Everybody understands what I mean. Look at an object, look outside, look into a thicket of bushes or trees, look at the slight area under your couch, or at the slim crack underneath a door leading to a vacant room. In other words, look at those places where the light fails to totally reach, the places in between. Have they been getting darker?
I live in a town of a few thousand on the northwest coast of Scotland, so the days being a bit dark, especially from October to around February is ordinary. It isn’t what most people perceive, Scotland isn’t all drab, foggy, wet, and gloomy like you see in the movies, but we have our fair share of that type of weather. The late spring and summer months are bright and beautiful with the sun setting late into the night at 23:00 or so, never quite getting absolutely dark out.
So not long ago I was out and about on one of those long sunny days in early May. In recent years I have not been much of an outdoors person, I was when I was younger, but in my 20s I’ve become a bit more overwhelmed with life going on around me. I think most people can relate to what I am talking about here, there’s a lot going on and life gets a bit heavier, you find it hard to go outside and spend time doing more adventurous things. But that day was a day that even I could appreciate. I decided that staying inside and going about my usual routine was a waste. I instead resolved to enjoy the beautiful day and get some likely much needed vitamin D.
The finer details of the day are hardly important. It was nothing too crazy, went for a walk, read a bit of Joseph Conrad at the beach, saluted a few magpies, stopped at the library, and went to the shops. Like I said, it’s a small town, so there was no need for taking a bus or anything like that, just some nice easy strolling.
I noticed something, well different, while I was at the local Tesco, which I had been to I don’t even know how many times. There’s an area towards the back of the shop which I know is a loading area, or inventory room, or something like that. The room is closed by two of those big swinging metal industrial doors where the upper third or so of the door is a window which lets you get a peak of the room. Usually, at least I think usually, because I really don’t ever pay attention to these things, you can see into that room fairly well because the light from the shop pours in through the two moderately sized windows. This time it was pitch black. I do not mean it was dim in that room or a bit dark, it was abyssal, as if that room had never been exposed to light of any kind. I didn’t think much of it at the time, sure it was a bit weird, but I was too busy being a bit pissed that they had run out of the oven bake naan to dwell on that for maybe as long as I should have.
I began to take notice as I walked home that something wasn’t totally right. As I walked through the park near my house, I looked into the tree line to get a glimpse of some of the birds that were singing their songs, but I saw none. Not because there weren’t any there, but because there was nothing there. In the spaces between the trees, there was nothing. The world around me, the world that the light touched, it looked as it always had nothing was unusual. Nothing except those places in between. It looked like some bad cell shaded filter, where all the negative spaces between objects were filled in with nothingness. I continued to peer into that tree line for some time trying to rationalize what I was seeing. I get migraines, bad migraines, it’s been that way since I was a young teenager. Sometimes one of the visual phenomena of migraines is a blurry distortion of vision that makes things look somewhat dimmed. So that is the conclusion I came to, it was a migraine, I told myself, of course it’s a migraine.
I continued down the pathway through the park, approaching the street where I live. As I was turning the corner, I noticed a small collection of bushes that I had walked by hundreds of times, and I peered into them. Nothing. I couldn’t see the branches beyond the spaces between their leaves, nor could I see the ground below. It was as if I was staring into a blackhole, it hurt even. It was not quite like looking into the sun, it was not a searing instant pain. The pain almost built the longer that I stared, it almost felt like pressure, or the type of pain you experience if you have ever gone down real deep in a swimming pool and stayed down there for a bit too long. After a minute or so I had to look away. I took out my phone and shined its torch into the bush, and everything looked normal. The abyss had receded, it was just a normal bush, with normal branches, planted in normal dirt.
Since then, I have noticed this almost everywhere, but it isn’t consistent. There are some days or moments in time when these spaces look normal, others where the abyss creeps in, that is what I have taken to calling the phenomenon, the abyss. I am not sure why it is happening, or if I am just losing my mind, but there’s more. In the last 2 months I have noticed something in that space between, something that might be looking back as I have become accustomed to it.
Have any of you noticed the abyss?