Bad Weather

Image credit: Ashling Larkin

The most alarming thing about the storm was its suddenness. I didn’t know how long I’d been walking, but it was a regular route, and becoming mundane in its familiarity. I suppose that’s why I didn’t notice the clouds moving in. Others could see the reflection across my face, but I couldn’t: I had stopped looking.

The cloud — thick, cloying, choking, filling my ears and lungs and shoes with dense ash. The silence absolute, but my panic deafening. No hope of seeing another person, and I stopped even wondering if they could see me.

In time, terror and pain turned to apathy and numbness. Cries for help were half-hearted and went unheard. I developed a strange affection for the cloud which now totally enveloped me. A cocoon. A womb. But no new life from here; a solitary and imperceptible erosion. Ashes to ashes.

With dreamlike timing the cloud would clear — a glimpse of hope — soon closing in again. I continued to walk despite the dark; maybe uphill, maybe down, maybe not even forwards any more.

Out of the haze, my daze, daylight emerges. I remember so clearly the old road coming back into focus — is it warmer than before? Such euphoria at the reappearance of the ordinary. Such relief to shed the thick cloak of cloud.

I don’t know whether the storm passed or I found my way out. My vision has certainly changed; I can see other wanderers, lost among the clouds. And even though I have no power over this weather, perhaps I’ll start to lay down a path, so they’ll know that someone has been there before them.

Jules is now a GP, in her 30s. In her late teens/early twenties she experienced a severe depressive episode and had no idea what was happening to her, or even that there was a name for how she felt. Writing this has been cathartic for her, but she also hopes that others will identify with it, and take strength from knowing this: although there will always be bad weather, there is a way through it, and someone has walked that way before you. Strive to help each other.

Ashling is a Scotland-based comic artist, illustrator & animator. She graduated in 2016 from DJCAD with a 2:1 Bdes(Hons) in animation and has since been doing freelance work at the Dundee Comics Creative Space at Inkpot studio, while also working on her current ongoing project, a fantasy-adventure webcomic called “The Enchanted Book”.