There’s a pine forest further up the mountain where my dad lives. This makes it a place where, even in Winter, everything is still green.

I intend to get myself lost for a day in such a place.

Nothing but my brain, whatever song sticks in my head and my footsteps crunching twigs and squelching mud. Maybe I’ll even look for the tree I carved the initials of an old flame into when I was a volatile emotional little thing. Carving your initials onto something more immortal than you is a very insecure thing to do.

I’m not allowed to write while I’m away - at least nothing I would intend to be read by other human eyes. My wife ordered me that much, and she’s quite right. My recent straining to create has given me nothing but literary haemhorroids.

I’m bringing only three books with me while I’m away - a still relatively blank notebook, my diary from 2003-2004, and my current diary from February 2005 to the present day. I read a few entries just earlier - a letter to another old flame in fact. It’s become very apparent to me that I have lost myself - not the self I used to be, but the person I was meant to grow up from him into.

Christmas Day was an epiphany - a quiet one as many epiphanies are, punctuated by the metaphor of mysterious orange lights rising slowly and steadily from the south, regular as a metaphor. A little too regular in fact, though it was a little early for the Morning Star to be putting my problems into perspective. But the routine of their ascension, their steady arc across the night and eventual dissipation into the clouds was just a tiny allegory in a larger idiom, and only one of many that evening that didn’t end until I woke from a series of strange dreams halfway through Boxing Day. Their strangeness was conspicuous only by their mundane and everyday imagery. Life. Death. Rebirth. Immortality. Christmas Day and its subterranean End Of The World has given me much I need to put into order.

Not least of all, I need to think about a boy called Ben who used to have adventures. As I said earlier, to a friend I haven’t met yet, I have a sword, a new coat I love, a camera and a notebook. What else could one possibly need for an adventure other than a pen and the will to push it?

Downtime.

This journal is now closed for the festivities to conclude.

>_