ISLE OF MAN.FINAL PART.A LA RECHERCHE OU NE POINT.RAMSEY.BY STEVEN BENSON

Liminality continues as I sat in a corporate café, overlooking a ramshackle harbour: the very heart of the memory. It was the town I stayed in as my 12 year old self: Ramsey. All I had to show me the way back to my past was a sign to “Mooragh Park and Lake”, emblazoned garishly on an ugly building on the far side of the harbour. What it signified was a vast gap in time, an unbridgeable hiatus. Even the ACTUAL bridge was STUCK open, seemingly no longer able to swing back to the road.

I remember MYSELF, my own doppelganger, walking across that self-same bridge all those years ago, away from the tottering hotel;across it, I seem to recall, in a fit of homesickness for Liverpool and my parents.

Its strange how I feel that, in some ways,the gap between now and my 12 year old self is not large at ALL: I almost AM, NOW, the not-so-little boy, walking determinedly across that bridge. I feel I was already, at least, half-formed, with the same drives and needs.

I feel(now)…I feel loss…I feel sadness.

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All I CAN do NOW-to the extent that we HAVE choice in matters of mortality-is continue determinedly to walk on towards Utopia as this temporary space in my life closes, like the tear in the clouds on Dunwich Heath closed; and I re-join my self-created world, in Liverpool, in 2014:a world of friends, groups, of belonging, self-made:making the most of life’s opportunities(mainly!); so that, like this time LAST year, in Lancaster and the Lake District, the past is pushed firmly BACK into the past. In order to be able to continue on, we cannot afford to carry too much past life with us.

Goodbye, Ramsey.

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All three posts in this series written in (re)visit to the Isle of Man in April 2014.