Dave's Hurting Soul

'Dave.  You need to spend some time alone mate.  You need to reconnect with yourself.'

Dave thought back to when he was a teenager.  Endless hours spent listening to Nick Drake on dull winter afternoons, smoking endless cigarettes and thinking endlessly dark thoughts.  It was always late autumn or winter back then, or so it seemed.  Everything grey and brown and muddy.  Mirroring how he felt inside.

He remembered longing for a cleansing frost.  And a homely house in the countryside with a welcoming fire, books, and a patchwork bedspread.  Instead of the damp featureless first floor apartment in the brutalist concrete housing estate where he was brought up.  

Was he connecting with himself, back then?  It was hard to say.  It was just the way he was, back then.  Friendless.  Introverted.  Relying entirely on his own company.  Escaping on his bike to bits of scrubby ancient woodland still hanging on amidst the concrete and rubble of new roads and shopping centres on the outskirts of town and finding solace for his hurting soul in a bit of birding.  

I haven't changed a bit, he thought.   I live in the countryside and I'm married to Val now, so I'm not on my own.  

But my soul still hurts.