I’m sitting in the shower because I don’t want to disturb Molly, who is asleep, with the sound of the light or my keyboard. I’d be inclined to romanticise this scenario but actually I’ve just ended up with a wet arse.
Im sleep deprived, I didn’t sleep very well last night in Marseilles. There was also a Giant sitting beside me on the plane so I had to sit at an awkward angle the whole flight so now my neck hurts. He actually apologised for his legs- I felt bad for him, I hope I didn’t give off the impression that I was put out by his size- I certainly wasn’t thinking that. I wonder does he say it to every stranger he sits beside every time he takes a Ryanair flight. That would be kind of sad for him if that was the case. Sometimes I am grateful for having short legs. He sat scrolling through Instagram reels (offline somehow??) for the whole flight and laughing which was kind of endearing, but a baby a few rows behind us cried on and off and every time it started to cry he shook his head and said ‘oh my god’. I thought about saying well that baby can’t help crying, the same way you can’t help being a Giant. Well i didn’t think about saying it, I just thought it.
We walked a lot today-up a big hill covered in rich people’s mansions- we were trying to find a view of the sea but all their walls and tree borders cut off any possibility of this. Both our faces even got a little bit sunburnt. I think we might have been suffering in some way at one point because we both had two very strange moments within seconds of each other- I was telling Molly how I didn’t like the name ‘Fiachra’ anymore and it was because of ‘some annoying lad in my college’ before I stopped myself and remembered that Molly and I had both met at and gone to the same university and we often reminisced (commiserated) about people and events from that time. It was as if I’d entirely forgotten who i was talking to. Right after that, Molly tilted the water bottle she was carrying and my shoe scraped the ground and Molly thought the water had poured from the bottle even though the lid was tightly on and she stopped in her tracks and said ‘was there a splash?’. The proximity of two uncanny moments made it feel like there had been some kind of rift in the fabric of space and time. Or a glitch in the matrix.
Ive noticed I experience deja vu more when Im tired and i feel a bit unsettled by the thoughts of what strange electrical activity is going on in my brain at those moments. I think of some of the other strange things that happen when Im extremely sleep-deprived (I won’t say tired, because when I’m that sleep-deprived Im beyond a sense of tiredness and just feel more like a broken robot). Sometimes I get this feeling like I’m turning somersaults even though Im just sitting on a chair. Other times the walls shimmer and shake and then other times again when Im feeling very keyed up and anxious I hear invading aircraft and bombs being dropped in the distance. One night when i was a teenager I heard a strange and ominous sound in the sky outside and looked out and saw lights- I ran outside into the street in a complete panic at an imminent alien invasion only to realise it was a Garda helicopter, searching the woods.
I don’t think I was sleep-deprived or anxious then, I had just been reading about UFOs a lot. My dad even used to print out articles in work and bring them home for me.
I think I did see a UFO once. I was walking back from a cello lesson (I don’t play the cello anymore) and stopped at the green near my house to look up at the stars. Suddenly a star flew into my field of vision and did some loopdiloops, then disappeared suddenly, as if it had taken off into the distance. I remember being a bit frightened but also a bit excited. A book I was reading earlier had a paragraph about alien encounters and how they are a contemporary form of spiritual experience- impossible to deny their credibility but at the same time can be read as a means to rationalise inexplicable phenomena. I don’t really know what that UFO was supposed to represent to me at that time in my life but lately I do believe in attributing meaning to uncanny events. Maybe Im missing religion in my life. So, perhaps earlier Molly and I did actually tear a hole in the fabric of space time and now we are wandering an alternate dimension in Provence. We did see a dead toad in the sea which was very unusual. Later we went back and looked for him in the same place but he was gone. I like to imagine he was swallowed whole by a giant fish. I might go outside and look for UFOs.
