The Dead of Night

We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.

What's the Future? It's a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren't the lines we wanted.

I live in the light, But carry my dark with me.

Life's harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.

When you're scared you can either give in to the panic and let your mind fall apart, or you can take charge of your mind and think brave.

Life's harder, the deeper you feel things.

My pen.’ Funny, I wrote that without noticing. ‘The torch’, ‘the paper’, but ‘my pen’. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It’s about the most important thing I own.

Let no stranger intrude here, no invader trespass. This was ours, and this we would defend.

The world was quickly forgetting us. And there was little news to report.

One of the things I find strangest and hardest is that we were having such conversations. We should have been talking about discos and electronic mail and exams and bands. How could this have been happening to us? How could we have been huddled in the dark bush, cold and hungry and terrified, talking about who we should kill? We had no preparation for this, no background, no knowledge. We didn’t know if we were doing the right thing, ever. We didn’t know anything. We were just ordinary teenagers, so ordinary we were boring. Overnight they’d pulled the roof off our lives. And after they’d pulled off the roof they’d come in and torn down the curtains, ripped up the furniture, burnt the house and thrown us into the night, where we’d been forced to run and hide and live like wild animals. We had no foundations, and we had no secure walls around our lives any more. We were living in a strange long nightmare, where we had to make our own rules, invent new values, stumble around blindly, hoping we weren’t making too many mistakes. We clung to what we knew and what we thought was right, but all the time those things too were being stripped from us. I didn’t know if we’d be left with nothing, or if we’d left with a new set of rules and attitudes and behaviours, so that we weren’t able to recognise ourselves any more. We could end up as new, distorted, deformed creatures, with only a few physical resemblances to the people we once were.

A bad black horse steals Steals into my head And moves across the landscape Of my mind, while I sleep. He does what he likes in there. Next day I feel The damage. In the quiet mist I watch her go. It feels like snow. There's a feeling that I get. I walk back home Sad and slow.

It was the world-without-adults daydream. In my dream I'd never quite figured out where the adults went but we kids were free to roam, to help ourselves to anything we wanted. We'd pick up a Merc from a showroom when we wanted wheels, and when it ran out of petrol we'd get another one. We'd change cars the way I change socks. We'd sleep in different mansions every night, going to new houses instead of putting new sheets on the beds. Life would be one long party. Yes, that had been the dream.

Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.

Night started to fall, then it fell, till it was lying all over the ground.

Being brave is a choice you make. You've got to say to yourself: I'm going to think brave. I refuse to think fear or panic.

Death comes walking across the countryside swinging that scythe, and he might get you or he might not.