Time Passes

I got up at 7:00 this morning and walked into town, listening to the just-downloaded second album by eighties metal band Fifth Angel, and an also-just-downloaded nineties album by noisy Japanese black metallers Abigail. I ran into a few people I used to work with, on their way to work. I walked with them to the entrance and then carried on down the beach. A bright, hot day, and all intimations of autumn are no longer here. End of summer fever. This is no-time.
People I used to work with.
It strikes me that I no longer have a job. The thought is disorientating and freeing. I am glad I am not at the call-centre any more. That place was nudging me ever closer to some place where growing levels of stress and anxiety were going to cause me at some point grave concern. The future is open. Anything is possible.
I tell everyone that I am going to concentrate on my art, at least for a while, and though I shall undoubtedly produce, maybe lots more artwork, I'm still not sure whether or not I'll ever have the courage or motivation to do anything with it. If I ever work out what doing anything with it actually means.
I went down the Pavilion Gardens, sat on the grass with a coffee and continued working on the drawing I had begun in Portland on the morning of the day we flew back.
Hot and unreal day.
I walk back home, and head off to meet Em at her house. We walk into town, and the heat is relentless and unreal and strangely cathartic.
Someone I used to go out with.
I borrowed her wireless and registered my Kindle my parents had bought me, rather fantastically, as a present on Friday before catching the train back to Brighton. I downloaded Thomas Ligotti's book of pessimistic philosophy The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and Chris Limb's Confessions of a Teenage Toyah Fan. I used to know the latter author - very vaguely. I read the book in one sitting. It is a rather fantastic paean to nostalgia, memory, time passing and things changing, threaded through with a strain of obscure and not unattractive melancholy. Highly recommended.
Someone I used to vaguely know.
Time passes alright. The one thing of which we can be certain. As I sit in my room in this late summer twilight (September on Sunday! Autumn!) listening to Fifth Angel again, (the kind of then-commercial metal I would avoid like a plague during my teenage years, now full of an odd nostalgia) I feel time pooling about me. I don't mean that time feels stilled, or stagnant (though, to be honest, I can conceive of no other season by late summer) but more that time is refusing to flow, building up against some dam. The river rising. Ready to burst its banks. Ready to flood across those fields I can't see, those unmapped meadows, pathless woods, and lanes lit at twilight by crooked street lamps that only sometimes work.
I only feel like this of course because I have no future plans, I have no idea what I am going to do, but am aware that things could go anyway, both good and bad. This feeling is further accentuated by the fact that I am giving myself two weeks off. Permission to not do anything except what I want to. I don't want to panic-rush into some unsuitable course of action. I want this space. I need this time. It's hard to do nothing - even if you're given yourself permission to.
Then again, I think of the council website, and the housing benefit form I need to fill in online, and that I might have to find documents, and that I might have lost then, and that I might get into some kind of unspecified trouble, and that...
7:50pm. Time passes. Through the gap in my curtains I can see that it is getting darker. Nights are drawing in. The year is growing older.
Remember 2013? Two-thirds of it are now done...
I wonder where I'll be come Christmas, and the thought vacillitates between both hope and despair.
I have no idea.