I’ve been unfeeling, or feeling too much, feeling what I don’t want to feel; feeling something slipping, throat tightening, forgetting. A halloween hallucination, a custard pie, behind the sweetness, a veiled threat.
I’ve been searching for a future. It’s all I can do not to look at you and feel directed, drawn, spoken to. Every art teacher I’ve ever had lives behind my eyelids. They have no critique but quietly watch me, see me achieve. We won the pub quiz several times. My favourite is the music round – I never get it right but I like how it feels to listen to something backwards. Like watching my father’s childhood home movies, my granddad waving at me from the young, old age that I am approaching, thirty three. I like the feeling of time and the illusion of progress, the promise of other, darker futures unravelling.
Sleep doesn’t come to me easily, but it is easy when it comes. I dream that I am earth being ploughed: good, old, fertile earth. Worms and mice and birds come to feast on me. When they have had their fill, I become the sea. Raging, I swallow all who dare to cross me, whole. So many little men engulfed, dead in the depths of my belly.
The threat revealed; the beast that is me; a feeling unleashed