Part 3

The Prisoner, the Stranger and the Key Holder

I can be anything here, I can do anything here and it actually feels like I am floating. The dizziness from alcohol isn't here, nope nothing just peace and beautiful colours and sounds. The grass tickles my back and I feel like I am going to sneeze and wake myself up, I don't and it passes, so does time, time always passes, much more quickly this way. One day like this seems like an hour. It occurs to me that I should think about where everyone else might be, I don't and it passes just like the clouds overhead. I could make shapes out of them. You know the way you used to do when you are kid. Being innocent and making innocent shapes out of innocent balls of fluff in the sky. I could try but I don't, instead I want to see what they will become on their own. I don't want to make the clouds into something they are not, make them into my own ideal image of what i think they should be. I decide to leave them as they be and let them pass unscathed and unchanged, free to become.

It's a warm day, unusually warm for April in the village. It's Saturday and must be around 3pm. I know this because I can hear the football match being played in the park next to the field I am lying in. No doubt the under 14's, the team I use to play for as I just heard someone shout. "Marty number 7! Get goal side!" That will be Marty McT, a big ginger boy. Not a bad player but always gets caught on the wrong side of the striker. Not a great trait for a centre back. His grandad used to play for Rangers and Scotland. We used to be friends and I met is Granddad a few times and he would tell us stories of the glory days ,back when it was a man's game and before money ruined it. I've not seen Marty in a few months, we have grown apart. People grow, that's what happen, some together and some apart. There is no fighting that. We don't really have much in common now anyhow.

I was a pretty decent player. I could probably have made a career out of it to but that never interested me. Seems ages ago since I last played, must be at least a year anyway. I gave up as I didn't want the continued pressure my dad was starting to put on me to take it to the next level. He kept pushing harder and harder and I was training 5 days per week playing on the Saturday and had the Sunday to rest, then straight back at it on the Monday. He couldn't understand that I played football for fun. I mean what kind of honest way is that for a man to make a living. There is no honour in kicking a ball around. The ironic thing is that he used to pay me to train and I used to save it up along with my dinner money and buy booze and dope. Anyway the final straw for me was when I got the man of the match award in a cup final and still had to listen to him all the way home about how I could improve and what I done wrong. Fuck that, I've got enough on mind! He meant well, just didn't realise it wasn't for me. Anyway I quit the following week. I should have been honest and said I like football as fun, it is my release, not my life and that I want to spend my adolescence with my friends getting drunk, stoned and meeting girls, not running up and down the stairs 200 times per night with leg weights on. But instead I told him it was his fault and said he had put too much pressure on me and took all the fun out of it. That he had basically ruined football for me and that I hope he was now happy. He took it bad but he will get over it, we all do.