foreign country pasts

I spent years here, bleary-eyed in wood panelled, green-carpeted reading rooms, hunched over text, yellow highlighters and pens scattered across the table, milky light in winter struggling through the warped glass of the windows. From eight in the morning till the midnight bus home, the green radiators clanking, the silence so thick and muffled it was like a scarf tightening around your shoulders. Now, all I am is a tiny dot of a face on a wall amongst hundreds of other faces. It was a great escape, a secret hiding place, somewhere to run to as well as away from.