Quietly

My father went quietly mad and nobody really noticed. I guess it would have been contained within the five years between 1988 and 1992, roughly coinciding with my teenage years.

The precise form of his delusion was astrology - not just a passing interest in daily horoscopes but a full time, minute-by-minute appraisal of his and our circumstances according to elaborately detailed birth charts that took into account the grid co-ordinates and precise moment of our births.

The stars don’t look down.
Look up as much as you want.
There’s nothing up there.

I would make some trivial utterance about my day (a girl I liked, let’s say) and he would consult his charts and exclaim, ‘Ah yes, your Venus is square Neptune’ and I would take that advice away with me, quietly. These moments were not worrying or even interesting. It was just Dad and his odd hobby, his singular obsession about which none of us could get excited or join him or understand him.

It’s only now, since it’s crossed my mind, that I realise how peculiar his behaviour was and how frightening it must surely have been for my straight-laced mother.

A man rides the train.
At each stop he shouts out loud:
‘Magic brought us here!’

And now I am at the age he was when it first began and do navigate not by the stars but not with a map either. I orient myself with poetry and the coded instructions I find in my pen. I am a cartographer mapping the terra incognita of my dreams, my desires and my fears. I beat paths towards mirages.

This car is haunted,
writing its own directions.
Passengers don’t know.

Nobody, so far, has noticed I’ve gone quietly mad.