The naked self

Waking

This is the peace I have been aching for all week. A confused dream abandons me to sounds that I slowly pull into recognition. I hear the keys in the door and my mind suggests that she is leaving for work. Winter birds call despondently to her from the trees. Catalytically-quieted cars hiss by on the hill road.

I lie here and try to imagine silence, but white-noise increases to fill the space. Anyway, the music never stops. Today it’s “Buckets of Rain”, which segues over from the final dream-scene. My mind is already busy looking for fingerings and considering alternative tuning. Words begin to fill my head – the narrator points me in the direction of this keyboard. Meanwhile, the low battery indicator and gentle bodily aches are calling from the foot of my childhood stairs that I should be rolling out of bed and starting the day.

Maybe there is no peace in the living world. Maybe peace is for the spirit only and even it must bear the agitations of life for now. I take myself to the top of a hill and listen to the wind gusting softly through the grass. My eyes are closed and I am naked. I am quite alone – except for one thing. I have brought my self.

And now the sun is setting

And now the sun is setting, and what has been achieved? Out on some playing field, one side wins and prepares to celebrate, before steeling themselves to play again and maybe lose. Somewhere, someone is wealthier than they were this morning, while someone else is poorer. Both will eat and sleep tonight. Tomorrow, if their hearts do not arrest, both will set to work again.

Across seas as turbulent as the people they separate, wars are fought to a standstill. Now the combatants have nothing left to give but a grudging acceptance of peace, and must settle their differences in high-ceilinged rooms while drinking water from the same tap. And I took back a ruined duvet to the cleaners, with whom I chatted and filled in a claim form that neither of us believed would achieve anything.

Then I sat on a seat in the park and smoked tobacco dust in the cold damp air, reading a book as passers-by returned from the high-street, having exchanged one burden for another. Young boys carried skateboards under their arms and consoled each other with jokes about men in duffel coats reading on park benches. Women betrayed the embarrassment of existing as their inquisitive dogs offered friendly, uninhibited muzzles.

Perhaps, if our minds are open, this day has taught us something that we didn’t know yesterday. Perhaps we have made the acquaintance of someone that we never knew. Maybe that person was our self.

Midnight

It’s absolutely fucking midnight and I keep reading things that I recognise. I’m looking forward to my breakfast. Did I ever tell you about the time I shared a pan of buckwheat porridge in the music hostel in Nashville? The moaning of those lonesome night freights crawling across the city and the girl orgasming in the dorm? What a night.

I need to be on the move.