On Being a Silverfish.

For some years now I’ve had a regular email correspondent in America, and yet only tonight did I get around to Googling her name. I don’t even know why I did it. It was probably because I’d just read one of her stories and wasn’t quite ready to leave the groove when I’d finished – a bit like licking the inside of the carton when you’ve finished your tub of ice cream, I suppose. All rather indecorous.

Anyway, the returns from Messrs G were impressive. They – and a few other factors – made me realise how much better a writer she is than me, how much more erudite she is, how much more multi-talented, and probably how much more intelligent. And then there’s the world she moves in: a world both vastly more rarefied and expanded than mine. Seeing this made me feel like an insect nestled under the skirting board at the edge of a room populated by big and impressive animals all vying for her attention. I currently owe her an email, but I have no idea how to begin it or what to say once I have. This isn't how a healthy deviant is supposed to see things, so it seems I’m not being a very good deviant at the moment.

Maybe it's because last night I got an inkling that clinical depression might be setting in. Not the feeling-fed-up type that everybody gets occasionally, but the real McCoy. I might be wrong; I often am. If I were to tell anybody about it they would probably suggest I see a doctor, and what an irony would be contained within that little piece of predictable advice. It’s the doctors working diligently to restore my health who are in large part responsible for my mental unease (however much I remind myself that gratitude is the order of the day.) If only they didn’t have to be so bloody invasive about it. Invasion of any sort is one of my most notable neuroses.

But at least I can say with some degree of certainty that I feel like an idle Sherlock Holmes right now, picking fretfully at his fractured wits while awaiting a knock at the door of 221B which will herald the promise of a new adventure. In my case it’s more a matter of waiting for a small but growing light to appear in the gloom, carrying at its core the warmth and water necessary to reinvigorate the frozen tundra of an uncommonly staid existence. I do have to wait, you see; I always have. I know from past experience that there would be no more point in me going out to try and find an energising light than there would in Sherlock going out to search for a murder to investigate. Where does one look? And so I think I need a syringe and something strong to put in it.

(I still haven’t received the letter notifying the date of my next operation, by the way. The tense peering into the post box every morning goes on.)

And I don’t expect anybody out there to be the slightest bit concerned about my health, the state of my mind, or anything else about me. Why should they? That would be illogical. But do please make allowance for the fact that this is a late night post. Late nights are the best of times and the worst of times.