Reading true ghost stories before bed disturbed my sleep. I was quite pleased as I had fallen asleep worrying that I could no longer spook myself out. Less pleased to wake up to the sound of something moving in my room (something falling somewhere) and a red eye looking at me. Cyclops-shuck, a black dog stare. Still dreaming.
Day of feeling strange. Midsummer panic that lasted seconds, and the air heavy with autumn - at least until the evening when it felt like summer again - even if summer from different times. I'm always in the wrong time, but at least sometimes the right place. Sometimes feel I'll get swallowed up by childhood bedrooms, adolescent afternoons and summers in my early twenties.
There is a film of the past overlaid onto everything. Writing this now and I can see Southside in Kinloss, late 70s / early 80s or the road at the back of our house in Forres few years later (cool shadow, overhanging trees) and then the autumn of 1985, writing a poem called 'Invaders' about it getting dark, and so on and so on...
I am fascinated by stories of people vanishing. When people vanish in folk tales and ghost stories I can only imagine them getting lost in their own past - or perhaps some kind of hyper-past, an antiquity that underlies each place, a deeper tide, that cold current, like a drug, like falling asleep, like being haunted.
