RIVER REFLECTIONS

Tonight I’m by the river. Mike asked if I could drive him to Guildford to collect his new car. I had to refuse, due to low energy. That’s what poor mental health does for you - robs you of friends and energy sometimes. And this was my only night to myself this week. So here I came.

All the geese were out, waddling across the grass tonight: Egyptian ones, Canadas, the other type. I picked my way through them avoiding eye-contact, and sat on a bench. I’m currently overlooking a poo-splattered path, the gentle Thames and the Other Side with its perfect lawns and fancy boathouses.

A Labrador bounded over like a bowling ball that had been suddenly launched. He ran at the huge gaggle of geese. In a sort of a goosey-stampede, they squawked and pelted into the river, splashing and rippling as they fell off the bank, while the dog sniffed the air in triumph.

There’s more life down here than in the park. Joggers puff past, eyes on the concrete. A drunk guy looks at me, and a hipster eyes up the root beer on the bench next to me. A large man in shorts and an old Hard Rock Café t-shirt bends over with his hands on his knees as if he can run no further, no longer. I know that feeling buddy. Meanwhile Polish girls take photographs of the swans on their phones, and one of them worries that a goose is ‘giving me the eyes’. They giggle off along the towpath.

And of course, the inevitable cloud of midges dances against the setting sun. I forgot that this happens by the river - tiny insects with not long to live, making the most of the end of the day.

A man splashes by in a multicoloured canoe. He mutters a swear word under his breath and wipes his sweaty brow with a sleeve. Life in all its fullness then, where the water flows.

I’m tired. There was just no way I could have driven to Guildford and back. Mike was cool about it - he quickly found someone to take him.

Yet this choice presented itself yet again - rest alone, look after yourself while your demons swirl your brain with negative energy, or pedal flat-out with your friends until you can’t hear those voices above the sound of your engine burning out. I don’t know whether anyone has any idea what I have to fight in the silence.

Anyhow. I’m by the river, where the lights on the bridge wobble in the water like the strokes of an Impressionist painting. The reflection of a thing can sometimes be so different to the thing itself, can’t it? Fragmented, distorted, rippling out of reality, yet still adding depth and beauty. I do a lot of reflecting - things people have said, how I feel about things, what I should do in light of all the complexity of emotions, how I could straighten it all out, given half the chance, but also knowing my weaknesses would get in the way and how I would fall apart.

Actually though, I think the falling apart might be inevitable.

But a reflection of a thing is not the thing. And the lights on the bridge have guided travellers from the poo-path-side to the fancy gardens and back, for over a hundred years! I have a hope and a trust that I can do anything to which I have been called, because the one who calls knows what he’s doing. That’s light, truth, way, right there on the bridge by the sunset.

The geese are back out of the water. One looks at me as some great provider of snacks and makes a croaky burping sound as it tilts its head. It reminds me a bit of the dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park, the one who spits venom in Dennis Nedry’s eyes and then eats him alive while he tries to escape.

I shuffled up and made my way back to the car, picking my way very carefully along the path.