Ghosts

Listen: Rambling Man - Laura Marling

Inevitably, the 21st year anniversary - the celebration, post-pondering, the wishes and the absence of people you thought would be there with you on the day. And the new ones, of course, stranger still - unexpected but not unwelcome. Quite the opposite in some cases.

I haven't been updating - there is that feeling that after years of blogging and putting my issues out here for anyone to read, I've retreated inward. There is the private diary to go to, but I have to admit that for all the privacy and confessional space it gives, it still leaves me feeling exposed, waiting for something to pick up whatever incriminating information I left behind. And yet. I have been obedient and good in the past few months, unlike what I have been over the past few years.

Isn't that a strange thing? I've been honest with myself, trying hard to, more so than I tried before this. And yet despite the efforts, there is still the feeling of being in a sort of identity stasis. What's 21 then? A number, a number to mark my adulthood - how else can someone else determine that I have, yes, become an adult?

But time is just time and consciousness is not subject to time, as I have been aware recently, with a growing unsettledness of how my memory changes. It came as a shock, a few days ago, to realise that I had almost forgotten events that had taken place only in February of this year. Was I really trying that hard to forget? I wasn't aware of it then, and I didn't think I wanted to forget now. But I did.

But yet - hurts that had taken place a year ago, that had mattered so much then - do I consciously bring them up, do I want to remember them? Or do external events and circumstances bring me round to them again? But they don't matter in the least now, so what is the use of talking about them?

A growing sense of things settling, of stability - but at times there is a heaviness that I don't really have the privilege of time to think properly about. It will be smooth, but then something spiky and insidious would keep intruding into my consciousness, making me act out in ways I do not want. You might think I'm being paranoid about this, but how do I shake off this unsettledness then?

It's funny - to think I wanted to stop being so confessional here - and yet after a few months without a post, I go and spill it out here. It probably isn't as elliptical or cryptic as I would like to think it is, but it'll do.

In some dozens of universes, there's probably a Simon Pegg in at least half of them. And it's a comforting thought.