Robert Smith and the Bright Yellow Shirt.

You’d think that it would be the footsteps that would shake me from my stupor.

But it wasn’t.

Heavy, sombre, stoic. Each footstep the herald of muted reverence for the clergy they conveyed.

But his momentary arrival did not faze me.

It is always that fucking photo.

It haunts me, creeps unperturbed through my every waking moment. Resting quietly and alert in every corner of every undisturbed room I enter.

The endless question of why?

Why was he wearing that yellow shirt.

Why Robert Smith?

I love the cure. I love the moodiness, the Avant Garde way they paint on an expression of normality over their gloom.

Their make up looking like a skewed kabuki.

Some goth opera of happiness in smeared reds and blacks.

The music which dug into your skin like needles into arteries.

Like the needles that will send me to my doom.

Doom, like the lyrics that hide unquenchable pessimism, with a forced smile.

Robert Smith.

That’s what I am thinking about.

Obsessing about.

Even as seconds fall from the faces of clocks; Clocks that count backwards to the zero that will be my death.

I should be seeking redemption and forgiveness.

I should be asking the walls and the floor and the universe

and everything in between, for the forgiveness I could never give my victims.

I don’t.

I should.

Yellow.

Yellow is all I think.

Him leaning against the wall, smiling, his hand lightly gripping an open beer.

His eyes bright and joyful.

His black straggly hair a legend of fitful disobedience.

Robert Smith.

Stood happy as Larry in that bright lemon-yellow shirt.

A stark, jarring contrast from his usual palette of charcoal and black.

Black.

Yellow.

This is all I think.

The footsteps now fall silent, and an indomitable shadow falls upon me.

It is cast from a modest man in a black suit, with white collar.

“Are you ready, my son?”

The gallows chair waits.

White and sterile, straps ready for my wrists, veins taut, needles piercing.

I am soon to depart.

“Do you wish for a final word with God, son?”

I do not. I have no god.

Save Robert.

But even then...

Can I trust him when he has made me question everything I thought I knew?

My feelings toward him now are...

Yellow.

Like the shirt.

Robert Smith.

A bright yellow shirt.

I have not seen a single shot of the picture I saw, not once, in a single publication.

On a single article. Not in any way.

So is it real, or am I mis-remembering some weird fever dream of a moment?

What is this mysterious memory?

And why...

Why?

Why am I thinking of this,

rather than the blood upon my hands

from the knife I plunged wrist deep,

over and over and over again into the weak sack of a body?

No final words.

Curtain draws, angry eyes upon me, Yellow. Black. Yellow again.

Hands around my wrists and throat.

Warm yellow.

Cold needle.

Finally...

Black.