Panic

It's been a while since I've done one of my song stories. In song stories I use lines from a song in the story. Check out the song at the end. 

It had seemed like spring just moments before, but now the sky looked dark and angry and squalls of snow blew around my face. The sun had provided a little bit of colour to the cityscape but it was amazing how the clouds snatched it away. We were back to the grey, austerity that I had grown used to. I walked the streets aimlessly, filling time, killing time. I didn’t want to go home, my flat seemed even more austere than these Soviet side streets that I slipped down. I hated days like these, nobody told me there’d be days like these. Long, cold, lonely days. 
I’d let my frustrations show in class, getting angry with the students who’d stared at me with nothing but contempt. I thought I’d be their hero but far from it. I’d thought they would be hard working, dedicated, committed but again I was wrong. They were lazy good for nothing, spoilt brats, even worse than the ungrateful bastards that I’d left behind. Today they’d stared at me, like I was from a foreign planet not a foreign country. They refused to answer my questions, even though I knew they knew the answers. I’d raised my voice, given them a piece of my mind and what had they done, just continued to stare like I was nothing to them. 

I shivered. I was beginning to wonder to myself if I hadn’t got everything wrong, so wrong. I would never see the streets of Carlisle, Dundee, Dublin or Humberside again. The best I’d have were the stern roads of Kharkov, Leningrad and Moscow or maybe the slightly more picturesque sights of Prague or Budapest. Could life ever be sane again? No, I'd cooked my goose all right.

I looked around. For a moment I didn’t know where I was. There were times in this town when everything looked the same, when buildings blended into one, streets morphed into a blur.  You could feel a sense of familiarity on the other side of town and feel lost in the next street. I was close to panic, but I took a deep breath and retraced my steps back to the safety of the town centre and from there headed home.

As I walked down my street, I saw a figure lurking around outside my door. ‘Honey pie you’re not safe here,’ I mumbled to myself. I straightened myself up and kept walking. I couldn’t show I was scared, couldn’t show that these thugs intimidated me. I was used to this kind of thing back home but I wasn’t expecting so much hostility on these streets. If it wasn’t the police, or the KGB, it was their hired help, the skinheads. They were the worst, they were the same people but out of uniform, off the leash. 

But as I grew closer I realised the figure was not thuggish but much more feminine, a gentler soul with a beautiful smile and a face I could stare at all day. That face gave me a bashful look, checking if I was please to see it. A smile spread across my face, the first one of the day. I nodded and thought my flat wouldn’t seem so austere and cold tonight after all.