What is lost?
I can’t quite remember when it was that I first noticed that I had lost it. I can’t even remember where it was or, more correctly, where I was ……… when I first noticed I had lost it. I doubt that there was a significant passage of time between my noticing the loss and the actual loss itself, but I can’t remember that either. Whatever else, I do know that not a day, not an hour, has passed since then that I haven’t missed it. And it is really annoying.
I do remember that I had been going through a rough period for some time, and so I was probably a little distracted. I wasn’t eating well and I wasn’t sleeping well either. I was somewhat overwhelmed by feelings of insecurity and, as a result rather too emotional. Any little thing seemed to set me off and I would howl long into the night.
It may have been the insecurity or, even worse, some incipient paranoia but I started to imagine that I hadn’t actually lost it but that someone had stolen it. I realized immediately that it was a preposterous notion, far too awful to contemplate, and so I didn’t voice my fears. Talking, through this period, was not my strongest suit anyway. In truth I have to admit I was terribly sulky; uncommunicative but loud nevertheless. I raged against the loss in a non-specific way and, presumably because it was non-specific, my rage was largely ignored and simply endured, if not quite entirely tolerated.
No-one else seem to notice or acknowledge the loss and I started to doubt that it had ever existed or, at least, had not been as prominent a feature in my life as I had imagined. I wrestled with this possibility for a while before rejecting it wholesale. The logic of this decision, however, led me to the uncomfortable conclusion that there was a conspiracy afoot.
I found it difficult to sustain the view that there was possibly malicious intent involved although I did experience some peremptory, rough treatment and extremely threatening faces. And while this was alarming it was almost always followed by cascades of warm attention and sweet indulgence. It felt a little like brainwashing but found that that kind of thinking just led me into a Catch 22 situation. If my brain was being so rigorously cleansed and suffering distortion, any findings that that same brain presented to me were equivalently discredited.
This, of course, led me back to the idea that the whole loss thing was an awful fantasy fed to me by my damaged and delinquent thinking machine. And for time, I have to admit, this was a little destabilizing until I followed the loop back to its presumed beginning. Any disfigurement due to brainwashing clearly required a reason to warrant such brainwashing. But this only offered short-lived comfort as I was forced to conceded that a healthy brain that could concoct fictitious brainwashing, could just as easily have concocted a fictitious loss. Unless, of course the brain’s concoction was not fictitious then neither might be the loss! At which point in my thinking I realized that my ‘presumed beginning’ to the loop was more doubtfully presumed than everything else!
As you might imagine this was the real low point of the whole experience. If, indeed, it were a fever I was suffering from, then this was the veritable crisis; the very edge! This is the very point where friends and family spend a desperate night huddled in grief around your bed, with damp flannels and flickering candles, instead of the perfectly functioning electric lights ……… softer on bulging eyes I presume.
For me the crisis was, of course, entirely mental. And so it all started to fall apart …….. in some dark, howling wind; standing beneath the unattached lintel of a creaking doorway, open and flapping in the night sky offering only access from and into infinite space. This was insecurity personified. There was nothing to hold onto in any direction; just this feral wind amok amid the stars; a bloated pinball, forever threatening to bowl me over into a bottomless, bottomless fall! I howled all night until, without thought, I put my thumb into my mouth and immediately found something to hold onto. I parachuted softly down to a warm-pillowed sleep.
I continued to suck my thumb for several days, until my parents eventually relented and gave me back my dummy; my pacifier. You can never lose anything that’s been taken from you. So I have forgiven them and recovered, I think, a primitive kind of truth.
Extract from "Tales of Fifi and the Truth Fairy" available at Amazon (as Paperback and E-book)
