Before I relocated Northward, I lived for a few years over a decade in the Cotswolds, situated in such a way that while we were immersed in an urban centre, escapes were both possible and plentiful to historic sites, limestone-heavy geology, and footpaths a plenty for exploration and adventure. A deep adoration of wandering country lanes will always been rooted within me from these memories, alongside a deep appreciation of the rural, more so the less cultivated parts of it, rare as they are.
One lingering memory that I now find myself revisiting with eyes-as-though-anew is a time in my youth, although at what age more precisely is not within my grasping.
Periods of time were spent in my childhood downstairs, as you do, and more so when I was ill. The furnishings, second-hand, were loved and loved again. The evening in question saw me laid on the sofa, wrapped up in an impressive nest of blankets. Directly opposite was a ceiling to floor length sliding glass door that opened out onto the garden. Small as said garden was, it was our little patch of beloved green. Whether I was asleep and then roused into awakeness through what was witnessed first in mind and then with the eyes, I do not know, but I starkly remember staring at the closed curtains at what can only be described as a screaming grotesque face backlit.
The words to describe it are at once both difficult to find and easy; some parts of the memory striking in their clarity and others vague and distorted. Framed in either a mane or wild tangles of hair, grossly exaggerated roughly human but also monstrous features, with the stark outline of staring eyes. Transfixed and shaken down to the bones both, at once both drawn to it and repulsed. It is something that has remained persistently interwoven within me ever since, stirring and shrouding as it wills. I will not attempt to pry into it, for the rationalisation of such a thing – encounter? – is not how I approach such a recalling. The grotesque, impacting and resonating, reverberating with an underlying consistence.
Obscurite 