May 9

 Weird space.

Quiet. That same quiet since Feb. But stronger.

I can slip on a mask and be someone else for a while. But it isn't me.

That deep stillness pervades.

There is a sense there of. A little. Anticipation. A little excitement. A little flutter. Standing on the shore looking out across an ocean of sadness. Melancholy. It shys away from the light. Seeks the dark. The quiet. Leans away from people. I am floating. When the distractions drop to zero, I am floating in a sea of black. I feel like, I could fly away into the night. Take off. Never return. There is nothing here on the ground. Illusions. And protocols, and dances, and stacks of little wheels embedded with insecurities and confusion and mess. This is not me. It was never me. This. Feeling. This is old. This goes way back to my childhood. That same sense of quiet darkness. It mixes an odd set of emotions that on paper do not belong together.

I can see all that has gone before. I can sense the sadness and grief and loss. About all of it. It has moved from an ending to... something beyond that. The quiet of the void. After the film has finished. And the cleaners have cleaned. The lights turned off. The doors locked. No people. No life. The spaces between the people. The shapes between the bits of life. Once upon a time I used to walk those paths a lot. It crossed my mind today why I did that. Something just, intrinsic. Or was it again a shape of my childhood.

I would sit and look outwards. Not inwards. I wouldn't join the party. The light. The chatter. The noise. I would instead slip away. And sit with the dark. And watch. And listen. And I could look from afar on those islands of activity. Safely unseen. Safely not part of it. That word. Safe. Implying. I felt unsafe in the light.

When I was a really young kid. I knew that the darkness was dangerous. And scary. It would not babysit me. There was an absolute edge to it that would eat you alive if it could. And another thing I learned. Everyone was afraid of it. Whether they said so or not. They would turn a light on to fend it off. Close a door to shut it out. Draw a curtain to block it. But overtime. My fear turned to curiousity. Turned to understanding. And we would talk. The darkness and I. About things and life and paths. And it showed me many paths that were outside of the light. That people would not travel because they would hurry back to the circle of light. The reassurance that their worlds made sense in that light. So long as the doors were bolted, and the lights burned, the darkness could never get to them.

And I sat in the darkness. And at some point I came to love that darkness. I think. At that point. That was the real split. Where I would sit on a roof and watch the spread of twinkling lights. And rather be nowhere else. Definitely not with the lights. The lights were pretty. But pretty from afar. To be close to them would be to be burned up. And they were so tiny. Compared to the vastness of the possibilities hidden in the dark. And I would sing soft songs to the darkness when I was an older teen. I appreciated it being there. There was my kinship. There was my belonging. Safe. From the light. And people.

Perhaps all of that. Is just the manifestation, unspoken, unrealised, of the child that feels unsafe in their home. That then learns that being outside of that is safer. Better to be unseen, unnoticed. Safer to observe from afar where you can't be found. And that in that space, nothing punishes you, there are no wrongs, I accepted myself.

And it is twisted with my childhood awareness into a thing itself. Narrative, and poetry and magic and psychology and reality. Unable to seperate the wood for the trees. The nuts and bolts from the subjective.

Today.

Feels like that space. But. So many years onwards. Now. With all that experience. Sadness. And grief. Encoded within that same space.

An enormous sense of longing. Longing. To disappear. For there never to be another sunrise. A longing that tugs on me physically. Gives me a sinking sense in my stomach. That odd melancholy.

I want.

To float forever in the night sky. Borne upon soft breezes. Away from lights. And people. And everything. Listening keenly to the things inbetween the spaces. Humanity. Does not occupy all the space. Only part of it. There are so many gaps inbetween. But. Ultimately. To fade out from that. A journey. A flight. And then gone. Done.

This is not me. This life. This planet. This. Shape. Not me. It feels like I am trapped in a skin that is not me. I don't have a shape. No strong purpose or self or anything. Just. Something else. Observing at most. If that. Not really here. Definitely not here in a human world. Barely participating in that game.

Hmm.

The purpose of it all. In. Normal human terms. Seems. Utterly pointless. Stupid. A paper hat. A distraction.

I know.

I cannot escape that easy. No matter how thin the walls seem to get. It takes. A little more than that. To pass through.

Where am I going with this. What. Place. Is this. I seem to be back to somewhere much nearer the start. Somewhere more raw. Somewhere more me. Floating away.

The walls of reality are very thin today. As these things do. I am sure they will regrow some of their substance in the following days. But perhaps not. This is all. A definite direction. Since Feb. A switching off. A disconnection. A defeat as the therapist labelled it.

I am unworried by it.

The pains and the exhaustion and all of it. Numbs out a little in the floating. Half way out of my shell. But still attached.

Let me go.