Books: 'This collection is an attempt at giving you a glimpse inside of my skull'

Unexpected things are often the most precious, aren’t they? They come in all quiet and change everything, catching in our throats and making our hearts bound.

We think, for better or worse, that this is life. We’re living it now. Regardless of the sentiment, this unexpected things has jolted us into life.

They can come at any point, in any situation, conversation, circumstance...

A stranger offers me a hard sweet before take-off and I soften – things aren’t as tense as my shoulders feel, not as divided as the internet makes it seem. Conversations, screaming quiet, two lonely men, frothing up only after afternoon pints, alone in this together, in the morning we’ll both pretend to not remember.

Even internally, within ourselves, they happen. Sudden breath-catching realisations...

I miss people the most in the hours just before seeing them again. It could be easier to get to know me, I could convert your affect into sounds that might convince you to stay.

You leave amongst the silence and I stumble – not home – but to where I live. Home is where we belong, I fled from it. I couldn’t make the sounds make sense. The noise was too much to endure.

At least this is how things feel when they happen. But things change over time – both the situation and how we feel about it. Everything changes.

Even now, as I look back at this book, the words crystallise in print, how I feel about these happenings is different now than when I first thought to write about them. Everything changes.

We can only do our best to detail how we felt at the time. We can’t hold onto those feelings forever.

Everything is nebulous, ever moving. A frustrating reality for artists. We try to capture the essence of something in its most distilled form only to find that every characteristic has changed when we look upon it again.

This invites flexibility then, a relinquishing of ownership.

If I’ve written about something, years ago, and a reader asks me if this is how I really feel, the answer is almost always no.

It is how I felt then, at the age I was then, the person I was.

Everything I have ever written would be written differently if I were to write it now. Which removes the attachment, removes the desire to stand over work and say ‘this is me’.

More accurately, I would stand awkwardly next to the piece and say, ‘this was me, I would do this better now’.

Anyway, what does it mean to inhale briefly? I’ve thought about this a lot.

I didn’t want to define it, explain the process, the intricate happenings that cause it.

Instead, I wanted to convey the moments, the moments where our breath is caught off-guard. We tingle with anticipation, panic, joy, fear.

These moments, even the quieter variations, are the ones we rarely forget. Because they’re packed dense with emotion. Emotion is the key to our memory of a thing.

There are chunks of my life I can barely remember because my ability to emote was offline. Depression is an awful thing. As much an affliction of memory as it is of emotion. But that’s rarely talked about.

So, in ways this book is a collection of things I can remember, despite depression. It’s a sort of resistance against it – here are the things I can recall.

And so it’s not surprising that these essays are drenched in emotion, all colourful and twisted and confusing.

I remember these experiences because they connected on an emotional level.

Which is just as well. If they weren’t emotional they’d hardly be worth reading.

Imagine an essay about how I brushed my teeth last Tuesday. Unemotional. Nothing to code it to memory. No-one would read that. So it’s ideal that I don’t have to write about it because I can’t remember it anyway.

One of the great limitations of the human experience is that we can’t know fully, or even to any significant degree, what it feels like to be inside someone else’s head. We have to imagine.

We put ourselves in their shoes metaphorically, but really we can never know.

I suppose this collection is an attempt at giving you a glimpse inside of my skull. To understand the things that cause my own breath to catch, to observe the experiences that have stirred my own curiosity.

A Brief Inhalation, by Daragh Fleming, is published by Broken Sleep Books (London) on March 31. The collection will be launched on April 15 at 6.30pm in Waterstones, Cork with Lucy Holme.

It covers subjects as diverse as the strange and melancholy beauty of inherited clothing, inner city skateboarding, ADHD, childhood snake rearing, the world of social (and anti-social) media, and all too brief interludes with mysterious strangers who leave lasting impressions,

It is a candid exploration of contemporary existence, dissecting themes of identity, dislocation, and introspection with a sharp, unflinching eye.

Blurring the line between essay, memoir, and poetic observation, Fleming navigates encounters with the absurd, the intimate, and the existential with a voice that is wry, incisive, and deeply human.

From fragmented conversations to immersive cityscapes, from the weight of memory to the fluidity of self-perception, this collection captures the restlessness of a mind attuned to the strange rhythms of modern life.