NOTE TO SELF AT DAWN

Words by Taliesin Gore

Illustration by Estella Mare

There’s no one watching. No one knows or cares

what you do when you’re alone. How hard

it is to wrap your head around this fact.

And how the vanity of an unrequited

infatuation turns your head. You feel

so stupid, but it’s egotistical

to be embarrassed; it’s just another ploy

to win the pity of an imaginary

observer—her. This story in your head,

this part you’re playing in the movie of

your life, of which you are director and

the only person watching, can’t be stopped.

Nature wired you up to be this way.

And maybe if you weren’t so self-obsessed

you’d realise how normal all this is.

You’re not the centre of the universe.

You’re just an animal shivering on the ground,

an animal whose kind are killing the earth,

and the earth doesn’t care one way or the other.

Unnatural mother,

she murders all her children in the end.

And if you lie here, very quiet, you

can hear the silent sound of genocide.

And where do you fit into all of this?

This human self-importance, very grand

and simultaneously very petty,

this desperate, bathetic self-assertion,

this insistence someone notices you’re here,

is all you have to shore yourself up against

the vast indifference of everything.

This wall of sand you build against the tide,

and have to rebuild every time the sea

returns, reclaims it, is like the nests birds build.

The ego needs its habitation just

as surely as the body. It’s the curse

of too much consciousness: the further it

grows the greater is its need to find

significance and purpose in itself,

absurd and childish as this need might be.

You’re only thinking all this now because

you have been disappointed—because in one

fell swoop you’ve scattered all the house of cards

you had been building up so doggedly

against your better judgment.

.

Still, you hear

the murmur of the sea in memory:

maybe a childhood holiday in Wales,

or that excursion with the hiking group

at university. And suddenly,

in spite of everything you think(,) you know,

it feels like someone’s watching after all.

Illustration by Estella Mare