The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 117 of 125
Nothing had been lost
I was leaving Judges Walk by a different route from the way I had come, down a tiny cul-de-sac. If you go that way the first thing you pass is a tall old red-brick wall, over the top of which you can glimpse some trees. At its foot were clumps of nettles, limp and dusty with the heat, and as I walked along beside them, I glanced down. As I did so I froze—then felt as though I had been picked up and hurled bodily back through time. This was just the way it had been by the huge wall on those walks with Gran to Little Crosby! The two walls rushed together. Everything staggered; my mind opened on vast empty space. I gazed around, in silence and slow motion. There was no more time. All these years I thought I had betrayed and lost everything—but now I saw that nothing could have been further from the truth. Nothing had changed. Nothing had been lost. Nothing had been lost at all. More than that. Nothing ever could be lost—because nothing ever happened. All my life nothing had ever really happened to me. Nothing ever did. I felt like a drowning man who finds that all along his feet have been a fraction of an inch from the Rock of Ages. Finally, finally I had become what I always had been. Again there was that shock of recognition, as though something at the very root of memory had been jarred. Indeed, as thought began to return, that was the first thing I asked myself.