Presence
T.S.J. Harling
Alone, I start to feel like I have fallen out of time; that instead of being haunted by a ghost, I have somehow slipped and become one. Am I here? The silence starts to have its own weight.
All my loved ones start to feel like happy, idle dreams from long ago, fantasies of joy. I doubt my own existence, my own mental state. Contemplating if the people in the streets outside are made up, a story written for a child. Instead, there's only the room, and me. Am I real? Is anyone else?
Feeling too keenly the absence of the others – bustling by in shops, houses, pubs – no longer stepping on my feet on the train, no longer talking too loudly or playing music too loudly on the bus. No longer chatting or shouting. Instead, only a few of my dearest, and even less of my co-workers, talking quietly and intensely on a screen. No one to kiss goodbye, or hello.
In the isolation of the pandemic, I feel I am slowly drifting away, like an astronaut cut loose, untethered from the mothership. I am becoming strange. I am becoming the uncanny, instead of reading the uncanny in a gothic novel.
It's easier in the daytime, with birdsong and passers-by and the ringtone of emails. These things anchor me, as if their existence implies my own.
Days, hours. Even my partner who I can still smell, and touch, is starting to feel like a sweet dream. Is he really here? Hard to tell if I haven't simply conjured up a lover for company.
Will it end? Will I come back to life? Keeping on writing things down, telling myself, I'm here, this happened, I'm on paper, there's a record.
I have been apart from the others for too long.
T.S.J. Harling's fiction and nonfiction has been published in numerous online journals including XRAY, Queen Mob's Tea House, Porridge, and Square Wheel Press. Based in south-east London, England,T.S.J. Harling is currently studying for a Critical & Creative Writing PhD, at the Royal Holloway, on the 'New Woman' in Dracula. @tsjharling