Extract

MAY: UNDERTHINKING WITH WENDY

…..

‘What is it that I think?’

Your eyes are bluey-grey, your lips give the best kisses, you are the person I want to be with forever and yet, in a year, a month, a second, it may all be different. But just now, being with you is my heaven. Just now is, is, is.

Just now is my worry that I may fall out of love one day, that I may lose my job, that I may not reach that ideal I cannot express and,

Oh, underthink! Underthink!

I say, ‘Get back to the basics.’

I hide under a bush in a dry hollow with crunchy leaves and let the sun dapple me. I distil myself to the very tip of a juniper leaf, the exact end of it. I become the precise centre of a concentric ripple. I become so concentrated that I explode with a sonic boom and shatter the silence of the lochside, our paused breath in bed. I shatter my equanimity, I startle awake clutching you, breathing fast and deeply, laughing a raggedy laugh that says,

‘Where did all that calm go?’

I walk in a glade of bluebells, becoming smaller and smaller until I am the essence of the green sea-like light. I am so happy that I have become so little, so unnoticeable until I notice my happiness, my pride, and then I swell into being and see your disappointed smile at the mud on my shoes, the crushed flowers, the fact that I was so busy being infinitesimal that I forgot to lie down here and kiss you and do that underthinking that forgets what underthinking is.

I sit on a rock and stare at the mountains, sit on a log of driftwood and stare at the silver mist of the sea, feel the breeze on my face. Watch a long-legged spider walk over my shoe, see a butterfly fluttering amongst the dusty heather.

I pause, I breathe so deep. I am the sand, I am the air, I am that mite of dust flying in the sun, and then I’m not: I am working out how I will tell everyone, how I will describe my magical connection with oneness. How I will resurrect that old story of being at sea, thousands of miles from anywhere, and I became as tiny as a salt grain, as big as an atom, as small as the universe.

And here I could swear so foully, if I weren’t brought up not to swear, and I could accuse myself of forgetting what I am trying to do completely. I could think a glass of whisky this evening will cure this arrogance and think of all the ways I pretend to be clever and feel my stomach curl inside me. Hint that the whisky might come early.

I say to myself and berate myself, ‘Deep breaths, soft breaths. Learn to giggle, to play, celebrate those wayward thoughts. Let the frantic thoughts settle like silt in a disturbed puddle that slowly turns clear and peat brown, lit by the amber sun.’