Meaning.

Sometimes we search for meaning in things that have no meaning.

Sometimes we see faces in crowds, hear names, feel familiar in places we have no reason to feel familiar in, because our minds are programed to search for such things.

Sometimes there is no reason, sometimes there is no deeper truth. Sometimes the strange things we glimpse through heat haze is nothing, sometimes the sounds in the night are nothing but scratching plants on window sills, sometimes the world is what we were always taught it is.

Sometimes it isn't.

For a few weeks, I have been being followed.

The thing that is following me is a bird. A black bird, an ordinary boring run-of-the-mill black bird.

It has a yellow fleck on its beak.

In Sydney, it tapped on the window of my father's flat. It was very late. It looked me, with one eye.

I ignored it.

When I came back to Canberra, I was walking home from the bus stop. It sat on the road in front of me. Same bird, same yellow fleck. It put it's head on one side, and looked at me.

I walked around it and tried to forget it happened.

The third time it happened, it tapped on my glass back door with it's beak. Same yellow fleck, same bird. I went to bed.

It happened again today. Although, I was feeling quite sick so I might have been mistaken. But I'm sure I saw a bird, with a yellow fleck on it's beak, that looked at me in that same way. It was at school, near the lake.

It is entirely possible that I hallucinated the animal. I do hallucinate. But never this strongly, or for such an extended period.

I have had... Strange dreams lately. Vivid dreams. Nothing definable. In the morning I am left with sensations, and memories of swirling colour.