Suddenly, your soul empties.
I suppose it’s what tanks do, when you don’t top them up.
Mine did. Around six or seven weeks ago, which is why you won’t have seen too many of these pieces recently. One morning you wake up, and you find that you are just going through the motions. Like a mediocre runner, you just put one foot in front of another, and rather hope that the next one will follow, and then the first one again. I am not the only one.
To the outside world, it is business as normal. Inside, it’s like working with a PC where some of the software has been corrupted, and the colourful ‘circle of death’ in the corner is delaying its various functions.
And half of your brain thinks it is really quite funny, the kind of thing that happens a bit more as the various parts begin to wear. As crises go, it’s not exactly a life-threatening one. But then it’s real enough if you’re living inside the head that is having the trip, so the other half of the brain hates it. Like I said, I’m not the only one.
We all cope with these moments in a different way, and mine, bizarrely, is not to talk about it until the precise moment that I start to think that it is over. Partly this is because, deep down, I am an optimist; partly because the grim construction sites within else’s mind are really quite challenging; and partly because, deep down, I have this weird feeling that it’s no one else’s responsibility. We live in a world where we would rather hear anything rather than the truthful answer to the question ‘how’s it going’.
Then something happens, normally right out of the blue. Something throws the switch marked ‘normality’.
No one noticed when this happened last night, because no one really knew that my brain was slightly mis-firing. Or at least, not to the extent that it was.
We had a houseful of people, and a kitchen full of conversation, the kind of evening I look forward to for days.
There was a playlist coming through to the speaker in the kitchen off Caroline’s phone, very quietly, so that only the higher, louder notes came through, like little tiny shards of sound. A song came on that I had never heard before.
I broke off whatever conversation I was in, because something in the song that was playing, some sequence of chords and notes, coincided so precisely with the discordancy in my head, that it was like a thick curtain flying open on a brilliant dawn. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the idea. Light, that had been obscured, was suddenly pouring back into my head, and the dust was leaving it. And it turned out that it had only been the dust all along, dust on the screen, and dust in the re-charging socket.
I checked the screen of the phone to see who the singer was, and what the name name of the song might be, and stored it carefully away. Then, because I am of that age, and slightly hopeless at remembering names of songs, I sent myself an email by way of a reminder.
And then, when everyone had started going to bed, I went to my study and played it. And then played it again, and then once more for good luck.
And by the time that sleep ebbed away from my head at around 5.30 am this morning, the fog had cleared, and I went down to my study and listened to it again, and knew that the little bit of me that wasn’t working was back on the road.
So this is a story of nothing, really. Here is what did it.
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