There was a strange feeling of coming home, and yet not being home; of familiar smells and shapes and corridors half-remembered, and yet recognised – like the fading yellow paint on one of the radiators.
Having gone to the school but having chosen to leave for sixth-form I never studied in the sixth form block. But I did once clean it. I had so many memories of pushing a broom up and down the corridors, of turning it ready to push more dust along, that I was lost when the man leading us turned to what had once been a path through to a computer room and started heading up some stairs. Stairs which had not been there before.
I had known that the sixth-form had now a block on top of it, now had two floors where one had previously sufficed, but had not realised that I would be going there. And so I faced it.
The stairs were worn, the banister broken. All I could see marked how much time there was between myself and the people I had come to study, and yet, yet, I could have been one of them I thought.
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And thus I mark the brief study I did of my secondary school sixth-form; a day where I bumped into friends, am not recognised by teachers, ate food in offices which were once Home Economics rooms, remember maggots and brooms and outside cupboards for secret smoking, and a house with a dog, and realise how far I have come.
And how small the central staircase really is. My dreams lied, it will not swallow the world.
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