Pure Morning

April 2nd, 2004

It's been a long time since I have seen a sky that blue and smelled the dewey fresh aroma of the cut grass and the Bourne stream that babbles a few steps away. The balloon in the park tumbles lazily in midair in the early noon sun. My favourite time of the day - of the year - is between 9 and 12 o'clock on a sunny, warm late spring day. The light has this new and somehow pure, young and dreamlike quality, not like the dusty, worn, dazed light of a hot late summer afternoon.
I love this light because it gives me a sense of hope and expectancy of the good in life that is still to come. It makes me look forward to life. God knows how beautiful this feeling is, and how dark life is without it. It's like being born again, having wiped out the past, getting a fresh start.
It's one of the first warm days of the year, and the most peaceful and happy in a long time. Everyone, everything seems so friendly. Maybe it's just the way I see it... emotion colors everything. I can't put in words how happy and light I feel, how amazing it is to sense the world around me again, fully aware, drinking it in, noticing all the little details that I always seemed to be blind to. Blooming trees and the fresh sweetly scented air, squirrels, even the ever horny pidgeons who never seem to stop their mating rituals down here. Looking at the ever-desperate student mating rituals, it must be something in the water down here (probably more in the cheap booze pitchers that are purchased by the dozens on weekends, welcome to Bournemouth)... but it just seems to go past me completely. I am a born single and quite happy with it, who would have ever thought? How can one trade freedom with the ever-annoying self-erasing compromises of a relationship? I like to sit and just absorb life quietly, the purity of it, the little that it has left, and nourish that part in me that isn't quite dead yet and that I refuse to let die.

Bournemouth is a beautiful place to live in - ignoring the evening pub brawls, and drunken rudeness, and the clickety-clack of a few thousand stillettos attached to skimpily clad, sexually overexpressive wenches offering themselves for a hump in return for a free beer. God I'm cynical, but it's true. Maybe it's that stale, bland desperation down here what has turned me into a nun. I guess that is why the pigeons make me laugh. They are the perfect analogy for Bournemouth's nightlife. Except that the pigeon girls have principles.

Anyways, back to happy things. I feel I have wasted time because I was for so long too depressed to appreciate what I have here before.

I'm sitting on the ground by the Bourne stream - the benches are still too wet with morning dew and the low stone walls to damp and mossy - who wants a green patch on their butt? I prefer to sit on the ground (with an awesome peach-banana shakeaway)... I find it liberating, for some reason, connecting me to what is around me. I sometimes wish I could do this more often, just in the middle of the street, to sit down and stop in time and just be.
I have this strange dream to sit on a highway in the Californian desert or the Texan hill country, in the spring or summer. The Texan hill country is then covered in the azure carpets of the blue bonnets and poppies, mixed with cacti, and hopefully a few longhorns grazing nearby. And this incredibly blue wide dome of sky, with gigantic white clouds lazily drifting by. Just lying on my back, feel the warm, grainy surface of the road beneath me and watch the clouds drift, and listen to the lonely screams of the cowbirds, and not be near any human beings and settlements, and sensing that this is the point in time that touches eternity. The middle of the road is a place where people never really go... they just run past it, across it, if ever. The middle of a road is somehow one of the last uninhabited spaces of the Western world.
I am sick of this common structured life, the deadening habits, as the modernists described it. Doing something out of order makes me feel alive. Do something different, unexpected, and life will feel new.