Dreams

I dream of falling. They may be idle thoughts now, merely horrific daydreams, but one solid minute of conviction and they could become reality.

It was some time past four am on a cold and blustery late October night as I lay in bed, unable to get comfortable, alternately too hot and too cold. I'd gone to visit my father for the weekend, out at his place on the edge of the Mendips, overlooking the cathedral town of Wells.

I'd fake-grinned and joked my way through a day of chit-chat and being around people that expected you to be a certain way, people that didn't want to know the truth. I hated myself for it, the way it was automatic now.

Asked how I was, I would reflexively grin and crack some bad joke. I used to do it when I was sixteen and trying to woo girls by being self-deprecating and ironic. It actually worked for that purpose back then. Now at twenty-six, as a screen to hide my true self, it just drained me and left me horribly depressed. One lunchtime of it left me hating myself, a whole weekend of it was almost unbearable and left me completely exhausted for the next week. I couldn't tell my father, or he wouldn't listen, to my true feelings. 

I've never slept well away from my own bed. I like it dead quiet and dark when trying to get to sleep, I like my bed and my sheets and my place. Even with those present, half the time my mind doesn't co-operate, as it decides that now is the perfect time to invent new worlds and realities inside its confines.

So I’m lying there, the wind howling and crashing against the house, when the thought pops into my head. You could jump off that cliff right now. You could get dressed against the biting wind, put on your boots, go outside, walk to the patio overlooking the valley, and jump. Nobody would be able to stop you.

Earlier I called these thoughts horrific daydreams, except they're not. Some part of my mind knows they should be that, but the idea is actually rather pleasing. I wouldn't even have to walk the miles along the Avon Gorge from my flat, climb up the steep cliffs and do it from there like I’d planned. I could walk out of the front door now, and end it right now. Not even five minutes and it would be over.

These thoughts aren't so laid out as this of course. Do I leave a suicide note? Simply: “I'm sorry dad.” No, that wouldn't do, would have to be three, one each for my mother, father and brother. Although leaving three seems a little conceited too.

Then come the doubts. What if I fuck it up? The cliff is high, but not perfectly vertical, the slope below covered in scrubby ash trees and dying bracken. What if they arrested my fall enough and I ended up only breaking a leg, or worse, snapping my neck but remaining alive. Paralysis, being trapped inside my mind, would truly be a fate worse than death.

But then what of life? Life hardly seems worth living right now. Still, I am alive, though every waking hour is only lived to distract myself from my own inner thoughts.

And yet, there is a spark of hope. A sputtering, pathetic imitation of a flame, only giving off enough light to bring the shadows into greater contrast. But maybe it's enough. Maybe tomorrow won't suck quite so much. I want to see another sunrise. I want to see what my life could turn out to be if it started going right.

I give up thinking and roll over, drawing the covers around my body as sleep finally claims me.

I dream of falling. Flying, for a few brief moments, feeling weightless, free. Free from myself, and free from this world. I look up at the stars, but I can't reach them. Maybe if I jump high enough, they will come to me.

Perfect Sense

Perfect Sense (2011) is a small-budget film directed by David Mackenzie, and starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green. It tells the story of two lovers caught up in a worldwide epidemic of people gradually losing their senses, one by one.

Susan (Green) works as an epidemiologist, and comes to work one day to find a patient who has lost his sense of smell after having a nervous breakdown. Slowly, it starts happening to everyone across the world. Then over the course of the film, people lose their sense of taste, hearing and finally vision.
Michael (McGregor) works as a chef at a restaurant opposite Susan's flat. They slowly form a relationship, and the film explores that loss of the senses through them. The lovemaking scenes are quite good, they tenderly explore each other's bodies as the realisation dawns that they might lose more and more senses and to savour the experiences they have left.

The film is set in Glasgow, but has snapshots of Africa, Asia etc showing people around the world reacting to the disease, to give it a bit more of a global scale. A narrator interjects at points to describe what's happening. Some people online found the narration overbearing, but I quite liked it as it does give a sense of pathos to these scenes of people losing their minds and thinking that the world is ending.

But really the film focuses on the relationship of Susan and Michael. At first it's hesitant, then passionate yet tinged with sadness at the loss of the various senses. They are driven apart by a violent outburst from Michael before he loses another sense, but they reconcile at the end of the film, just as they both lose their vision and the screen fades to black.

It's a really poignant film, no grand adventure or action, but more a focusing on the smaller things- the little details. And of course in a film about losing the ability to sense those details, that works rather well. The cinematography is assured, with rusting dockyards, muddy estuaries, and a great sense of people's faces and acting. The scenes of how people compensate as they lose their senses, like making spicy or colourful food, or street performance art inviting people to remember smells of fields, are great. The sound editing when people lose their sense of hearing is also very well executed.

It's the kind of film that will make you think about what you take for granted in the world around you. The central performances by the two leads are brilliant, they imbue them with a real sense of character and the distress as this illness hits them is very well done. I hope more people will catch this on DVD, it's a quiet sort of film that won't appeal to some audiences, but taking the time to slow down and watch it for 90 minutes is well worth doing.