All that was paralysing me because deep down I was resisting any forward motion and so closing myself off to any good that might come of it. I had forgotten that progress meant sacrifice, that that too would be added to the sepia-diluted timeline of events, and also that I’d have to be patient as none of this was yet realised. I was getting irritated by the lack of any new memories, thus investing a disproportionate amount of feeling in the old ones. Something had to change, but I couldn’t see any opportunity for recycling of things or complete freshness, and it was making me crave it with madness. I needed to be swept up in the fogs. I wanted them to drop me somewhere I felt meaning, and where there would be unlimited events. So I started thinking deeply about getting inside this cloud, and succumbing to it, letting it carry me off to some place. If only to feel my pulse again after years of numbness, to enable unforeseen happenings to supersede whatever had stagnated and festered in my mind. Just imagine the fresh laughter I would have on the other side of those obscuring clouds! I craved total submission to that place in the sky that I could not yet see, and thought about it, agonised over it in the sense that I believed I needed this to have any chance of recovery, because this way the past can be batted away. It was essential that I covered up what had gone before, in totality, as it would give me immunity from negative associations that were beginning to crush. That fog generated an immeasurable release, a kind of hypnosis that rendered anything that had gone before redundant.
It was scary because I lost snippets I wanted to retain, for the sake of some pleasant memories, but I conceded I had to lose them too if I wished to progress into clear air. There was no opportunity to go half-hearted into these fogs: a clean break complete with clear conscience was on the menu. Now, I was mind-flying, soaring and channelling a fresh energy into 100% optimism that in turn filled me with an orangey warmth. That old-school edition of a feeling that had been crushed by an ongoing, all-marauding gloom that had kidnapped the districts. I was feeling in the present. Body disconnected now, mind in the midst of a bright-white flight. Body moving to where I wanted to be without being restricted by fear of travelling away from the past and its enclosed offering of hope (probably trampled), where I still just about wanted to be, and it was a movement that I had delayed, as I recognised too that with it would come realisation that a chance had come and gone. The timeline was back to year zero. I was a newborn man. An infant but fully grown, and already with all available faculties to attempt to achieve something monumental. An infant with inherent knowledge, with the right ideas around what could and couldn’t be done, and, more importantly, the confidence to do them as the skies surprisingly and suddenly lit up with a hope-bulging bronze-disc sun.
© Copyright 2017 John Maher