The other night I was curled up in bed with a book from the past, and a cat snuggled beside me, on the cusp of sleep. It was at this moment that my mind flashed forwards to consider this image from ten years down the line, when I’d be sleeping in a different bed in a different room under a different roof, with no cat. I didn’t see but instead felt the longing to return to a past which was currently the present, and it upset me.
This premonition of sorts was most likely brought on by my considering of the difference in setting from when I’d first read this book, and was unsettling. Nobody likes to be reminded that somebody lived in their house before them, and that somebody will surely live in their house afterwards. What ghosts walk your rooms, bound to their own realms by only the constraints of time? Who will be sat where you are now, decades down the line? And where will you be then?
We all have chapters in our lives, some contrasting most potently than others. It’d be presumptuous of me to assume the same template of memories for everyone, but I’m sure I speak for many when I say that while some ghosts are strangers of time, others surface in the mind, not from speculative afterthought but personal experience; some with regret, some with anger, and some with no new perspective but the unbiased film grain of the past. Some people we choose never to talk to again, and fall out of their lives as quietly as we fall out of theirs. But they’ve left an impression upon us, and the world cannot be viewed from the same perspective as before that meeting, be they a bittersweet presence in the mind, or a blemish gazing distastefully back.
These are the blog posts I do not write; they are the statuses and tweets I do not post. Once, perhaps, but no longer. I find them self-pitying, self-obsessed, needlessly morose; there is enough misery in the world without me contributing to it. And whilst all the optimism I preach is of genuine conviction, I feel in equal parts this doom. Doom from the ignorance of politicians; doom from the forecast of society; doom, most of all, from the rigors of the mind and the personal wars I wage within myself. But look, I’m already adopting the starved poet’s mirror with that line.
One of my greatest fears is becoming, or being perceived as pretentious. But to be pretentious is to be without conviction, and a person without conviction is a painted picture of themselves that they maraud around the place as a photograph. My aim of changing the world to have even one less shadow in it is defunct, should I neglect to acknowledge the darkness myself. So this blog post is an experiment, written in one of my bleaker hours; it is an attempt to be truly oneself. And you can be certain that this was not some hastened scrawling of bad temper, for these words were written a full four days before they were published, leaving plenty of room to write something else.
But know this: Just because the world inside of you is engulfed in darkness, it doesn’t mean that the world outside deserves to be the same. This, I think, is where the wagers of war are fundamentally flawed, and it remains to be seen as to whether the human race is capable of getting the better of its temper.
Perpetually Perturbed 