Feeling in HDR

Do you remember that place? A time when every emotion was a Picasso painting? A place where every feeling was in HDR. Vibrant jealousy. Mind-bending joy. Lucious fear oozing through pores. Jarring ecstasy coating the roof of your mouth, the back of your neck and the inside of your navel. Crippling wonder that made you want to stop and hold the cosmos for as fleeting a moment as one lifetime would be.

Yeah, I’ve been there. We all have. Most likely we glimpsed it now and then as children and were told it was all fairytales and horror stories. And then as adolescents, it burst upon us suddenly. That one moment when we suddenly attained puberty. Or fell in love. Or watched someone die. Or didn’t fit a favourite teeshirt anymore. Or saw somebody else’s name written, emblazoned in a place that used to have our own and feel like home.

I was in that place all of the last month. It started with a New Year resolution to be easier on myself, to relax some of my fear fortresses. Maybe it was the years I spent inside and that it was time to come out. Maybe it was the sleep-deprived, alcohol-soaked advice I received on New Year’s. Maybe it was just that person. Maybe it was me.

I’ve been feeling so much, struggling to set one foot before the first, walk in a straight line, act the part of the intelligent person I have enacted for so long that I forgot it was a part. I forgot I’m not meant to walk or even run. I’m meant to fly. I forgot that sky and water merge in my universe and I have always been a good swimmer. I forgot that I’d closed my eyes because the last time I glimpsed beauty, I thought it destroyed me but really, I only closed my eyes. I opened my eyes and look, the world is in HDR again.