I have this memory. I keep it locked. Despite the thousands of restless spooks drifting in the margins, that spring’s perfume and dazzle must defeat my fear of the malignant spirits. There is a wild energy in each individual spring season each year, more vibrant that year, one which manifests as giddy anticipation and desire with the chiming of the change of the clocks. I will not lose it, I promise. As a last resort, I’ll pause on that much-revered spring forever, when a primal electricity in all our hearts surged, and we enjoyed ample revelry without the threat of any dark trace.
No, it will not be for nothing, no pointless memories. Even if that means I extract just a single freeze-frame and the rest falls away, it will be the chance for a smile, because that’s a – big enough – defeat of the monsters, who’ll get pushed back, dimmed, silenced, at the least for a short time. How many years ago was it, three, ten or a hundred? Or a thousand or a million? An infinite number of years, as that is what it feels like in the fruitless and growing distance between the present and when those seasons eternally blossomed. If I reach the end of this, I promise I will change, I will get better. Those phantoms may well lurk still, but in the future, I hope, they will have no answer for my pumped-up resistance, nothing with which to beat my fearless vigour.
that future gleams
The movements to come, the ones I have not yet designed, I will go into with a simmering adventure, with a glaring confidence it is hurtful to conceive in the present. It will be my era, where the newfound dazzle is going to burn my eyes at first but then lure me into the brilliant open spaces that glint into endlessness, offering real routes for tangible rejigs. My T-shirt will read: ‘Enjoy the remix, lads.’
The shadows I ignored in the past will be flattened to dust and even help generate a crazy sort of power within me because I will know I defeated them. That future – I must believe it is realistic – gleams with a difference that I struggle to enliven with these inadequate words, but outside of these pages, trust me, it is majestic, a planet on which I am a newborn, free of any daft restrictions I plummeted into or had imposed on me. It’s the doppelganger version of me I have always dreamed of, that one who doesn’t feel the lamentable tang of fear at the crux of the moment.
© Copyright 2021 John Maher