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On holiday one year, I read Money, thirty pages of it until I remembered that I do not understand Martin Amis. The main character in the book is a dedicated smoker. He says, “I started smoking another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I am always smoking another cigarette.” Unless I inform you otherwise, at intervals throughout my twenties and most of my thirties, I was depressed, mildly, moderately, severely, for a week, two weeks, half a year, all of one.
“Because when suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop.
As the noise got louder and louder, it felt—it always felt—like pressure building in my skull, like air is being pumped and pumped and pumped in until it’s hard like a tire, but still more air pushes in and in and it begins to hurt so much, knife hot and migrainous, that you cry and imagine a fissure in the hard bone becoming a crack and the air finally rushing out and then relief from the pain. You are terrified. You are going to vomit. Your lungs are closing. The room is moving. Something bad is about to happen. It’s already in the room. It is making your back cold. You wait and wait and
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We were suddenly outside, running across the road, hand in hand, towards a bar. We drank champagne, then tequila. I told Patrick we were like two people who had decided to turn themselves in but, in the moment of surrender, they had realized that as exhausting as it was to keep running and surviving and not give up, the alternative is worse. I said, “Because the alternative is other people.”
“Martha,” he said afterwards, lying next to me. “Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.” That is what life was, and how it continued for three years after that. The ratios changing on their own, broken, completely fine, a holiday, a leaking pipe, new sheets, happy birthday, a technician between nine and three, a bird flew into the window, I want to die, please, I can’t breathe, I think it’s a lunch thing, I love
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I said, “It’s like going into the cinema when it’s light and when you come out you’re shocked because you didn’t expect it to be dark, but it is. “It’s like being on a bus and strangers on either side of you suddenly start screaming at each other, fighting over your head and you can’t get out. “You are standing still and then you’re falling down a flight of stairs, but you don’t know who pushed you. There is no one behind you. “It’s like when you go down into the Tube and the sky is blue, and when you come out, it’s pouring with rain.”
This one
Robert said, “I’m very sorry for you. It sounds like it has been hard for a long time.” I nodded, biting my nail again. “I wonder, has anyone ever mentioned —— to you, Martha?”
I'm so curious why the condition has been left blank
I have been loved every day of my adult life. I have been unbearable but I have never been unloved. I have felt alone but I have never been alone and I’ve been forgiven for the unforgiveable things I have done.
