It all ended for me just when it should have begun. And if that sounds dramatic it’s because that’s how it’s supposed to sound. I feel sick inside every time I think about it, so sick that I feel like crying, and in the end often do. But it gets me nowhere, there’s no relief afterwards, not even a long time afterwards, when the tears have dried on my blotchy cheeks and there’s not a drop of salt solution left in my body. It’s always there, this sickness, always drying the back of my throat so that I can hardly speak at times, and tying great big knots inside my guts as though some runny-nosed boy scout were in there practising on me, tugging and pulling at my intestines like nobody’s business. Why me? I sometimes think, only just being able to stop myself screaming it out the window. Why the fucking hell did it have to be me? Of all the bands I’ve known, all the guitarists, drummers (though a drummer could have coped, I suppose), why me? But what’s the use in asking pathetic questions, questions with no answers — no answers that I know of at any rate. That’s what I feel like half the time: a walking question-mark. No future, no present, just a past that I can’t forget, that haunts me, leaves me lying awake at nights, staring into blackness until the dazzling headlights of nightshift lorry drivers flash across the ceiling to break my morbid reminiscences, reminding me that I need sleep to face another tomorrow that might bring — what? Hope? Don’t make me laugh. I had hope once, ambition even. No, more than ambition, more than confidence. It was certainty: we all shared it, even in the bad times. I knew we’d make it, had to come one day. It was like evolution, if you like, followed on from one thing to another — naturally.
