New shoots

My life-long companion insomnia visited me last night and I woke up early feeling rattled. So I took the dog for a long walk, at least as much for my benefit as his.

A beautiful morning, no-one around except the pigeons wheeling away from the bird scarers in the fields and four horses munching lazily on a pile of hay. The sky was brightest spring blue, the first waking shoots of the crops starting to push through the earth towards the light. The hazy optical illusion of the mud and the baby crops is as if the whole landscape was of brown taffeta shot through with brilliant green.

For many years, I realise now, I operated chiefly from the logical reasoning side of my brain. The process of pulling the pieces of my psyche back together in the wake of the break up with D has resulted in my brain re-wiring itself it seems. The result is that I am now primarily driven (and sometimes buffeted) by emotion rather than reason. If these emotional antennae are new to the world like the tender crop shoots, they are equally sensitive to climate.

My feeling is that something has happened; some subtle shift in dynamic has taken place. I don’t know what it is or why – perhaps it is the re-opening of my heart which I acknowledged in Egypt? In any event and whatever it is, it is, I think, the source of my rattled feeling. I also know that I just have to roll with it, let time reveal it when the moment is right. For someone who had always been governed by logic, always sought practical solutions, that’s a big ask.

I find myself driving to a quiet place, a location that held great significance for me in a long-ago relationship. I haven’t been here for many years but I find it unchanged.

A strange thing happens to me in places with strong emotional attachments. I always have the most compelling feeling that if I just looked quickly enough I’d catch a glimpse of the ‘me’ that occupied that space or place in the past. I’m not sure what I’d say to the younger version of myself if I had the chance. Keep believing in time travel and understand that the palette containing shades of grey is the most colourful and surprising in the spectrum, perhaps?

I sit in the car, eating jelly beans and smoking and looking at the magnificent view until the rattle subsides.