* * *
It was too much to handle. I ran out the door and down the stairs, ill prepared for the brightness of the morning sun. Half shutting my eyes to prevent the sun from blinding me, my senses were suddenly overloaded; the smell of the sea air carried on the wind, shiny silver cars and noisy diesel buses, rattling past and pouring dirty black fumes out the back. I had to get to somewhere quiet, somewhere I could be alone. I needed the garage but first I would need peace so I could work out how to get there.
I ran off down an alleyway that I knew would take me to the backwaters. I could follow the coast back to Kirk-Leigh, a route I knew well. As I reached the end of the alley and came out into the relative calm of the water’s edge, I felt an enormous weight lift from my shoulders. As I realised I was no longer captive, held by paranoia in that dingy flat; or surrounded by every person in the world on Wanton high street on this Saturday morning. In an instant, all that was replaced by another feeling. Nothing looked the way it should. Nothing at all. The whole world had gone wrong. Visual boundaries between different objects had gone, the things I looked at all being somehow connected. Trees in the distance, or the backs of buildings behind me set against the blue morning sky, looking as though they were all next to one another, or maybe even joined. It was like being trapped in some kind of living oil painting.
I set off walking through this vivid alien world, my feet scraping along the floor as I barely raised them from the ground. I could hear them in my gentle ears but I was too numb inside to feel them. I made it around the first bend in the backwaters and was surprised to see a deserted old rowing boat lying on its side. It made me think back to working at Ship’s in the summer holidays with Al, back when we didn’t know what we were going to do with our lives. It dawned on me what I was doing with my life. I thought about how we used to be and how we were now, and it made me feel a hundred times worse.
An old lady came walking towards me with her dog, pausing to take a look over her shoulder. The dog moving left to right on the lead, trying desperately to increase its reachable area. If I didn’t try hard to focus on it, it blurred into one brown ball of fur. I couldn’t even see its feet moving. She looked towards me as she got closer, I couldn’t tell if she was looking at me. I tried not to stare for too long.
Finally she got close enough to see me properly. “Good morning.”
“Morning,” I replied.
She gave me a strange look, like something between sympathy and disgust, before passing me and walking off the other way. I contemplated looking back but was scared she might be following me. I didn’t know what that look meant really, I just filled in the gaps in my head. I’m not going to be able to handle that again I thought....Luckily for me I didn’t pass another soul on that long countryside walk home, I’m not even sure I passed my own soul. I think I’d left it somewhere. If only I could remember where.
I crawled into bed when I got home and passed out. Where I slept for the remainder of Saturday, then all of Sunday. On Monday I woke up in hospital.
The Brightest Of White Rooms
August 2002.
I knew I couldn’t carry on like this, pushing the limits of the drugs as hard as I could. I’d gone too far, and now they were pushing back. I’d made my mind up in that stairwell; walking home through a fractured reality removing any trace of doubt I’d had about what I needed to do. I only hoped I hadn’t left it too late, gone on too long; destined to be trapped in this unbelievable world, staring up at a crack in the transparency of the sky. Over two years had passed since that first time at James’s flat. It felt like two lifetimes. That first night being the marker between the life I led then, and the one that led me now.
Church Group Page 52