Suzy

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Once in a while I get a little uneasy when the image of Suzy pops back in my mind. Suzy used to be a stunner in her days, a well sought after model in the sixties. She came from a small German village close to Frankfurt and had moved to London in the beginning of the sixties. Unfortunately life became too confusing and like many of her generation she became a total junkie. By the time I met her in 1975 (she used to live next door to my friend Alfonso in Inverness Terrace in a tiny dirty room, living of soup that she heated up in the can itself on a small electric stove) she couldn't have sunk any lower. She was pleasant when she wasn't too incoherent or had "gentlemen friends" over but most of the time you just couldn't communicate with her at all.
As one is getting older the frightening images of how one could end up surface so now and then. I know that I'm not in her position, eventhough I eat mostly soup and live in a tiny room here and feel quite lonely at times. But I cannot help wondering how close people sometimes are in just losing it all in a matter of minutes; something happens in their head, they make a succession of wrong decisions and voilá there's no turning back.
There must be so many folks out there who travel that god forsaken path while the rest of us just think that life is naturally good to us or more to the point should be good like we''re sort of entitled to it.
It just scares me...... but I do count my blessings every day and do consider myself a lucky guy.