Last week I met my friend in town late afternoon, just before sunset, and we took the tram back to my house together. Oh god, I said, looking out the window. I can’t cope with this light. It was weird light, ashy and grey, with an electric hint of violet. She asked me what I meant, and I explained certain types of light fill me with an extreme sense of despair; make me want to tunnel underground. At sunset in winter, I often picture myself lying beneath my bed, hiding there, waiting for the light to fade entirely. I can cope with the dark, with the night, once it has arrived, and I know what I am dealing with. I don’t enjoy the long nights, coming home from work in the dark, but it’s better than coming home while the sun goes down, when I feel absolutely fucking insane.
My friend found this very amusing, and said I was mad. She asked me for other examples of weird light that I have found distressing. I answered quickly: an afternoon in my old flat, when there had been a big storm, and the light went this strange shade of green, a sickly yellow-green, sort of chartreuse. I can picture it now, and it is making me feel very uneasy. I pulled shut the blinds, wanted to block out outside, not think about it at all. As it happened a friend turned up on my doorstep that afternoon, after something upsetting had happened to her at work. I made her a cup of tea and tried very hard to listen to her tell me about what had happened, all the while thinking about the horrible green light outside, trying to not look too distracted by it. I was supposed to be going to some band thing, after, a festival in town, and I thought about cancelling, so I wouldn’t have to step outside, be bathed in this vile yellow-green light, light filtered through the flesh of a lime. I did go out, eventually, but only after the sun had gone down. The green light made it into my last book, so troubled I was by this light, just the worst light ever. If the light were to stay like this forever, I thought at the time. I would just have to kill myself.
On the tram my friend pointed at spots where the light had started to split, and I was comforted by this. I like it when the light begins to split, it feels like a relief, the way autumn feels elementally menstrual: tension, tension, tension, then release. She said there must be something in that: the build up, the looming threat. It made me think about the only time I’ve ever fainted, which I did during a writing workshop I was running, for school kids at an art gallery. A girl was telling me a quite distressing story about her life and I felt myself getting very hot and lightheaded. I thought with absolute clarity: I am going to faint. But I didn’t want the girl to think she was alienating me with the intensity of her candour, so I remained sitting on my heels, listening. It felt as if someone were turning down a dimmer switch in my brain, and then I woke up moments later on the floor, a bunch of fifteen year olds staring over me, looking completely horrified.
I fixated on this moment for a long time after, replaying the sensation of the light fading to black. I booked a GP appointment a little after. My GP looked bemused as I tried to explain: it was like someone was turning down a dimmer switch in my brain! It felt like the world was narrowing in on me and I was about to die! You fainted, she said. But yes, it can be a bit scary. I suppose I feel some of this fear as the sun sets, a sense of the world narrowing in on me, forthcoming oblivion. I’ve never done well with the elements, used to crawl into bed with my sister during a storm. She told me she used to hear a crack of thunder and wait, before I inevitably knocked on her bedroom door, and she’d hold back the bedcovers to let me in.
It had more or less gotten dark by the time we got to our tram stop, and we picked up my son from nursery on the way home. My son is scared of the dark, as most children are, and constantly reprimands me for not having every available light switched on. But he loves walking home in the dark, finds it very magical, excitingly spooky. I am not sure how he feels about sunset, however, but I suspect he doesn’t like it. Like his mother, he struggles with transitions, with liminality.