The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 30 of 125
Nothing lived up to the promise of childhood
What happened next had me staring incredulously! First one then another of the mallards or moorhens seemed to wake up and start, jerkily at first, to move about, until they were all doing something. Around they went, pecking and waddling, the swimming moorhens making that prodding backward-and-forward movement with their heads. More bizarrely, some ducks in the background were ascending and descending almost vertically, like bees. The photo was like a laptop screen playing a flickering sepia documentary from the depths of my unconscious. God, I thought, I’m seeing this the way a young child would see it. I am seeing what I once saw when I was very little. Something broke—and the tears started to pour. All of it had been taken away! My Gran and her magical world had been taken away! The grief throbbed like a wound that had just been inflicted . . . and suddenly I grasped the whole story of my life. Nothing had ever lived up to the promise of childhood. It was as simple as that. That was where the sense of failure came from; from that, and from the fact that somehow, though I still didn’t know exactly what I’d done, I had been responsible for it. Somehow I had betrayed myself. I’d swapped everything I had—and it was everything; I’d had the whole world in my hands—for an adulthood that was worth nothing. Nothing at all. The awful simplicity of it took my breath away.