The Water's Edge

"This is the fear. This is the dread. These are the contents of my head."

It gets messy in here around this time of year. No longer mad in March, but still foolish in April. British Summer Time and the living is easier, you'd think. But the fool's month is like fool's gold: it looks real, but it's worthless. We're saving the day, minute by minute, but still torn between the light and dark. Still sinking in the quicksand.

Sometimes it's like being in a room where everyone is shouting and you're straining to hear the voice of the person conversing with you, two feet away. You give their words the most intense concentration, because if you lose this thread of conversation you'll never find your way out of the labyrinth and the fabric of time and space will rip and rend.

Sometimes it's like being inside a box that you can't open. Sand is pouring in through the cracks and you take one large breath and then another because if you can just fill every internal void maybe you'll be able to last until eventually you're beached, gasping and breathless, under blistering and blissful sunshine.

Sometimes it's fast, all fast, the world is too slow, you're mercurial and the world flows with you and into you until you can't tell the difference. You attempt fruitlessly to marshal your thoughts, but they evade and mock you, silver cats rubbing against your ankles in mock pleasure, hissing, scratching and fleeing as you try to pick them up.

Sometimes it's an unquenchable thirst. You're a parched man in the desert, hallucinating firehoses, cartoon filling stations, gulping down more and more fuel to help you remember whether you've forgotten yet. Caved and vexed, the bottom of the glass is a lens that makes things seem both closer and further away.

Sometimes you're talking but the noise from your mouth is hollow and empty. You want to use words like pleh and skow and drav, but you're speaking a foreign language, un-subtitled and un-dubbed. They can hear you, but no one knows what you're saying. You're the last speaker of a dead tongue, with no heirs.

So you bide your time and wait for the earth to get warmer, the waves to pulsate at a different frequency and your reality to shift and rephase. In the meantime you drift between worlds, fit neither for the hard sell nor the padded cell: displaced, misplaced, lost for so long that all you have left is the hope that someday soon you will arrive home.

Posted by Hg on Wednesday 04 April 2007 at 00:28.
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