Glorious golden summer days, very special days, days to look back on in wonder, days to memorate and commemorate as often as possible. As frequently as feasible. I was busy generating a happy world, you see. I was going to my happy place. ‘Go to the happy place, go to the happy place, go to the happy place’, my mind was telling me. ‘Go to the happy place before it’s too late…’
I struggled to obey. I always struggle to obey! Obey is my middle name and – given a chance – I’ll obey anything in sight. Sometimes I’ll tie myself up in knots trying to obey my own obeying. That’s how desperate I am. ‘Glorious summer days,’ I said, ‘glorious summer days the like of which you might see on the back of a box of cornflakes’. ‘Days the like of which you’ll never see the like of which again’, I told myself sadly. Days the like of which the like of which.
Sometimes it’s hard to obey. You’re trying to make two worlds where there’s only the one. You’re struggling to make it be two, but they keep merging. You would like to obey but you can’t. Your efforts are in vain. Every cell in your body is straining to obey but to no avail. ‘Go to the happy place,’ I told myself flatly, without any inflection of emotion in my voice, ‘go to the happy place before it’s too late…’
Sometimes it’s hard even to remember the happy place. It’s never not hard really and even on those very rare occasions when the memory comes back to me, I’m never one hundred per cent sure that it’s a genuine memory and not just the memory of a memory I once thought I had. Shards, I call them – distorted quasi-memories of other, older memories that never actually happened. They didn’t need to happen because we remember them anyway. Sometimes we do, at least.
That’s the nature of the soup we’re swimming in, anyway! We’re in the soup now for sure. We’re in what you might call a bit of a soupy situation here and no mistake – there are chunks of carrots all over the shop, ghostly strands of white cabbage, spiralling out of control before your very eyes. Your eyes can’t believe it, your eyes can’t believe what they’re seeing. They’re staring back at you blankly like the button eyes on someone’s neglected old teddy bear. You’ve seen too much and now you can’t unsee it.
Thick at some times, thin at others, the soup remains all we have. It’s ours to make do with the best we can. Happy for a brief moment or two, then morose again for many hours. Crying into your kebab at a late-night fast-food emporium. Crying into your kebab because you know it’s all a dream. Ever the sentimental type, you shed many a lugubrious tear. ‘This soup is good and nutritious,’ you tell yourself, eventually. ‘There’s plenty of fine nutrition in this soup’. You’re quiet after this outburst. Quiet and reflective. You’re thinking to yourself, ‘The soup will save me…’
