#143a

Friday Oct 1st - Morning/afternoon

Something terrible is happening around me; I can feel it. It's like there is another force which has taken control of my bland life and is twisting and perverting it out of shape. Nothing quite makes sense any more and yet somehow it makes more sense than it ever has. It's as if everything is being set up, put in place and tweaked for a very specific purpose. I feel like somebody else's plaything.

The storm I first saw gathering and swirling around on June's horizon has now arrived proper. It pulled up overhead this morning and just sits there weighing down heavy on the last plane of light. Under its presence the world feels compressed and hallucinatory. Any moment soon it will open up and break, but for the minute it just sits there, waiting.

Looking out through the smashed front room window, I watched as the neighbours prepared for the deluge. No.17 brought her small plants in; No.23 weighed his dustbin down with bricks; and Mr Bartholemew called out to Marlow, who arrived from some place looking as if he was going to the gallows. Each one would look up at the sky and kind of shiver at what was in store. The smell of ozone, that salty, acidic smell that nature secretes as a warning was everywhere. When this one breaks there will be hell for us all.

As I prepared for the downpour myself – pinning black binliners against the window to cover the break – I saw John roll down the little pathway and turn his head skywards. Under the presence of the storm, in the strange light and combustible atmosphere it gave off, he seemed to look his part. I thought of the telephone call I'd made earlier, how I was told that unless John kills someone or attacks a McDonalds that there is nothing that can be done... that we cannot just remove people from society and have them admitted to psychiatric hospitals at whim. The man, gay I think, asked me: “What kind of a world would that be?” And I know he's right, that the world cannot work like that, but John is ill... really, badly, terribly, dangerously ill.

As I watched John some more it made me feel sad. Whatever it is he has lost also carried something of me - my hopes and dreams and a large chunk of the future. As he looked at the black swirling mass above, he smiled, and in that moment I knew that he saw a different beauty from the one I saw, that our eyes were not made to see the same things, that the worst thing we could possibly offer each other was each other, that it'd be cruel to carry on together as we were. I pressed the last drawing pin through the bag and into the wooden window frame. It was a green one. The world was ready to go.