Dark Epiphany

I have certain spots that I like to haunt – places that are familiar to me, places that I have a good feeling about. That’s a joke isn’t it – that I should be talking about having good feeling about things. It’s incongruous to say the least. It’s not a good feeling as such of course but more a memory of a good feeling. Like the memory of what it feels like to be warming yourself in front of an open fire on a freezing cold winter’s night. That’s such a wonderful feeling – can’t you just feel it? Only you can’t because it’s only just a memory. There’s no warmth there.

 

Anyway, that’s all irrelevant now because I’ve moved on. Or rather I’ve been moved on, which is not quite the same thing. They wouldn’t let me stay. They banded together and drove me out. The unclean spirits, that is. It’s the familiarity that comforts you see. I’m saying this as if you didn’t know it. Of course you know it – everyone knows it. I’m just talking to myself really. I’m telling myself stuff that I think I need to know, stuff that I think will help me. That’s a very familiar behaviour pattern for me, as it happens. Self-comforting by saying familiar things. Although sometimes it isn’t comforting at all, strangely enough. Sometimes it goes the other way and it’s appallingly horrific to be hearing yourself coming out with this stuff. It’s a nightmare the scope of which you cannot imagine. No one can imagine it. Trust me, you just can’t. No way could you. Not in a million years.

 

Did you ever see that film ‘Nightmares in a damaged brain’? I know most people would say that it’s third rate garbage but I kind of liked it. I rather liked ‘The Blob’ too. How can something that is comfortingly familiar also be appallingly horrific – that’s the question that’s occurring to me now. How does that make sense? How could that be? On the one hand you have this nice warm feeling inside you and everything’s cosy and on the other hand there is this terrible, terrible moment of purest horror, like the worst nightmare you could ever possibly have. All the other nightmares you have had in your life are only faint echoes of the one I’m telling you about, trust me. It’s the archetypal nightmare – the grandaddy of them all…

 

I keep saying ‘trust me’ – why should you trust me, for god’s sake? Why would you? Why would I trust me? I’ve probably been giving myself bad advice the whole of my life. I definitely have. I was only trying to reassure myself after all. Reassure myself about something that deep-down I know isn’t true. Why else would I need to try to reassure myself? If it’s true there’s no need to keep on saying it, is there. There’s no need to keep on making a case for it. Stands to reason that reassurances are a lie, doesn’t it? When you actually think about it, which of course you never do.

 

So when you believe these easy reassurances you feel good, you feel all warm and cosy inside. That’s where the good feeling comes from – it’s because you believe your own bullshit! All of this is only just coming clear to me right now as I write these words down. It’s not a literary device or anything like that. This is like an epiphany for me. A dark epiphany: the comfort of the familiar and the horror of the familiar are forever linked. Comfort is the same thing as horror – that’s my epiphany. Not that there’s any point in me ever trying to tell it to anyone, of course. There’d be no point at all, trust me…

 

 

 

 

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