Darker than grey.

I'm sorry. It's been a while. But I thought about this and I have to write this. You know, for all this blog is meant to be the god-honest truth, sometimes it's not. I'm aware that even if I feel down, I feel myself telling myself to end my diary on a major, not minor chord. For myself, for everyone who still reads this, it's important that things don't spiral down, that light still shines. I write to cheer myself up and to understand myself.

Sometimes though things aren't exactly - well, not sunny - no-one expects sunny all the time - but they're darker than grey.

I've been checking in via email with Kings Cross United, and the relief is, I'm not alone. The people who were fine, no really, no really really just fine, are this week not sleeping. Snapping at people. Suddenly, can't breathe in the middle of the night. This week, there was a wobble in the hopeful equilibrium.

And yet the outside world has moved on, and our immediate work of day-to- day dealing with stuff connected with 7th July has moved on too. But, dammit, now the dark gritty grey descends. And the bigger picture is sometimes, suddenly harder to see. I wish I'd seen this coming.

It's not life and death anymore. It's no longer the exhultation of survival. It's not the trembling shock of the blast. It's no longer the practical business of stitches, burst eardrums, what I am going to do about taking the tube to work. It's the slow hard slog of the small things. The taste of things being different. The constant, unwelcome comparison between Before and After. That is held within the self; the private grief for the small lost things.

See, the world , London, other people have now gone back to how they were before. Or they look like they have. And more than anything, that is what we want too, we people from the train.

But this last week it hasn't quite worked. The concentration is still shot, the sleep is still disturbed, it is as if now that the shocked self has finished reverberating, the insidious damage to the sense of humour, the sense of fun is embarrassingly obvious. The damn cracks are starting to show.

Unfortunately, so are too are the fissures in peoples' patience - and in my own ability to move as far on as I want from this bloody, bloody thing.


I've hunkered down, and used what little concentration I have on getting through work. I haven't even done that great a job of that either.
I'm sorry. I want everything to be like it was before, but right now I'm an itchy, jumpy, mopey anti-social shadow of my former self and my resources are low. I feel paper thin sometimes. I feel angry with myself for flaking.

I'm scared of how, if I gave in to this gnarliness, this greyness, my present popularity and support system would likely fail. I'm fed up with myself. I wouldn't take me to the pub right now.

Best to lay low, and trust in what I know from the last time: keep breathing in and out, keep putting one foot in front of the other, feel the ground beneath your feet, count the heartbeat. It's always monochrome before the sunrise. This is the greyness that you don't remember when the colours are beautiful. These are the the darker times, but it's still only darker than grey. The familar shapes are still there. And they will be there in the morning.