‘They pass through your sorrow and leave you quite still...sitting among your souvenirs.’ Dan Fogelberg
I stay in my room all day, with barely a glance outside. I prefer to sleep, in dreams everything is clear, contrasting a life where things seem fogged up, hard to see. When I open my eyes, silence surrounds me. I am like a stone, washed up on a distant shore, lying heavily in the sand.
Someone is knocking at the door. I turn my music on; I can still hear the knocking and the voice that accompanies it, wrenching me from my solemn reprieve.
I open the door, my Mother stands there. She tells me to walk outside more, that feeling the wind on my face and the grass beneath my feet are some of the most precious gifts life can give you. I would rather life give me more than wind and grass, rather the ability to make something of myself. I don’t tell her this of course, a barrier of suspicion lies between us, years of fighting and not understanding cannot be changed so quickly. There are no bridges, only the smoking remains of those we have burnt. She looks at me, and tells me how thin I have become. Am I? Am I really so thin? What do you expect when all that was me has withered away.
My mind is filled with flickering pictures, like shadow puppets on a screen, nothing is clear anymore. Psychologists are forever digging up dreams from under my pillows.
My degree, I had hoped it would explode from the shadows, that it would give meaning to my life, to prove that I can do something. It would be everything and more.
Recently my attempts at anything remain virtually non-existent. It is like trying to have a conversation in a cafe with someone. Your mind isn’t there, its watching the woman outside, wondering what she’s doing, following her home, focused on her and what she is doing with her life.
I sit on the floor, burying my head in my hands, tears slip through my fingers, glinting on my rings, slipping away, just like everything else. I want to find someone to blame, someone to scream and rage against.
I don’t believe that I can predict my fate; no matter how hard you try you don’t have any control over it. You can hope, and perhaps try to alter it in some small way, but in the end you can only live and die by fate. This is how life happens, it hurts you, it baffles you, it makes you scream, but the only thing you can do with it, is to live it.
I have decided to go to Brighton for Halloween. I like Halloween it has a certain romantic fantasy about it, the way you can put on a mask, and with that mask chase away all the feelings of doubt and pain, become someone else, even if just for a night.
