Suddenly the swarm of evil bat-like creatures that seemed to have been tearing at the inside of my mind for so long were gone. They just stopped being there. Not flocked away, not faded away, they just pinged out of existence. I looked around, mind-wise, to see what other predators were lurking in the airs of my mind—all human and deal-able with.
This moment of sudden-quiet happened at about four, of the morning, on Sunday. Just before the dawn was up; I was walking along the canal with my wife.
The night before we'd agreed that we weren't seeing enough nature. So it seemed sensible to get up while it was still dark to take a walk, see the dawn rise and see what nature was up to in this town of ours. So up we got about half-three, had a cup of coffee and headed off out.
I walk to-and-from work along this very canal, in every season, at all times of the day and night, still I've never been along it at four am in May.The birds were singing, the hawthorn was a spectral whiteness along the tow-path, everything around me was familiar but strange. Strange in the sense that I felt that I was seeing something that the world half-hid from me unless I met it half-way.
The quiet-epiphany happened just after we'd passed under the garish council-painted metal-bridge that the pigeons nest under, where the Valerian grows in ranks on a wall top, where the Moorhen has a nest in the reeds and the Japanese knot weed is killing the competing Buddlia on the far bank. There was a redness in the sky but the sun wasn't up. Suddenly I started seeing the real world again.
My commute to work might have well as been along a featureless canyon of darkness for all I've noticed for who-knows how long. I have been walking along the wrong strangeness.
A flight of ducks quacked over my head and my wife complained that we couldn't liberate [steal] any Valerian. I smiled for what seemed like the first time in ages.
The drugs had kicked in.