The Fit

I'm up late, trying to figure things out. Stuff that can't be figured. Hooray! Let's hear it for the stuff that can't be figured.

     
My mind hasn't made much sense of late, the epileptic fits getting worse since my last post. However, to my intrigue, my mind has become radically more interesting to me. Like a film I never understood before, now I watch it not even caring that the script is strange and the actors keep improvising.

     
Where did all the usual props go? Last Wednesday, I fell out of time, landing on New Cross High Street, clinging to a friend, unable to keep my eyes open, or even sit up, short-circuiting myself. After an hour, terrified, unable at times to stop myself from crying, I attempted to make it to the station, my friend at my side, determined to somehow get me home.

     
As I sat on the train, having finally got a seat at East Croydon after clinging to a window frame for forty-five minutes, trying to go with it... 'just go with it Clare', I wondered if this might be it. Surrounded by Ipods and copies of The Metro, late night workers with exhausted, sweating faces, I'd slip down this seat and never get up again. The book would remain unwritten. And all the obsession, all the love, what would it matter to me as I trickled away into white nothingness? A wonderful story. That's what my life would have been. A wonderful, fucking painful story. The End.

     
However, as the commuters gradually disappeared and night grabbed hold of me, the fits subsided and I came back into time again, and even felt the warm indentation of my body in the train seat.

     
The fit lasted three hours, but its after effects swam into my dreams the following mornings, banging inside my head whenever I walked out into sunlight and making me think I saw people I knew on the street who were not really there. I fell over things, knocked cups of tea flying, banged my knee. And I was so tired, I could have curled up on my couch in my dressing gown and not risen again until spring. When I lay face down on my bed and started dreaming, my mind became brilliant like the reflection of midday sun in a polished floor.

     
My mind is interesting to me. The fit was a terror, ripping through my sense of the world as being something I can stand on. Something that won't break apart when I touch it. But in the last couple of days, it has become a friend, opening a door in my world I never knew was there. This is the afterglow. Until again. And the fear boils up in my veins and takes it all away again.