madness, pre-midnight

[helenic]

For the past few days I have felt strangely dislocated, as if I were on a bewildering cocktail of drugs. It is only severe sleep-deprivation, I think, but I am not tired, only distant, anxious in an empty, out-of-focus way. Today I sat down to read while I drank a cup of tea and looked up again to find it was three hours later. I wanted to continue reading but felt a sort of emotional sickness at the idea, put the book down and stared at a point on my coffee table, trying to assemble my thoughts. I could not work, that was out of the question. I picked up a tin whistle and played Salley Gardens, plaintive and halting, and was shocked by how loud the notes sounded in the strange silence produced by the constant, unregistered whir of the computer fan.

In the end I walked over to the boys' house, hoping that Iain would be in, rehearsing what I was going to say as I padded, hands shoved in pockets, across the paddock in the cold dark. He wasn't there and I chatted to his mates instead, conducted a mission to retrieve chunky milk from the fridge, laughed in genuine amusement. Stepped outside again into the star-encrusted night with my emotions temporarily in place; cheered only superficially, but enough.

It’s an odd addiction, reading. A strange, cruel sort of pleasure that leaves you stranded, afterwards, disorientated, blinking in the sudden and unwanted light of reality. Dazed, like the calm after a storm, but with nameless things still raging inside, unvoiced. Reading for protracted lengths of time is a self-indulgent, guilty pleasure; like an orgasm, shivering internally with bursts of surprise and delight but outwardly showing nothing. A petit mort, a temporary losing of the self. It is a vice, I’m sure of it. A sin. I am anxious, now, afraid to pick up the book in case I lose time again, but I cannot resist. I go under for too long, testing fate, staying in the beautiful, mysterious deeps for as long as I can bear it before rising again to the surface and taking great, desperate gulps of air.

I cannot stay in that place forever. But having glimpsed it once, I feel at times like these that I will nowhere else know that same piercing clarity of happiness.

Comments

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

I think you write beautifully. Real food for thought. Keep it up! :)

Re:

[libellum.livejournal.com]

thankyou :)