For two days I was locked up, having to do life things, things people call real, I didn’t write, I hadn’t realised until now just how much I need to do this, how I can’t not write. I don’t know when I crossed that line, when it changed from being some kind of hobby into the newest of all my addictions, and when I don’t write them down I see the words seeping out, under the door, away, gone and yet not, they still swirl around on some level, eating up my head, make it ache and hurt.

At the moment I keep wanting to write about the past. The last few weeks when I’ve gone to bed I’ve seen it all layered up, all the parts of the past, like I could reach down into it, swim around for a while, surface for air, reach up into other levels and dimensions. And I don’t know if it’s to try and figure out now, or if it’s just because everything’s running parallel anyway, so hard to say what’s over, the fact it existed once sometimes make it seem like it’s not gone, not really, it’s just held in another dimension. And so that’s how it’s been, grasping at the technicolored past, maybe I’m wanting to see who I was there, chart when I started to veer off from the core and get back to it. I’m not sure. And at other times there’s this brief and fleeting glimpse of a future me that runs across the screen of my mind, but I can’t at all capture her, she’s there and gone all in a flash, she only visits in the spaces in between thoughts, but blonde always, and caressing wood, and it makes me feel better, maybe this future is as certain as the past.

But the thing I’m bad at, really bad at, is hiding behind my own biography, making it into pretty words and pictures and a rhythm that almost negates the need for anything else, it tumbles and rolls and the content, well the content barely matters. But it’s all just lies, just an evasion of all the things I should be saying. The way I want to live, how my needs and wants match up for the first time ever, the way I look out at all the pretty countryside as it rushes on past the train window and really I don’t want to be here at all amongst the greenness and the hills and I can know on an intellectual level that it’s nice and beautiful but it’s not wild enough or lonely enough or full enough of sky or water for the way the edges blur with the sky and it wraps you up in this safe basin, none of it, none of the here is inside me.

And sometimes I wonder as I lie awake in the inky darkness when the world slows down and there’s no noise that has a name to distract you, it’s then I’m honest, then that the black thoughts come, and I wonder if I’m human or animal or something halfway between, if I have blood or quicksilver in my veins and I want to ride a horse fast at a crazy gallop like I used to but not stop this time, just keep riding until the horse, sweaty and breathless and foaming can’t keep going anymore. And then I remember how I want to run, how I love running just for the feel of it, running at sunset with a hare at my heels, watching the city spread out pink below from the top of the hill and the pain it gives me for the way it won’t last, this beauty all around twists me up inside but I’m scared to say it, I don’t know if other people get it, this snarled up feeling where you’re at one with everything and nothing all at the same time. Where it seems so cruel to be bound to flesh and blood and you’d like nothing better than to turn to dust, to mingle with all of these things outside of body, and then other times you are reminded again of the flesh and how it feels to be properly alive, to be awaked, for every sense to be vital and real and you wonder why you ever wished to turn into smoke and air until the next time you see something that brings the pain back, or listen to music, and the intangible way that none of it can be grasped or held cuts you up again like paper on skin and it’s then you want to disperse into a thousand tiny molecules, the little dust particles held in the air when the sun hits it. And this way you know you’d be fine, to live like this forever, it’s the rest, the human bit that’s so precarious, so difficult to do, and all of the things that make up a life, the houses and the cars and the clothes and everything else seem so crazy and hideous and like some kind of sticking plaster to cover the fact that we’re here for nothing all. And the very fact you joined in and shop and drink and play and waste time on the internet and consume and bloat ourselves up with ideas and theories makes you feel sick and wide awake and you resolve to do none of those things again. And I wonder if I’m primitive or mad or utterly sane and am not too sure where the line is between the two, blurred by the tide in the wet sand. I don’t tell anyone though, I don’t know how to, I’d trip over the words and when I speak all these silly trite little lines come out and so I play the game of being everyone else and everyone else probably plays it too and no one knows where they stand anymore. And I’m not sure if somehow I’ve become so disconnected from any concrete reality, or if this loosely held abstract idea of reality is more concrete than anything I’ve yet come across. The way I feel real and really me. Outside as the sun lowers I lose my thoughts under the roll of the train wheels, we stop in an ancient cathedral town with still more memories, relentlessly we keep moving on north, towards the hills and all the things I can’t run from yet.