Hey Knobs this is dedicated to you
my Shamwari
and my Oak
the pebbles between my toes.
I haven't been able to write so I'm just going to let words fall on the screen, a waterfall of bouncing thoughts or game of pick up sticks, a higgledy piggledy and untidy jumble that will hopefully have some merit or sense or at the very least be mildly entertaining. I don't expect it to be great.
Life is strange and frustrating. there is always something falling, dropping or snagging. I dropped an empty wine glass yesterday, today I got my shirt caught on a door handle. Tomorrow I may block the drain with a sock. It is a roulette wheel of the random that we are never in control of, capricious and mischievous and occasionally laced with malicious intent.
It does have joyful moments, homecomings and smiles caught across the room, running and pausing by the pond to talk to the ducks and other interesting people, feeling the warp of warm, weathered planks under my arse and sending the girl with rainbows in her eyes photographs of my mud streaked legs through space, time and the internet. She just laughs and unplugs me.
I wish I was Clint Eastwood. I want a face that looks like it's been scrubbed by the ages and chiselled from rock. I want flinty are you feeling lucky punk eyes and a voice like a smouldering cigar. Mostly I want to stare down those twin imposters triumph and tragedy with equal measure because It's been a hellish year and it deserves a hellish response. It deserves no compromise and an honest look. It's contained more snags than smiles, more confusion and loss of hope than the balance that we are promised. It has been quite specific in it's maliciousness.
Life over the last 18 months has been a rollercoaster in hell. Terrifying and disorientating, any upward movement has only shifted the tones from dark to grey and allowed through the odd swirl of light and clarity whilst the wind, that doubting Thomas, cut ribbons across my face. I wonder when I went and how I got there. I became absent, slipping away into the deep recesses of my internal landscape where I was trapped and lost. Sleep became survival. The carefree days of running disappeared, that spiritual instinct of life wrapped in the cloak of physical exertion and natures healing embrace and was replaced by hard breathing, a sore body and unhappy grind.
I have examined myself naked in the Chernobyl half light of December, tracing my physical scars and burns and as yet unable to examine the invisible internal stains that I carry as heavy as rocks. Where did the voices in my head come from telling me to put ropes around my throat and drink on the roof? What happened to me and what has happened? I have no answer and very little detailed memory just the dark residues of mental health breakdown and all the pain, disorientation and loss that it brings with it.
Loss.
I'm not writing about Covid, that deserves it's own essay although it is the lens through which the last year must inevitably be framed. I lost myself regardless, it is not Covids fault and I suspect it would have happened anyway. I've mostly forgotten who I am and what the constituent parts of my personality are. Maya Angelou spoke of the horizon leaning forward offering space to place new steps of change and I am very much a believer in keeping the horizon before me, yet It is very hard to look forward when you lose sight of who you are, what you believe and what you dream.
I am healing but I may never be the same again.
Running remains. Running is the frame of my life, the exoskeleton that keeps me upright and breathes life into me. It is the tree in the distance, standing alone on the dusky horizon. The branches a filigree catching and holding the ochre light of the setting sun before letting it slip away, the sky becoming the colour of bruised plums, dark and purple and with a faint milky sheen of reflected light from the hidden heaven far beyond the grasp of human imagination.
Running opens the cracks in that heaven allowing the enlightenment that comes from stolen moments that are least expected or sought, the mind not striving for meaning and shut off from the distractions of normality. It is the unshackling of inhibition, the embrace of space, it is returning to my garden and my fourth child, the appointed one sitting hunched over in the sun, whittling a long stick into a crude spear with the intention of spearing one of his brothers. It requires that I do not intervene.
I run to find my calm place in an anxious soul bewildered by anxious times. Normally I run long distances as a panacea, it is how I fly, the moment I drop away from myself and enter into a space that is still and harmonious with silence and where I am not inflamed and troubled. I do not want to be earthbound, unable to think, read or be, moving restlessly from room to room or falling into the sort of heavy oppressive sleep that leaves you just as tired when you wake up. Running allows me to love people as they pass by, ferociously engaged in their lives as if aware of the sands passing through the timer and prophetically as it turns out. It is living deliberately because we never know what this fickle life is going to deliver.
No comments :
Post a Comment