboro lights please.” This is a novel. I smile. “Thank you.” He smiles. A smile from a stranger is worth the universe.

Walking up North Hill, I am in the world in early morning – bird song, the faint and familiar throb of my blood bringing me movement through it. Its perfumes change, they grow. The wind blows through me and carries my memories into scents that blanket me. Suddenly I can smell the sea – seaweed rotting on North Sea-caressed sand, saltwater on limestone. For a heartbeat, Highgate becomes my favourite place in space and time. Long gone. But I feel young again. Like any fool I keep on sniffing the air, greedy for nostalgia and comfort. The scent bulges and swells, and drips down into mulchy soil. Moss, bare earth. Decay. I know this smell. I can smell the cemetery of two years ago, half a mile from where I am walking. I am older. But I still feel young.

I see a man and pretend I am special. I pretend to be paranoid. I walk quickly – I always do. He walks at a man’s pace. Is there fear here? He crosses the road before I pass him. Is he afraid of me – me walking quickly, heavily, head down and brow lined in deep thought? But I am not me. Me is in the air, in the breeze – my memories and my thoughts. My essence. My body is just someone pretending to be special. My legs are walking away from things they pretend are out to get me. This is not my body anymore, and my thoughts are not bound in its flesh.

I pass a bus. Stationary. The driver is hunched over a book or magazine. The lights are on but the cabin is dark. But I am pretending to be special and lift up my collar as I pass him. Every can that clatters on the breeze and over gutters is my assassin. Ten seconds down the road and his engine starts. ‘Don’t let him see your face.’ The bus creeps to life behind me, inching at the tip of my shadow. I walk faster as I approach the corner and the bus moves faster too. As he turns the corner I look to my left so he cannot see my face. The bus hesitates, its engine hungry and heavy, clumsy. But I am looking away. I am looking through a gateway. Into a church. I am looking at graves.

At Pond Square I choose a bench in the darkness and sit and light a cigarette. I look for the ghost of the bald chicken. I want to see the ghost of the bald chicken. But I see nothing. Instead I see a shadow by the bricked up toilets. It gets out of its car, slowly, and walks to the bricked up toilets, slowly. It stops. Is it looking at me? ‘Go away,’ I say quietly, ‘I am not cruising.’ Suddenly the shadow is not cruising. It becomes a man. He gets something from beside the wall of the bricked up toilets and walks slowly off with it, back to his car. A bin bag. He’s a bin man. Or an assassin. No, empty cans are assasins. Men just carry rubbish. A fox suddenly runs out over the Square, crosses my path. Is this a metaphor? I speak to it and it looks at me, but it still runs. I finish my cigarette. Why did I come here? What drew me here? Is this it? Have I crossed the peak? Is it all a mirror or memories and echoes from now on? On the gravel I watch the shadows of branches moving in the breeze from the streetlight above. But they are not shadows. It is light that is dancing.

I cross through the village High Street and walk downhill to home. I think of metaphors and avatars, of magpies, white cats and foxes. I think of mirrors and allegories. I feel the unpresent clasp of Shinbo in my hand as I walk through the oppressive morning light. Suddenly, downhill, the world has turned human again. It is clumsy, disordered. The buildings around me reflect the deep blue of the early morning sky too perfectly, making the buildings look hollow. Empty. Meaningless. I pass jasmine bushes boasting of what mine has not yet created. I sit and smoke again, and the fumes are heavy in the flesh of my lungs. Flesh. Moonlight drips through the branches. No. Not moonlight. Streetlight – manmade. The light of a human abode, with unseen windows reflecting the blue universe around it. I hear an engine from the junction downhill and turn to see a black car approaching. Next to me, above the bench, is a tree. Its leaves are the greenest here, but yellowed corpses still litter the ground, shrivelled and crushed like dreams – unfulfilled, wasted. It is a maple tree. The black car passes me but I do not look away from it. I am not pretending to be special anymore. I can’t in this world – it’s changed now. I look into the car as a man passes me. Whether he looked back or not doesn’t matter. He is gone.

I wait and a white van lodges itself downhill at the junction like a wishbone in a throat. I look at it and wonder if it looks back at me. It moves, shifts, shuffles, and drives up towards me. I remember this metaphor. I remember this from before – walking uphill on Swain’s Lane, years ago, a white van would pass me. I would always look away. I would never know if it was God or a vampire. Either would drive a white van. But this time I look. It is neither, or both. It is two men. They are both dressed in black. They do not drive past me, but turn off at the junction in front of me. They are lost.

I wait and listen to the breeze, waiting for jasmine, black cats or foxes. But the world is human again, clumsy, disorganised. And me along with it. I had pretended to be special and made myself God in my own universe in six sixths of an hour. But this has all slipped away.

As I sit here at home and write this it has all slipped away so quickly now.