Lost self
Will the process of writing help?
What does it do?
What is it that it is trying to do?
Hurtling through the countryside I’m wondering how the hell I keep hold of all my atoms in one place and then constellate them into some kind of identity,
Maybe if I write I will manage to gather them all together. Sheep into the fold, planets around a sun, constellations in a solar system, moths around a light, iron filings to a magnet.
What the hell holds it all together?
The late light is casting long shadows across a late summer countryside. Straw bale roundels do geometry in summer harvest fields, barely touched by a human hand, cut and spun by industrial monsters yet nodding to a past historical agricultural identity, a past self that Hardy would never recognise, more obscure than he could ever have imagined.

To hurtle from the country to the city, and back again...to be continued...
I’ve hurtled a bit further.
It’s hard to go anywhere and be among people and not know who I am anymore.... of course, I didn’t know that I didn’t know who I was before but somehow, somewhere along the line, this particular loss of self has become so fundamental.
Today I am ahead of my friend who will reflect a more constellated self. I am unfolding my consciousness (whatever that is) as I hurtle. What a mess it is. William James was so right. How is it possible to stay sane as the trees stand in their fields, as hedgerows stretch out in some strange space time continuum, as swans float on a passing pond, as allotments....gone, as housing esta...pass, canals intersect (it was an impossible competition), electric lines looping on as the sun goes down in a blaze and Auden’s ’night mail’ picks up the rhythm as we hasten north. Is that where I am ‘more’ my-self? Really? Is that where I am located? Will you find me there if you came looking? Would I find myself there? When I sat today having lunch I looked up to see the faces of my brother and my cousin and spontaneously started crying. I wasn’t really sure who I was. I had asked my cousin how his dad was. He died two years ago. I couldn’t believe my sense of lost self that was still in a time where he was still alive. The marbles dropped and echoed down the corridors of my sanity. I couldn’t believe that sense of myself that was fumbling on the floor trying to scoop up all the pieces and put them in the right order so that it might at least look coherent on the outside even if it is utter chaos behind the scenes. Keep the front room tidy, don’t let them know what lies under the stairs and in the basement. I know there’s menopause brain but this is something else.
The windows of the houses are on fire as they reflect the light of the setting sun.

....curiously, now, an hour or so later, as I hurtle in total darkness, I feel more at ease. I am approaching home. The blackness out there is inky and comfortingly familiar.