One a.m.
A campsite in Oxfordshire.
I can’t sleep.
I’ve been to sleep, but now can’t get back to sleep. I told myself I wouldn’t drink alone anymore, but the bottle of Merlot by the bed, emptied earlier, testifies to failure. I had slept very early, in the late afternoon really. I wake in pain - I won’t say why - and my body is restless. I get up, switch on the light, flop back in bed. Eyes close. Am I going back to sleep? Eyes open. Check the phone - another bad habit - do a news search, put the phone back down. Maybe just stay like this? No. I get up, switch off the light. Flop back down.
Eyes close.
Eyes open again.
I’m writing. Not at a screen, not with a keyboard, but in my mind. Words flow, sentences form, questions are asked. New questions, and questions decades old. I have to know. There is a long-standing uncertainty that has to be resolved. Has to be. Before all else. And soon.
I toy with the idea of switching on the machine, grabbing that keyboard. Who would I be writing to? To myself, just indulgence made public? No, I’d be writing to you. I don’t mean a generic ‘you’, the audience, I mean you, the individual. Yes, you. You know who you are. Even if I don’t. Just my guess, just my deduction. You don’t miss a post, you usually open within minutes of me posting. You seem to want me to know your keenness, even as you hide your identity. It seems an invitation to investigate, to parse your pseudonyms, actions, and avatar. It seems I’m being led to look closely at the fog of obfuscation, led to find patterns, but to always doubt, to never to be able to say “aha, I know”. Anyone can read me without subscribing, but you want me to know that I’m being watched. But why…?
I’ve been here before. I once fired a bolt that got through, and thought I heard the echo of an impact. Everything remained plausibly deniable, and I knew why, and I knew to never say “I know”. But circumstances continued to look like mounting evidence, a stream of jumbled letters that started to look like words. But were they the words I thought they were? To carry a secret for 30 years, and not know the true nature of the secret, or even if it was really a secret, or just an illusion. Even if illusion just had a minor percentage chance. I still pore over the memories of that time, weighing it all up. And then think about how that might look to others, those that know much more than me, after I kept reappearing, and have reappeared yet again. Time to fire another bolt? Maybe I’m not that good a shot, and just got lucky - possibly lucky - before?
I don’t know. I’m not that smart, not really. My eyelids are getting heavy again, I’ll type it up in the morning.
This is for you.
Get in touch.