The sun tastes sallow, somehow - yellow, pale, bleak instead of the golden rose I've come to know in the late afternoons. Tendrils of smoke drift lazily from the abandoned cigarette in the tin can ashtray, off in search of some reprieve, and they dissipate beneath the wilting hanging geraniums. 

The sound and the fury of hurricanes creep into the recesses of my thoughts, fitting into the gaps of memory with a white radio static. I can hear the songs of Dido and Dolly intermingling in my mind, faraway, with the faded shade of youth.

The sallow sun sets on the black screen, reflecting a technological void out to the world. I pick up the phone, and I descend into the world of the other - somebody else's thoughts, somebody else's sounds.

Better to live the chaos detached from myself, than to address the storms in me. 

Let her words fill the noises in my head, and set the sallow sun back to glow. Let her thoughts shape the visions I see in smoke, and shelter the walls of my skull from the raging hurricanes.

I am a human study in the art of escapism.