The counter tops are bare. Even the leaky kettle has finally been thrown away or packed up and taken somewhere else. My parents are gone.

*

For the first time since I have been able to leave the station, I go away from myself. I don’t know where I go when I go, any more than I knew where I went when I had absence seizures when I was alive. All I know, in the moments before I go, is that consciousness has become unbearably painful.

I left it too late to get my memory back. My parents are gone.

*

When I come round, I am still in the kitchen. There is a dripping sound from somewhere and I look around hoping it might be the kitchen tap – any sign of activity in my old home would be welcome – but no, it has begun to rain outside in sparse fat drops and water is dripping from an upstairs windowsill onto the ledge outside the kitchen window where my mother would occasionally try to grow herbs in pots – she would buy or be given those kits you get in garden centres. They never seemed to work. I had the feeling they needed a garden in southern Spain, not a windowsill in Peterborough.

The light feels different – a little brighter, despite the rain. Maybe it is a different day from when I arrived, I think. It feels more like morning, lunchtime at the latest. Perhaps I will live here now, rather than the station. My parents have moved out but you don’t have to be dead to leave a spirit presence behind – despite the fact that most of their possessions are missing, this cold and empty house, stripped of any trace of them, still feels suffused with their presence. As long as it is empty, maybe I can float around here for a while, pretending they are just in another room.

I am wondering whether I can bear to take a look upstairs when there is a familiar rattle – the sound of a key in the door. For a moment, I glance around, wondering where to hide so I won’t be caught in my own home – such is reflex – then I remember no one can see me, and with a rush of gratitude and neediness I think a single word: Mum. Maybe she’s stopped by to pick up the post. I’ll be able to follow her and find out where they are now.