Who Is Cristina?

In many ways the life of the writer is the story of a battle with paper.

Every weekend, I trawl through a crumpled sea of post-it notes, A4 Pages and books – fighting to keep my head above water.

What have I read? What do I yet have to read?

What have I written? What do I yet have to write?

The writer is a hoarder. A hoarder of ideas and thoughts. Sometimes a hoarder of the remnants of mundane everyday life such as receipts, leaflets and plane boarding passes for reasons which relate to a strange form of the sentimental.

The sea level is and has for many years now been rising.

The sea is a unique entire representational system – an entire world unto and into itself. A way of experiencing reality which over the years became its own living, breathing and vital reality. A cognitive map of the flipside of life – of life’s dark side.

I sometimes wonder what would be made of it all. What if I died tomorrow and my body was discovered lost at sea?

Would these fragments of life be taken as clues in some imaginative forensic act of contemporary psycho-archaeology?

“I think therefore I am.”

These are the things the man thought. Therefore what was he?

Today I am doing press-ups on my bedroom floor and I spot a folded piece of bright lime green paper under my bed and on the horizon.

I have not used bright lime green post-it notes for some years and with a mixture of curiosity and dread I reach out for it – under my bed and clasping so far as my fingers will allow me to.

I scoop the folded square into my hand, roll over onto my back and read its two faces.

One reads the words “vampire limbs” “orbiting” “tailspin”.

This triggers a vague out of shot memory of writing these words – although today I know not in what context and to what ends.

The words speak of somatosensory disconnection, dissociation and disruption.

“Try to restrict yourself to 8 thoughts a day” one of my best friends advises me.

Perhaps he really urges me to leave the sea and come back to live on dry land.

I turn the piece of paper over and read the underside.

The words are cryptic, enigmatic and quite possibly rhetorical.

A question that today I do not know how to answer.

“Who is Cristina?”

I lie on my back for a few moments and allow myself to drift away in the sea at the mercy of the tide.

If the sea does indeed possess a psyche, it is one far colder than the most fundamental, human and impelling emotions of a mere man. And in the end I have at long last understood that is all I really am.

If 2019 really has taught me one thing, it is that a man (even one like me) really does need an anchor.

I somehow managed to lose mine and without her I am just a capsized vessel adrift.

I still want her back.