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Sex. Even the word is exciting. Gauche and to the point, it doesn’t just finish with a sizzle but starts with one too, cyclical sibilance for the eternal hiss of temptation. Sex sex sex.
What a tiny rip in the continuum, two people noticing each other! The subtle ratchets of flirtation like bubbles in champagne. The way a quarter-second of eye contact can hold a grain of eternity.
The way voices can change over an evening, reverse their polarity, as lovers coil towards each other, fingering the red button of mutual self-destruction.
Something terrifying to this force that sucked them down, placed its hand on the steering wheel and yanked hard right.
This unquestioned racism was so mainstream as to be part of the water system. White people making jokes about curry, laughing at made-up Indian names and how long they are, their compulsion to try the accent, and inability to do so without taking a left turn into Llanelli. I’ve always felt an affinity with the Welsh dating back to this time. They’re part of the honorary clientele at my dream pub, which otherwise exclusively caters to blacks and dogs and Irish. Hard to imagine a better night out.
Claustrophobia is not felt more extremely than this, the inability to bear being in oneself, entombed in your own flesh.
Trying to formulate what we love, we find ourselves talking nonsense. It is a slippery, dancing thing. Lily was as graceful as a classical sculpture, but had an equal capacity for demented outbursts, and these are what sung straight into my heart.
It was fascinating, though, the private ocean of desire that lived in other people. No one really knows anyone, I remember thinking. It was thrilling to break the surface of the water, dive into all these worlds.
Flirting and bullying have this in common: at their most sophisticated they operate without trace or accountability.
I never paused for thought when I was rounding those bases, trying to break free of the past. Making others responsible for my self-esteem was to enlist them in an unwinnable war.
Men express feelings in their actions instead, we’re told. Pay attention to the way he tightens the wing nut on the cistern, because he is telling you he cares. Do you see him flicking fennel seed out of the dishwasher filter? His heart is full.
Unless we train ourselves to look through the anger of others, we don’t see it as pain.
Most of what I remember was the tiny study next to the living room that he would hunker down in, how that room was all desk, a citadel of papers and him at the heart of it all, worrying.
had wondered about death so long and here it was, and I was pierced by the loneliness of it, that he couldn’t share what was happening.
People will think it’s strange, I thought, and wondered why I cared about that, as my mind reeled and puckered and gasped. I began wailing and trying to swallow the wail at the same time, an accordion in the key of grief. Or does grief begin later? What are the parameters? I was suffused with thoughts, involuting and vomiting other thoughts, chief of which was the sense that we would be washed away within the hour, carried down that river after him.
Luxury steeped my bones, and I didn’t feel the sliver of coldness deeper within. Something immune to gold, biding its time.
I would sit in the bath in the dark, trying to drown the black mass in my head. People talk about losing your mind when you let go like this, but the world is the only thing you lose. Your mind is all that remains, leagues of it. I couldn’t have normal thoughts.
Grief is a bone-rattling loneliness. I was ashamed of my rawness, how uncomfortable it made others. A thing of spines, in a room of balloons. I had a sudden, unsettling need to go to Tesco, and punch all the loaves.
It is unfair that so much of grief is gone through alone, a mirror process of the dying itself.
Death is devastating and lowering; it burns our bridges. And it cannot be undone. Guilt would prove much harder to let go, the root of regret being proximity to the path not taken.
I was maybe ten, ready to play the lead in a school play for the first time. A hydrochloric anxiety had dripped through my brain for weeks, through the entire rehearsal process, until in desperation I shared them with my daddy on that walk: what would people say when they saw the play, and saw me? Peter Pan is meant to be white. The things parents have to hear. The leaves were a blur on the ground as he spoke, but the air was clear. Neverland isn’t a place on Earth, so Peter Pan can look like anything, he told me. You can be anyone you want.
The further we get from each other in time, the more I see you. Anxiety, bunker mentality, I have those. The determination to make a place, too. I found it hard without you, and I know you wouldn’t have wanted to leave us alone, but it’s okay. If I was the last thing you saw, it’s as if you placed some part of yourself in me, a final gift. Like Columbo always says, One more thing.
One thinks these connections arrive in a look, a melding of gazes, but it was more like the magnetic poles inside us turned to face each other, and our bodies knew before we did.
I’d loved being alone since childhood. Bliss, to close one’s eyes against the sun, with no need to translate the swim of feeling into words.
The perfect tessellation of two oddities. A treat, meant just for me.
The lack of confidence elsewhere in my life melted away, as I swapped out my central nervous system for his, and looked out through his eyes.
It broke my heart a different way every month. How would it feel to let a vocation fall away? It was impossible to imagine, but we often have to do things we can’t imagine. Imagination is not necessarily a criterion of growth.
It made sense to me finally, how you could let an old life flutter down, and be carried away by the water.
Mates happy to overlook the hole in the centre of your chest, the one you could see clean through. But maybe our friendship was capable of more.
The best thing I could do for my depression, much of which sprung from existential anxiety, was commit to my decisions, I was realising. Give up the what-if game. It’s okay to change one’s mind, leave relationships and careers behind, to let things go that once meant everything. The only course to avoid is passive regret, feeling life has been done to you, or that you made the wrong choice, and must always bear the cost. There is no right path, only how you walk it.
I’d been using guilt as a way to keep him alive, and he wouldn’t have wanted that and it was making me very sad. I wanted to separate my grief from my regret, and honour him in better ways.
Living alone, my heart had been snagging on items of hers and breaking all over again, like stitches that couldn’t heal.
The day after the event, picking my way through the pregnant, particular silence of a room cleared of a crowd,
I look back at my scribbled notes, and realise the questions are too miserable to be printed. I ask instead if he has any life advice. Cube considers, and brightens. ‘Don’t be a pussy all your life. Sometimes you gotta be a dick, and you gotta get hard.’ Totally unprintable, but there was a poetry to it. And that was enough for me.
I liked attaching myself to the prestigious name, feeling its mantle settle around my shoulders, becoming the oracle. A kind of acting, but isn’t everything? The feeling of being solid and capable was not one I’d felt in a while.
The university years had proved I was not clever, which many jobs still discriminate against. It’s disgusting.
There’s a pressure to lock in achievements before you turn thirty, to have found a fulfilling job, marriage, a ladder that progressively allows you to earn more than your age. It’s arbitrary, but hard to think outside that framework. Similar to the fresh-bread smell they pump into supermarkets – knowing it isn’t real doesn’t stop you getting hungry.
Once I’d passed thirty, it was a great relief; the way I imagine it feels to clip a pedestrian on a driving exam. Pfft, and the pressure lifts. Nothing to worry about anymore. You failed.
On the one hand, I had no writing experience; looked at another way, who doesn’t?
It was a stab at my fantasy, a chance to wipe out the wasted breakdown years. I let people assume I was a decade younger than I was.
There was something disingenuous to my jealousy, though. Clinging to outsider status was another way to mask fear. I was terrified by old inadequacies.
I was also not a real person, and a recovering basket case.
Writing was work that suited my temperament exactly – the obsessive need to be left alone, yet also connect. It’s good for my head, making use of my thoughts, while the generative act itself – transforming a blankness of space via the word – carries no small amount of divine pretension. I had a surprising patience for the Rubik’s Cube-ness of revision, I found: turning a sentence this way, a paragraph that, until the colours lined up and my hands knew it was done. Order singing from chaos, briefly, miraculously.
It wasn’t as if she was depressed. More like they just didn’t have cheerfulness where she was from, and she didn’t care to acquire a taste for it at this stage.
The inevitability of baroque abuse was a clear danger to my mental health, and from the very beginning, had killed in the shell any pleasure at being published. No sooner had a piece gone up, no matter how harmless, than some éminence grise would rush to the keyboard to throw dogshit over your baby, and you. I knew other writers felt the same way, that we were just clay pigeons. But it still hurt.
Starting again isn’t starting from nothing, because you take the person you are with you.
But I’m at peace now with the fact that I’m not going to get rid of anything. After all this time, I know the darkness isn’t going anywhere; it will still roll around like clockwork. The difference now is that I know the light will too.
Wasted years, damaging behaviour – so much of what can be attributed to this illness is also the stuff of life. I’m not saying it’s all in my head. I’m saying the borders of illness are porous. Grouping the experiences under a name won’t redeem the time, or bring back the people lost.
‘Keep on writing, because these things that haunt you,’ she goes on, ‘they also let you see. You know that, don’t you.’ One day, everything the shadow touches is yours.
I can see the heart in her chest, a little electrical generator trying to reach mine, calling me home. It is a feeling at once particular to one person, and continental, oceanic. Stretching beyond the walls of this place and its implausible enchantments, I see a world being built of love, little bricks of it every day, made of unrecorded words and thoughts and acts.
