LATE FOR THE SKY

Keep a fire burning in your eye
Pay attention to the open sky
You never know what will be coming down

He called it his 9/11 hangover and no amount of Bayer Aspirin, Tylenol or Advil would dispense of it.

Besides, it wasn't so much in his head as it was in his heart.

Sitting in his apartment close to the financial district where the catalsymic event happened, he'd never been the same since that fateful day of history when he lost the love of his life and learnt the cruellest lesson of all - that you should never end a call with someone you love in a state of anger as you never know when it may be your last.

Greg would be forever haunted by that final, hurtful phrase he threw at his beloved Samantha in his irrational and aberrated state of mind back then. He'd tried to find a way to forgive himself but no amount of private therapy, group meetings or regular confessions to captive drunk strangers in bars assuaged his endless remorse. It was if the words he deployed that day were weapons of mass destruction directed at himself in a bid to cause the maximum damage.

And yet, twenty years later, he was still here. How the hell he made it this far was beyond him. Suicide he'd attempted numerous times but failed miserably due to either being too enebriated or high to execute it successfully. Stuck in an endless purgatory of regret like a doomer Groundhog Day, the only solace he found for his troubled soul was the record Samantha had given him as a birthday present a month before her death in the South Tower.

He'd never even heard of Jackson Browne before she introduced him to the artist and now here Greg was, twenty years later, playing that same record without any tiring of its endless familiarity.

Contemplating what it was exactly she loved so much about this record would offer Greg a welcome distraction from the incessant pain of guilt he carried around the city with him.

Listening to songs such as Late For The Sky, Fountain Of Sorrow and For A Dancer seemed to connect him to his lost love beyond the finality of death in a way nothing else touched, not even prayer.

Somedays, after returning from work, numb to nearly everything else in his daily life, Greg would sit in a chair by the window and watch the late afternoon light cast shadows against the walls of his apartment whilst the record span on repeat on his old turntable. He'd slipped in and out of sobriety over the past twenty years, depending on how rowdy the demons in his head got from time to time. Whether it was herbal tea or whiskey, somehow, by the grace of God, he would eventually fall asleep in his chair and hope to dream of Samantha so he could be with her one more time to say sorry for everything he had said.

But she never appeared.

Some therapist had told Greg that he suffered with acute melancholy, but he was pretty sure it was just called guilt and maybe prolonged grief at something that could never be returned to him. The one time he seemed to be able to resurrect the ghost of her memory was by playing the record that she'd gifted him. If it wasn't for the Jackson Browne the only other sounds he would listen to was the continuous cacocphony of the city with all of its siren chaos competing with the voice inside his head.

Anything that could drown out those terrible words he had uttered that awful day helped him recover some peace of mind. But it was seldom.

The worst time was between two and five in the morning when the city slowed down a little bit and suddenly the words came back to him in the darkness.

"I don't love you anyway, you stupid bitch!"

But he did.

Fuck. He really, really did.