I never looked at things anymore, in the way I had before.” I suppose I was seeing but not looking – the visual world just came to me flat, like a catalogue of information. I would walk to work or go out for groceries or whatever and by the time I came home again I wouldn’t be able to remember seeing or hearing anything distinctive at all. It wasn’t just that I failed to be delighted by sensory experiences – it was that I didn’t actually seem to have them anymore. At that point, I found it impossible to imagine ever feeling again as I had apparently once felt about rain or flowers.
I started to put the diary away for weeks at a time – it was just a cheap black notebook I got at work – and then eventually I’d take it back out to look at the entries from the previous year.
When I did make entries, they were increasingly verbal and abstract: song titles, or quotes from novels, or text messages from friends. Sometimes I would fall asleep without remembering to write anything, but then other nights I’d open the book and not know what to write – I wouldn’t be able to think of anything at all. There was something delicate about living like that – like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.Īfter a couple of months, I started to miss days. And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them. The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on, completely ordinary things.
“Walking around, even on a bad day, I would see things – I mean just the things that were in front of me.
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