moving and being still

in my teens i started work in an office, it seemed like the only step i could take into being an adult, but even as i did took it i felt like it was happening to someone else, that i became someone else….panic attacks, i couldnt breathe, petrified of an unknown badness, some terrifying event that was about to happen….my blood was too fast for my veins, my brain too large for my skull… ‘is this it?’ …the slow exchange of a life…but i had a sense of a somewhere else where i would be alive, another life…i felt the whole of the world disagreeing…i left the job, released.

re-reading ‘perch hill’ i recognise something in adam nicholsons longing for connection…’i know of nothing bigger or finer than the feeling that all barriers are down and a full-blown flood is running between you and the rest of the world. i know all these things and treat them as my touchstones and my yardstick. is this life, i always ask, as good as that?’