Tabula Rasa

I screamed in frustration. I screamed in confusion. I turned and lay on my back. The incessant stream cascaded upon me unabated. The frothy, writhing mass of my mind seethed in this rapid, raging, stampeding succession of thoughts. Jagged and jumbled, the tumble across my consciousness. It's later. I lie awake. I feel tight like a coiled spring. My chest feels tight. I can't take a full breath. My thoughts spill out of my head to pool on my chest, weighing it down. It never stops. I can't uncoil the spring and it just winds tighter and tighter and tighter. I can't sleep. His body flashes across my mind. My body feels clammy under the light bedcovers. I try and lie still and calm my breathing. Focus on the breath. Try and quash the swell of anxiety each time I cannot expand my lungs fully. Drowning. Chest too tight. Too many thoughts bleed out of my head, suffocating me. How did he know? Shallow breath. Focus on the shallow breath. I focus. I try and lie still. Focus on sleep, focus on the calming breath. I lie still. The photograph. I lie still. Breath. Breath. Breathe. Slow frustration begins to infect my limbs. It tells me that I must move, I must turn over. I cannot lay still. I ignore it. It screams at me. I cannot lay still. I get up and walk to the sink in my little room, guided by the moonlight slanting in. The smooth wooden floor feels cold underfoot, almost like stone. I focus on the sensation, ignoring the gnawing anxiety in the pit of my twisted stomach. I fill a glass with water and gulp it down, relinquish any hope of sleep this night. I fill another glass and place it on the tiny desk by the window, lighting a candle to give me some light before I try to coax the glowing embers of the fire back into life. Eventually it's meagre warmth slowly and hesitantly spreads into the room. I sit at the uncomfortable wooden chair at my desk and pick up the captain's diary again, staring at it. The captain was dead. I had seen his bloated corpse with my own eyes. His boat was found drifting, completely unscathed. It made no sense. The diary though. It's entries carried onto the end of the year, months past when the man died. There was no way he could have known about the bushfires in April or the death of his daughter in July. I pulled out the photograph again. Sandwiched between some pages towards the back, there was a photo of two men, smiling at the camera. They were standing at the foredeck of the boat that had been found drifting. It was dated November of this year, and I had immediately recognised the other man, though he had died before I was born. The captain was standing with my father.