I’m in bed. A faint light whispers into the room, like a conversation heard through a memory. It’s illumination is so slight that it makes the objects in my room seem even more obscured. I close my eyes and darkness is replaced by eigengrau: the shifting movements of my inner-being forming strange patterns against the lids of my eyes. Thoughts flit through my consciousness; a cocktail of what I had experienced that day and what I was expecting in the next. Scenes from TV shows blend with interactions I’d had. Why did I say that? Oh, that was a cool scene. I hope that job is well received. Oh god, I’ve got so much to do tomorrow. A list unspools behind my eyes and never stops unspooling, endless tasks forever. I almost get up out of bed to write some of them down, but I stop myself. I need to sleep.
Settling deeper, silence blooms. Like a ballon growing over my ear drum, a silence that contains the odd passing car or rustle from some night crawler, but holds all the unspoken words from the day. It presses down as I uncomfortably shift my body. The presence of this silence expands, prompted by my attention to it. It doesn’t grow, but it unveils, like a butler pushing on a bookshelf to reveal something that was always there. It’s enormous. It’s unimaginable. It stretches my perception of space to make the slightest twitch of my finger feel collosal and the movement of my breath the workings of a titanic mechanism. Images and scenes starting rolling again, like a broken projector and a mad editor stuffing my eyes with whatever fistful of film they can dig up from my mind. I allow myself to be swept up in the cacophony and the silence recedes to the background, a consistent thereness that never abates, but cannot intensify. A type of relief that can only be made by making something else louder…
Argh, I shake my head. How long have I been off with the fairies? I don’t bother checking the clock – it’s been long enough. I sweep away the busy detritus in my mind and allow myself to relax. But in the quiet halls of stillness, the silence awaits, unintentional and potent, like a natural disaster waiting in the wings of my life. I warily edge towards settlement, but space immediately begins to warp. My body stretches and my mind curls inwards; each breath draws out as long as the life-age of a star. I try to bring focus to something, to ground me. Black, I think. I imagine the word, ‘black’, painted on the curtain of my eye lids and drape it around myself. B.L.A.C.K. In its protection the silence quiets its presence somewhat. I just want to sleep now, to forget this horrible feeling and never revisit it.
For a short while, there is equilibrium. The blanket of ‘B.L.A.C.K’ offers me some measure of comfort, but the enormous presence is simply there, omnipotent in its force. The letters painted onto the screen of my eyes start to grow. They grow and they grow and they grow, until B.L.A.C.K feels as if it’s projected onto the very wall of the universe, a perspective on the infinite. I am a tiny speck in the cosmos of my body, a body that still lies on the bed but also seems to lie elsewhere also: into the depths of me, which also seems to intrinsically relate to the depths of space.
I bolt up. I swing my legs over the bed. I reel from the sudden movement, the particles in my body suddenly awoft in a frenzy of swirling movements – a snow globe in violence. A light sheen of sweat fogs my forehead as I focus on my breathing, trying to calm a storm of anxiety. What is happening? Panicking, I try to think of something that would end this torture. Suddenly, I feel like running, walking, crying out for my mother, my partner, a friend, a sleeping pill. I get up and rush to fill a glass of water, the glass belying the tremble racking my body. But I stop. I slowly close the faucet of the tap, pinching off the stream water. In a moment of clarity, I see how the anxiety has shaped my body, and with a deep sense of sadness, I don’t recognise myself. I am completely bowed, my arms at jagged angles and my legs barely strong enough to carry me forward. It has completely reshaped who I am into something beaten, small and pathetic. How did I end up like this? I see myself from the perspective of my child-self, and, honestly, I am disappointed. It wasn’t just that I had been too anxious to do anything in my life, it wasn’t just that I had become mildly alcoholic to cope and it wasn’t just because I took recreational drugs to be able to socialise; it was simply that I no longer knew what joy felt like, something that had existed in abundance but had now been extinguished.
I straighten my body and gently take a few sips of water – the movement feeling incomprehensibly enormous, but now settled. I allow this gentleness to walk me back to bed, more acutely aware of the intensity than before, but simply at one with it. Slipping into bed, I place both palms on the centre of my chest, where, as a child, I thought the heart was. Nothing had changed, and yet everything was different. I had a sense that I had been beaten and had beaten myself so small that some aspect of me had stepped in to remind me of a grandness that could never truly be extinguished, but only be distracted from.
im-press 