Being Cast Adrift.

I watched a video on YouTube last night showing several areas of the city centre in the place where I was born and grew up. It had a post-apocalyptic feel to it. Large areas which were demolished several years ago still haven’t been rejuvenated, presumably for lack of money and constructive ideas. There was one run of shops covering a hundred yards or more and consisting of businesses ranging from the big national department stores to the smaller, privately owned ones. Most of them were closed, boarded up, scrawled with graffiti, and hopelessly derelict. Only the rolling chunks of prairie grass were missing from the scene of desolation.

I’ve reported the fact that lately I’ve been having a lot of disturbing dreams, one category of which was precisely what I was seeing in the video. Can dreams be prophetic, or was it just coincidence? I tend to the latter view, but who knows?

What disturbed me most about this monument to dereliction was the fact that my life started here. The city centre was the hub of my world. I spent the first two months of my life living in my grandmother’s house on the edge of it, and it was where I went frequently throughout my childhood and teen years for shopping, entertainment, and erudition. And now I want never to go there again.

It feels as though the ever-growing and seemingly unbreakable cord which connected me with my roots has been severed, leaving me adrift in the cosmos with my roots floating away in the opposite direction. I wonder whether the city centre itself is being drawn into a black hole and heading for the ignominy of oblivion. I can’t know that of course, but it’s a sad feeling.

It might be said that I’m exaggerating all of this, and maybe I am. But this is more than idle imagination. This is the stuff of perception, and as I’ve often claimed on this blog, perception is the whole of the life experience.