A Wolf, Perhaps.

A Poem by Belle Bamford

This will always be me.

Waking up to feet like ice blocks, the cold winds whining through the creaking damp shingles of my house. White winter sun filters through the planks and cuts the plaster walls around me. Smells of hot sausages and weak coffee slide under my bedroom door and half-heartedly lift the blankets from me.

The sounds of clattering knives and forks on plates, mugs being placed on whichever damned surface they choose, ovens and fridges being slammed... they set my teeth on edge. My muscles spasm as I stand at the top of the stairs. My aversion to my family feels like flu. Aching, ungrateful, shuddering symptoms. I say little over breakfast.

My country is beautiful by all seasons. Bright and crisp enough to chill my hot breath to fog in the morning, to coax me into the wilderness and to usher me into warm amber solitude by night. The sun looks lonely in the winter months but shines golden out here, between swaying bare branches and fluttering magpies. Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly generous, my eyes well up with admiring tears. God can be good.

My village is miserable, aging and sinking into the wet earth. Hunch-backed crones shuffle with a dreary sense of non-purpose around each other and somehow, in summer, stand down in place of irritating young families, screaming children in anoraks and mud-clogged prams, dads with binoculars and those repulsive, tired, grumpy, waspish mothers in designer wellies. This place is poison. It is killing me slowly, through a drip.

There is solace, though. A comforter in death.

Lonely boy, how I wish I could take your hand and lead you away. I cannot think where specifically. My ideas change with every passing day. We would walk silently, hand in hand, to the train station. We would slip past the near-retirement ticket man and on to a city where we would start living. Or perhaps we could do what everybody does. We could sit by that fountain where I always find you and ask awkward giggling personal questions to each other until we've accumulated enough information about the other to not feel bad about leaning in for a kiss. Or, I could run up to you, drag you away from that bloody fountain and lead you up the highest hill in the dales. We would watch the sun rise even further up through the valley and contemplate "The Now". Or I could lead you to a nearby barn and f**k you in the hay. I haven't quite decided yet.

I lie awake at night thinking about your notebook. All those schoolboy anxieties, those bitter grudges held to your father, those ideas for novel plots or doodles of men stumbling out of the King's Arms. I want you to talk to me about them. That notebook which captures all those glimpses of you that I should be collecting would lie discarded and forgotten if we were together. You could cry to me, shout at me, slap me, kick me into the dirt and I would still want to drown in your beauty.