The Light
It's mid-August. Summer hasn't been too bad here in the UK. There has been a particular quality to the daylight over the last couple of days that has stirred something in me. An echo from a long forgotten memory; like a ripple from a stone thrown into the water long ago, so long ago that the memory of the splash itself is long gone and only the ripple remains. I can't put this feeling into words, it's something that I just feel, that just is and there's nothing I can do to explain it.
I used to get weird flashbacks as a little kid to a time that felt at least 10-15 years before I was born. Images of a fairground, a woman in tight fitting black capri pants, high heels, a top of alternating black and white bars, her brown hair tied up in a red headscarf and those 50s pointy sunglasses on. I felt that I was a kid of about 6 or 7 years old; I had a balloon, she was taking me around this fair - some kind of funfair but also an exposition of what the future would look like from the viewpoint of the 1950s.
It was a memory so clear, but so alien; the woman was nobody I knew, her look was brand new but out of date. The kid wasn't me, but I felt like I was there.
Was it a childhood dream I had that was so vivid that it stuck with me? Was it something from a programme or film I'd seen on telly and parsed it into memory as my own? Was I remembering a past life?
I don't believe in past lives. I think the brain sometimes malfunctions and we, in our arrogance as entities, put it down to The Supernatural, Aliens, Religious Deities etc. etc. rather than accepting we've had a brain wrong.
My brain wrong is pretty soothing, this feeling I get looking out of the window at the daylight is quite pleasant.
Thankfully.