Where to begin? At the beginning I would imagine.
Yesterday was an eventful day in the tiny saga of my existence. Towards its end, I found myself on a train to Newport and still quite shell shocked by its conclusion. I had been staring out of the window for hours, gazing at the fading light of the day - trees and houses whizzing past like a thousand metaphors for missed opportunities, doing long division in my head to stop myself from concentrating on that single image still tearing away at my mind.
The image in question was a little like a film of oil, thick and slimy atop the otherwise clear and simple structure of my mind. I thought that if I thought about it for too long, the bottle (or glass, cup - whatever metaphor you want to go with about now - as you’d imagine, I’m avoiding specific details) would start to rattle, to shake and vibrate to the extent where the oil would fizz into tiny unmanageable blobs and infiltrate the water table of my mind like gestapo agents in those black and white films I’ve never believed. Or species 8472 in Voyager, which I find only slight less credible.
Odd stuff had been going on all day. The kind of universal levels of holisticity I have no trouble believing, but you would most likely find less likely than Species 8472 building an exact replica of Starfleet Academy for infiltration-training purposes on a distant planet. You’d probably even use that vulgar little word “coincidence” to describe it.
It’s hard to describe the feeling you get on days like that. Sometimes it’s deja vu. Others it’s not so much deja vu as unashamed spontaneous divination - knowing the phone’s about to ring and who’s calling seconds before it does, or when you know that someone sitting close to you is about to speak and exactly what they’re going to say. That sort of thing. The most irritating manifestation of these was yesterday afternoon, when I was rushing back home to pack my suitcase and waiting, impatiently, for a bus (for there is no other way to wait for a bus in London).
As I stared at the countdown, I instantly and somehow knew that I wouldn’t be going home by bus. Suddenly, with no real prior indication, I knew that my travelcard had expired and I had been sapping at what little top up I had left to get to work each morning. This low fat clairvoyance was indeed proven to be correct when I encountered the driver of the C2 arrived shortly afterwards, a gentleman who can only be described as THE MOST OBNOXIOUS, PATRONISING AND BELLIGERENTLY UNHELPFUL CUNT I HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED. Most drivers on this route will usually let you travel the few stops left if your Oyster isn’t credited. Most drivers on this route are more concerned about drunks, gangs or mental patients getting on the bus and starting trouble. This particular individual seemed to want to make an example of the rather upset manic depressive Administrator rushing home to pack so that he could safely catch his train in time, already having a quite one of those days.
“Thank you,” I said, as calmly as I could manage as I stepped back off the bus, resisting the invitation to inconvenience everyone behind me by dueling with him in a stalemate, which his wistful gazing off into the distance after our little “discussion” seemed to suggest he was all for. “Thank you very much.” It was only afterwards as the bus drove off I hissed a loud “PRICK” into the stale air of Kentish Town, unfortunately a little too close to an old man being pushed in a wheelchair, whom I sincerely hope realised that he was merely an unfortunate victim of unhappy circumstance.
I passed the unctuous troll-driver again as I was walking back on the opposite side of the road. In retrospect I probably shouldn’t have hexed him. In fact, I definitely shouldn’t have. I accept I most definitely absolutely and certainly shouldn’t have done it three times to make sure. It’s probably difficult to understand why I did (or most likely that I really did) if you don’t know the levels of irrational fury I can reach in the face of human belligerence, arrogance or ignorance (pretty much anything ending in -ance it seems). I have a lot of venom. A lot, of venom. Events like that make me realise I actually don’t do too bad a job of biting my tongue most days.
And I have been very distracted as of late. I’ve been having these dreams you see, for the past few weeks now in fact. Every night. I don’t think I need to go into too much detail. They focus on something from my past. Something very important that I left there, and blame myself for. It’s past the point now of remembering whose fault it was that it was lost, if it was indeed anyone’s fault at all. I think my friends are all bored of the sorry tale now, and frankly, I should be. I should just forget about it and move on. But recently, and inexplicably, it’s come back to haunt every waking, and almost every sleeping moment of my existence with a vengeance, and I didn’t know why. Until yesterday, at precisely 6:51pm.
So, who should I see at the station?
You.
Uh huh, that’s right. You, with a capital Y. Or Him with a capital H to everyone else.
Of course it may not have been you. I could have been entirely mistaken. It could of course have been your long lost identical twin, who just happened to give me the same look of frustration and restrained anger you could always level me with in some of our less diplomatic moments. It could all be just another one of those coincidences. And of course I didn’t realise at first. I kept staring because I thought it was someone who just happened to look eerily like you. I kept looking away and laughing because I was on the phone, telling my best friend that I’d just seen someone who looked exactly like you, and wouldn’t it be bizarre if I saw you again across the concourse of Paddington station, of all places, and after all this time.
I never intended it to happen like this, you know. I thought that when I saw you again it would be more civilised, that there would be polite smalltalk before we got to the difficult-to-digest main course. I just thought you should know I’m not that glib. And maybe that it did affect me after you walked away.
I survived the journey with counselling via text and first doing long division in my head, then listening to ear-bleeding hard house on my iPod (yes, I do have dance music on my pod. I know, it surprises me too.) Most of that journey was spent feeling as if I was about to burst out laughing or crying. I didn’t know which. The uncertainty was made all the more dangerously exciting by the fact that the train was absolutely packed.
By end of the journey the urge had not vanished, though it had dissipated somewhat, and enough to cause me to let out a short snort as I looked out the window on the opposite side and noticed the brightest and fullest moon I have seen in some time beaming down its holistic coincidences and interconnected important events upon me like a season finalé, drawing all the loose threads of my life together. It was a huge white full stop on all those dreams and thoughts I’d been having, culminating in that thought process made flesh… (and yes, still most beautiful, still perfect corporeal flesh).
It was the end of the dress rehearsals for the performance that never happened (see, ref: coincidence, play - MT; damned unfair & hope you’re okay now). It was the bipolar occultist’s time of the month where everything and anything happens, and everything and anything always does.
That night the profundity of my dreams remained, although the previously regular subject had finished in his guest starring capacity. Instead I dreamt about a malicious voice in my head, that sounded eerily like my own, telling me to spread its malice far and wide, to everywhere I could go. I was standing in a park, looking in the distance at the HSBC tower in London with my father and sister, when we discovered a scythe which I threw into a tree so that the voice wouldn’t make me use it to hurt anyone. But the handle of the scythe fell free, with the blade lodged in a branch high above. I had to wait to make sure it fell safely back to earth, so that it wouldn’t fall upon anyone who was walking beneath it and kill them. Little else happened, though I awoke with the brief image of a goat’s head in my mind, and the (perhaps conscious) label of Baphomet placed upon it.
The second dream I found, if you can believe it, far more sinister. I was driving with my sister. I often have driving dreams, knowing that I can’t drive (I can’t). This car functioned as a motorbike. We drove up to this ravine, where my sister wanted to look at the view of Iceland, so I parked and let her walk down to the shore. I was aware of her slipping and falling into the water, and rushed down to watch her trapped beneath a layer of ice, scrambling to get to the surface beneath it. Suddenly she stopped, and began to sink, having drowned. I dived into the layer of ice and dragged her back to the surface, but awoke before I could revive her. I think my conscious mind probably kicked in, and woke me up from this unnecessary upset before it could continue any further.
Despite last night’s night terrors (stripped of their usual feature), today I am at peace, though not like the slight sense of silent confusion after an abrupt conclusion of an episode of Voyager, but more like the calm and confident repose felt at the conclusion of a Murakami novel. Despite the otherwise depressing note of the death of Jesus, today is actually quite a beautiful day here on my Dad’s little mountain, overlooking the sunswept valleys and fields of South Wales. I am working on my submission to Channel 4 - updating my writing cv/biography, and chewing over some notes I made for the submission, also editing a script I adapted from a short story as a writing sample. I have no idea whether any of this will come to anything. I know I’m a good writer, but I know I also have my off days, and a lame reflex-of-a-yawn idea for each and every good one I have. Still, nothing ventured nothing gained.
Recent events have proven that you really can’t tell what’s about to happen, and how it will affect your life afterwards.
