Close your eyes...

It sits dormant for maybe years at a time. Forgotten. Then I hear it somewhere and that indescribable feeling wells up within me.

I don't know how the hook was set. I must have been so young. Too young to know what was really happening, just a vague awareness of the sound. Maybe I simply picked up the excitement of others.

I could have been as young as one. Maybe two, but not much more. There were probably a few parties. Ours was a partying family. I remember being taken to plenty as I became older - the smell of booze and cigarette smoke in the air. I miss that, too. Fun had a distinct smell.

The beat. So hard to shake off when I hear it now. Raw energy. The air seemed filled with it - a cliché.

It's strange to think of all those people being old now. Many of them dead. It still seems unreal that two of of THEM are dead. They seem so animated and alive in TV clips. I sense a curtain falling as I watch them.

I found the chords to the song tonight and crashed my way through it. I'm not much cop really. But something stood my hair on end as I went through those changes: Em, A7, D, Bm. Then G, Em, C, A7. That was it. That C to A7, though the rest of it sets the whole thing up. Creates the expectation.

Something innocent, infantile and wonderful lies beyond my reach. The song takes me so close. Like the lost colour memory I have. Orange and blue haunt me.

These things lie beyond my earliest recollections. Irretrievable.

I sink into the pillow, eyes closed. Time is momentarily breached and I drift, sighing, into sleep as the last chord fades.