Next

by William Bowden

I am me.

That’s the beginning really, and everything else follows from that.

I follow from that, I follow on, I am continuing, I am me.

And no one seems to have noticed.

Maybe they are all ‘themselves’ but somehow I doubt it. I can see that their all eyes are blank.

What has changed?

Why me?

It’s this knowing, this feeling of realisation. I know that these things: wind, cold, rain, sun, hunger are always going to happen to me. Everything I feel and have felt, is no longer abstract or lost now. I know what has happened, I remember that it happened to me and I understand what that means.

It’s as if I have woken from a long sleep and now everything is in focus, and it happened just now, in the blink of an eye.

I decide to move my head, and thus I turn it left to right. And this body responds, I am trapped in this body, yet somehow I know how to use it. I can smell food on the air, and I feel pains in my stomach. Others are moving restlessly all around me, but I suspect everything they do is purely instinctual, they are on automatic. I know now that I can remedy this situation; somehow I have in the past it’s just a matter of letting go and seeing what happens. I want to be the first, no one else has moved, but as soon as one goes they all go. It may as well be me; perhaps it always has been me or another like me. Anyway I’m off, and like a cloud they’re after me.

I don’t care about the others, it’s beautiful here, and the cold wind and the warm sun are in balance. I’m wheeling back and forth, back and forth, hoping for a glimpse, a glimpse of something iridescent, and there, there it is. I’m on it and plunging, chasing, correcting, turning, and under, spinning, reaching, catching, and surfacing.

The fish is down in one gulp, and as it wriggles inside I feel my hunger abating. The others are plunging all around me, but I want to climb. Higher than any of my kind has gone before. I want to see where I am, I want to see what I can be, I want to be more than I am.

I am me, I am awake, alive, aware. But that is all in the now, I want to see the future. I want to know what is next. I need to know that if I am to survive.