Tricycle

Riding my tricycle in my back garden, maybe 4 years old. I’m very alone. The garden is silent. The house is silent. Perhaps it’s empty, too. The day is bright and the sunlight bounces off the concrete patio. I cycle round and round in circles.

Something has had to die. To die in order that I may live.

Where are they, my mum and dad? It must be me. Something I did. There is terror at my abandonment though you wouldn’t know to look at me. I appear nonchalant, carefree. I cannot allow that terror to be felt, less still to show its face.

Riding round and around on my tricycle, whipping up a vortex big enough to swallow all this pain. I know myself not to be worthy of love. Why else would they not come for me, have they not come for me? In that instant, safety is gone. I bear down on the terror that arises in its place. I ride it into the ground. Something has to die in order for me to live. That something is feeling.

Around and around.

The shadow of loss is grief. Like all shadows, it follows you around but when you turn to look at it, it disappears. How can you feel something you don’t even know is there?

So, instead of grieving the loss of safety, you are dogged by its bastard cousin – depression. It was Carl Jung who said that neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. And depression is the inability or unwillingness to feel your grief.

And it will rise up like a dark, scaly dragon, every time I try to be utterly me.

Which is to say, every time I write.

Right now, I am consumed by it. But still,

I write.