It was the month I spent learning ‘After The Goldrush’. Holed up in a house in Harrow, curtains tight all day until I’d open them up late to glimpse the dusk. I used to watch the street lights come on before slipping out to the corner shop to pick up enough to barricade myself back in for the following day. I think I was getting by on cheap Shiraz, a pack of Marlborough Lights, and tinned sardines on toast. Sometimes I’d upgrade to a better bottle of wine and skip the sardines. There was a guy that hung out near the shop who kept trying to sell me weed, or something to ‘turbo charge your cigarettes, mate’ as he put it. After about a week he budged on his opening price and so, occasionally, I swapped out the sardines for his low grade skunk. That was pretty much my life that Autumn, sleeping through the day and numbing my way through the nights with booze and pot and Neil Young.

‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down’ was the one I kept coming back to. It was invariably the song that was still on when I’d drift off to sleep in the early hours, sometimes still oscillating away on repeat when I woke the next day. I’d reach across from my bed, pull my acoustic off the floor and cautiously sound out the progressions, right hand barely scratching the strings, just a faint echo of the original song coming out of the speaker. If there was anything left from last night’s joint I’d spark that up and ease into the evening semi-conscious. That whole time is lost in a haze of smoke and heartbreak. Only love can break your heart? Damn straight, Neil. Damn straight.

Early in the month the phone used to ring late at night. I was pretty sure it was you but I never picked up. I know you thought we could be something else, all that ‘I still want us to be friends’ stuff that you’d said steadily over and over again the night you told me. But who wants to snatch glimpses of a set of polaroids when you used to be in the film? We were widescreen and surround sound. We were the stars. I won’t watch someone else take my leading role while I skulk on the sidelines. We started as friends. That was your other line. We started as friends, so we can go back to being friends, as if I could go back to being the person I was when we started. You changed that person. Wrapped yourself up in him, around him, like you were ivy working your way into brick and wood, finding the spaces to catch and latch on. I guess that’s not fair. It’s not like I was unwilling; you were an invited invader. I just didn’t realise how much of me was so bound up in you, how much would crumble and pull apart when you retreated.

Lately the phone’s not been ringing and I’ve swapped crumbling and pulling apart for crumbling and burning. A succession of nights numbed and lost in sweet, sticky smoke. It makes the music sound better even if it doesn’t really change anything. Sometimes I’ll put on Tom Petty or, if I really want to drown in nostalgia, Stevie Nicks, and try to put you in your place: you don’t have the exclusive rights on breaking my heart or the soundtrack to it. But the American Girl feels like a lifetime ago and we were just kids then. Edge of seventeen? I hear you, Stevie, I hear you. That was all too long ago. Not like you. Right up close. You were present enough that I didn’t wash my sheets for weeks because I was convinced they still held your scent. One of those androgynous perfumes, I used to spritz some on my wrist on the mornings you’d stayed over so I could keep you with me for the rest of the day. But you’re past enough that now there was mainly just an oppressive and pungent cloud of weed hanging perpetually in my room. Even through that I thought I still caught the traces of you but I was pretty stoned when I was awake so my senses were not reliable. Not to be trusted.

You will come around. That’s the very last thing I let you say to me. I didn’t believe you then and every time Neil sings it now, every time I pick restlessly at my guitar strings and murmur the chorus, I still don’t believe it.