I am packing up my life. I found the following, written after coming back from the UK, many years ago:
Easter Sunday.
My backyard neighbour is singing along to a melancholy folk song about “a long and slender lover”, while doing her washing up in her funny blue rubber gloves. It’s great. The best thing I’ve heard for a while. I’m sitting on the back balcony attempting to read, though it’s starting to get quite cold. There’s a good smell as it’s just finished raining, and there’s the sound of constant drips. Ah, the weather affects my mood so much.
It’s been a while since I sang along and cried to Ani, and sculled whiskey from the bottle while dancing and screaming out the lyrics to Sinead. I’d like to write “I wonder why?” but I know. Those times were half a world away.
Is it so bad to be here now? Was all that emotion and energy and madness really such a good thing? It seems it in retrospect, but I’m sure I can’t properly remember the anguish and confusion it brought at the time.
“In retrospect”. I have been saying that a lot lately. I wonder what I’ll say “in retrospect” about now, or if there will be anything worth saying at all…
In retrospect, I loved that screaming, drinking, smoking, chatting and so much sex. It’s funny how sex is so much more thrilling when it is forbidden! Even thinking of it was all consuming.
So much thinking, dreaming, planning and over-analysing. Everyone was my new best friend and every possibility was an impulsive decision just longing to be made. Each elated or depressive (yet amazing) second was brimming with potential. How close did I come to that idea about faking my own death and moving to Spain? In retrospect, it doesn’t seem so bad at all.
What is it exactly that I miss about then? The people, the place, the excitement? Definitely all those things. But that’s not all of it, not exactly. What I miss is being myself. There was no idea of myself up on a pedestal in the minds of those that loved me best there. I defined myself as I went, and I liked that person. Fun crazy, more than slightly manic, intense with a capital “I”, but likable. I miss her.
Though, was that me? Or was that what happens when I take a holiday from myself?
Technology made that idea of me up on that high pedestal so damn close, despite me doing all I could to try to forget it. I was tied to home and I dared not break those ties. I knew that the time would come when I had to face the image and that moment was looming in the ever-encroaching future.
It never all came crashing down as I thought it might. There was not a single volcanic eruption. I was prepared for the worst, perhaps a little over prepared. I shut myself down and locked myself in.
There was a point when I let the whole drama lift like a helium balloon and as it went over my head, I simply let it go. I’d like to think that happened in a moment, but in truth, it all fell apart more times than I can remember. I recall scrubbing the flat before final inspection weeping to “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow”, when I ran out of tears. Everyone had left. No one was going to walk in and ask me to explain what was wrong. And explaining it to myself was like playing Monopoly alone; I couldn’t help but cheat myself, and winning was no victory at all.
I remember wandering around London Bridge trying desperately to think the thoughts that the “me” on the pedestal would think. I was shutting out all recent memories that part of me wanted to cling to. They felt so real, but so dirty, and I convinced myself that my new reality was dangerous to me in the long run. Every sentence of my inner monologue ended with “Oh fuck”. I wrote an unsent letter that night. It was meant to be yet another final indulgence to those thoughts.
I don’t’ remember Heathrow, or the tube ride there. I don’t remember the plane ride. I don’t know what I was thinking, if anything at all.
I guess it was when we saw each other, that the image of me on that pedestal and the “me” I was in the present converged. In his mind at least. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I know that it was then when I stopped wanting to talk about things. I resolved to do my best to prove that nothing had changed about me I tried to prove that the whole me was there, that I wasn’t scattered between different times and different places. Hard, to say the least, when those that knew me best were in France and America, my lust was in Argentina, and my belongings somewhere on the ocean.