The Day After Rain

There’s something special about the day after rain. The world seems clearer, clean, after the downpour has washed away the bits and pieces of scum that modernity leaves hanging in the air. The sky is brighter and the leaves are greener and the birds sing sweetly. Although it is possible that this is just how daylight feels after a month of nocturnalism. I’ve been cloistered for the last couple of months, Honours has taken its toll. Daylight provides too many opportunities, distractions, picnics, long walks, the things that remind us of life, companionship, humanity. I haven’t been indulging in ‘real life’ recently, for fear that I’ll like it too much and opt to actually spend time with people instead of writing the dissertation that is due in twenty-eight days, which, to my mind, would invalidate the last year of my life.

Living nocturnally makes it easier to avoid the distractions of life. I write when everyone else sleeps, and then I sleep when everyone else lives. The inevitable consequence is that the world starts getting smaller, and eventually the entire world is small enough so that an Honours dissertation, and all of its related anxieties, can fill it entirely. My world has gotten very small indeed.

So when I stepped outside this morning, to sit in the backyard and drink coffee, I was struck by the brightness of daylight reality. I listened to the birds chortling to each other and thought ‘I wonder when I last heard birds singing.’ Only to realise that I’ve probably heard them often enough, but my world has become so small that I couldn’t fit them into it, so I forgot the sound immediately as I heard it.

I wanted to write about the birds and how the world feels the day after rain, but it occurred to me that if I am going to write something I should write the next portion of my dissertation, after all I’d probably feel guilty if I didn’t. And then another realisation hit me, one even more disheartening than the smallness of my world, I haven’t written a single piece of creative work in months. My imagination has been entirely repressed by research papers, articles on malpractice and a bunch of decidedly nasty psychiatrists. Which actually sounds like quite a decent crime novel, it isn’t.

I let my world get so small, that I can’t even imagine the normal largeness of ‘real life’ let alone the infinity of imaginary worlds, beasts, creatures, emotions and the limitlessness of what my imagination was before. I keep comforting myself with the knowledge that June will come, and all this Honours nonsense will end, then I will be back to my old self. That is what I hope. But, I’m not  completely convinced.