Daywake
by Rachel Shelmerdine

Strip away the constructs of your life and what would you be left with?  Without your job, your friends, your status, your possessions do you still exist?  Or are you only the sum total of all you’ve amassed around you?

When you look in the mirror do you see the person you really are, or do you merely see the image you’ve carefully crafted?

So many of us waste time building a version of the person we think we should be.  We often create a life that is more acceptable to others than it is to ourselves.  And we populate this life with things, people and activities that we think will make us fit in.  But in doing so we knock ourselves so out of shape, distorting all that we really are and the things that we love and believe in; selling out our true selves for the sake of conformity and the need to be part of the pack.

And then what happens if after all the sacrifice and shape-shifting, we suddenly lose that life?  We kid ourselves that all that we have built around us will always offer us shelter, that the pack will always protect its own no matter what.

But that’s a lie.

There is no shelter strong enough to stand up to life’s disasters if misfortune has marked you for her own.  It doesn’t take too much to huff and puff your little life down and before you know it the wild wood is creeping its way through your walls and windows.  Its dark tendrils reaching out to wrap around the sham life you’ve devoted so much time to building, trying to pull what’s left of it apart.  And believe me, when this happens you better be ready to run because you are no longer part of the pack. 

You are now their enemy.  You are now their prey.

I’d been rolling the dice trying to outgame the game for many years.  Running from a chaotic childhood that often spiralled into darkness, reinventing myself on the fly, warding off the Fates.

But for the last few years my luck had been fading fast.  The sudden death of my mother had caught me so off guard that I’d begun falling from the moment she told me she was ill.  And I just kept falling in a perpetual motion, never landing, never able to reach solid ground no matter how hard I tried.  And now I was bone-weary and weak with a longing for home but no idea how to get back there.

Since she’d died, I’d made one disastrous move after another, subconsciously unravelling my carefully curated life and putting myself in increasingly more dangerous situations.  I was totally lost to myself and my inner world had collapsed in on itself like a dying star.

I was recreating my childhood but from the perspective of my mother.  It was the only way I knew how to search for her, understand her before she dissolved from my memory.  I was also doing hard penance, an endless Stations of the Cross, trying to absolve myself of the guilt of letting her down when she most needed me.  But it was me that was nailed down and the weight of my self-disgust was overwhelming.

My lonely quest had failed.  There was no closure.  No moving forward.  No new dawn after the endless night.  Instead, I’d reached a point where just being alive had become an acute physical pain that was unravelling my foothold in the world.  It was terrifying and disorienting, but my gift in return for this unbearable burden was a strange, almost surreal intense connection with the earth around me.

Colours were more vibrant, the trees, the rolling hills, almost every blade of grass leaped out at me, multi-dimensional, panoramic, pushing towards me, wrapping around me so that in the midst of my despair, I revelled in this beauty.  I breathed in this life even as I was trying to disentangle myself from it.

It was an ethereal October morning when I woke, battle-worn and parched from so little sleep.  I rose quickly and pulled back the curtains of my little flat to look out across the playing fields and over at the hills and trees of Marlow through the morning mist.

I stood by the window, my head touching against the glass in a gesture of love and benefaction to the life which had been gifted to me, which I now longed to return.  How many times can a human heart hurt before it breaks? And how many times can it break before it can no longer heal? 

Today I knew the answer.  I was too tired to do this, to feel like this. I looked ahead to the future and could only see it unfurling as a series of endless days to be got through. I couldn’t live like that.  The last silken strand was finally unravelled.

After months of drifting, I suddenly had purpose.  I slotted together the pieces of my plan, stomach spiralling, skin pale and icy despite the sun magnified through the glass, burning bridges in my mind as I washed and dressed.  I was in my car in less than 30 minutes.  I stopped at the corner shop to pick up the items I needed, and in just another 30 minutes, I was parking along a narrow lane leading to the water meadows.

I sat for a moment, stomach still twisting and jolting.  As I’d driven, I’d said one last prayer for something to save me.  But my prayer, like all the other ones before, remained unanswered.  And so I got out of the car, knowing that I’d managed to sever all ties with anyone who cared what I did, and that I’d finally achieved the one thing I thought I always wanted – complete freedom.  I slammed the boot shut and started to walk away from the car and everything that I’d once been or had, without a backward glance.

My walk towards the river was quiet and unbelievably peaceful.  Each step was an undoing but I felt nothing of my earlier fear, I was too occupied with catching hold of every colour, scent and sensation.  Earlier there’d been smoky wisps of mist, but the ascending sun was softly disintegrating them, revealing the crisp beauty underneath.

The sky was a deep, heart-aching blue, so rich and rounded that I felt I could push my hands right into the core of it. I lifted my face and let it flood into me.  And in that moment, I became infinitely small, like another Alice falling down the rabbit hole, a lonely little figure beneath that great arching blue dome.  I shuddered, feeling momentarily trapped as if its tight lip clamped down on the earth below, denying me an escape.

I resumed my walking, mesmerised by the blaze of trees, stark against that bright renaissance canvas, creaking and shifting, hunkering down for the winter.  And all along their ranks there were the soft ripples of falling leaves, creating a brief, bright glory and the scent of things coming to an end.

I’d always loved Autumn and it connected me to a slideshow of happiness - kicking through leaves with friends on the way home from school.  My mother’s nurturing cooking.  The homecoming scent of woodsmoke caught on the cold air. 

Now I walked heavy-headed and leaden-legged through the damp grass for what seemed like a million lifetimes.  I wanted to feel some kind of meaning, that this was not a pathetic act, that it was something of purpose and destiny.  But there was just the river and the trees, the grass and the sky.  And my endless footfalls through the dew.

It was cold and there was an ache in my gut as self-pity reared up inside of me in an unstoppable wave, making me drop to my knees just a few inches from the river’s edge.  I felt an animal need to claw at the ground, to cleave apart the earth just enough to crawl inside, to not be human anymore, but to just be part of here, part of this quiet never-ending place.

The feeling passed.  And I stiffly moved from being on my knees to sitting down.  The wet grass through my jeans made me even colder and my teeth chattered as I looked once more across the river and I was rewarded with my moment of meaning.

I was between two trees, and through the clearing the river appeared as smoothly still as a looking glass with the sky reflected in its mirror-like surface.  It was an ethereal, heavenly image.  Was it a sign that I was finally in alignment with life, no longer perpetually out sync.  The tragic knife-twist is that we never know if we’re meant to be following a cosmic plan or allowing our free will to run riot.  And so we’re always caught between the two, the victim of fate and our own desires.  Always unkowing.  Always making haphazard choices. 

I sat transfixed, watching the swirling kaleidoscope of reflected clouds drawn across this upward looking sky, now made somehow more attainable, painted like that across the river’s surface.  If I submerged myself into this watery mirage, it would be a worthy sacrifice to sky and water, to something greater than myself.

This thought made me feel stronger.  I could do this I told myself.  I was ready.

 July 2025
Dorset, UK