DEEP BLACK

I don’t think I remember a morning being as dark as this one was today. The shadows were deepest black, hiding all the traps and obstacles that cause no problems on a normal morning. There was not a star to be seen, no moon shone in the sky, not even a finger of light had yet appeared from the hidden sun, which had still not yet emerged from beyond the eastern hills. It remained concealed beyond them as the sky was just an endless mass of dark black, threatening clouds.

It quite suited my state of mind this morning.

“These are dark times in Lesser Blogfordshire…”

Lesser Blogfordshire also feels a very dark place today, as if it were experiencing a power cut on a cloudy moonless night when all the candles were damp whilst the thickest of fogs descended and all the batteries in the world had gone flat. A wall of blackness clouds my mind and there’s not the slightest chink of light seeping in. A deep black cloak is over my head, shrouding me, but there’s no need for it, the darkness doesn’t need assistance, it is quite deep enough and requires no further emphasis.

In my head I am transformed. I am a small child spending his first ten years locked in a coal cellar or I am hiding in the back of the wardrobe, behind the fur coats which I can feel brushing my skin but not see, but finding no Narnia to escape to. The blankets are over my head, shielding me from the dark outside but providing no protection as the darkness is under them with me. I am in a dark, dark place, embroiled in the stuff of nightmares, and not able to find any way to wake up again.

It’s my own fault, but then it usually is. Recent events have had me looking into my own past, peeping under the rocks and stones of my own history and not liking what I find there. Remembering brings back the spiritless, hopeless, pointlessness of all things to the forefront of my mind and I remain bereft of joy. I cannot even remember joy, or hope for it. All I can endure is just a tortuous, macabre firework display of black explosions against a jet-black sky, each memory a tiny bomb that overlaps the last in a cacophony of recall leading to the next terrible remembrance and the next and the next.

The mind won’t switch off. “There was the time when… and then… and then...” A spinning black tornado with me at its heart trying to focus, lock on to just one dark memory, but another worse one comes along and diverts me to itself for a second, but then another comes into view and another, all shifting and merging and raging, black against black on an endlessly black void.

“What about the time when I...?”

“When she…?”

“When I said…?”

“When he did that…?”

“I wish I hadn’t said…”

“But then I…”

There is an endless tar-pit of self-loathing that I am sinking into. I’m drowning in a sticky, clawing sea of treacle, which is pulling me down into it. I am in the deepest coalmine with not a lamp to be lit and the cage to freedom already speeding to the surface without me, leaving me forgotten, alone, isolated and cold.

Does anyone else ever look so deeply into themselves and not like what they’re seeing? I see the world around me and it seems that everyone else just loves themselves. They bubble along full of confidence and joy. Have they no dark memories? Have they no self-doubts? Does no-one else get their regrets and failures revisiting them, prodding them, reminding them on their brightest of days how utterly worthless they really are? Do their past humiliations and miseries never come calling at the worst possible time?

Tell me I’m not alone…