Billygean.co.uk

Monday, September 18, 2006

Le onde

I stepped out onto the back garden patio after my bath, a towel still wrapped around my hair and my bare feet cool on the ground. I looked at the purple sky and fingered plants and herbs as the breeze cooled my face.

I write about the past a lot. I'm not sure at what point things become the past, but something definitely happens. The ridgid structures of facts and everyday events become unwound by memory; suddenly there is magic in scenes you saw, and songs and smells will forever remind you of what felt like moments but were simply pieces of time.

I used to think I remembered school too fondly. At university I have looked back longingly at mindless hours spent in the common room, playing cards, people watching, becoming people ourselves. I remember scrunching my nose up in physics, the smell of our tiny library, the first time I read Chaucer.

The summer before university was life changing. Full of secrets, and long nights, and gazing out of windows. Me and my friends drove miles to secluded pubs, where we would order wine for the first time, and sip and try to discern the fruits. I would sit in my bedroom after these nights, wonderfully nocturnal, and light candles and memorise tarot cards and run my fingers over runes.

I remember reading Woolf's To The Lighthouse that summer. It conceptualised exactly how I felt. If I had an ocean, there would have been walking and painting, and shrubs glistening in moonlight. I walked a lot in the fields near my house. They felt like my first true home.

That summer cemented my English degree for me; it felt right, to be creative, to read other people's deep thoughts. How wrong I was. What was right then, was not memory, of fondness or rose-tinted glasses. No, it was some direction. It was logic and reason in what I did. It was knowing where I wanted to be. It was maths, and physics and structure in my studies, which allows my mind to float above with thoughts of love, and candles, and magic.

I feel that magic again now, as I sit in lectures. I love it. Everything lines up.

I returned to my desk after my bath and resumed reading a case. I put my pen down for a moment and smiled.

This is exactly where I am supposed to be.

by billygean.co.uk at 11:21 PM |