Panenka

by Ronan Hession

Nobody ever goes to counselling about their difficult grandparents. It is love without the stakes.

She was about the same age as Marie-Thérèse and had that same air of professionalism about her – another young person who had already assumed an unfair share of life’s responsibility. He didn’t know how people did it.

To him love was no union between two otherwise incomplete halves, but more like the gravity that locked two bodies into the same orbit, each doing their own thing but by reference to and in concert with the

other.

Years of life untraced and unshared. He had told nobody about the Iron Mask or about his intention to retreat like a woodland animal and deal with it alone. But illness meant dependency. It was society’s last chance to push the benefits of membership. For every person who feared dying alone, there were others like Panenka who resisted the intimacy of it, the body’s loss of privacy and the final exhibition of the personality.

The tragedy during that time was that he neither let them in nor let them go. But what else is possible for a man unable to solve his own sadness?

Humans are by nature romantic creatures. By that I don’t mean full of love: I mean that they like the idea of things more than the reality of them.

A man should mix with people who are at different stages of life. That’s what keeps you open minded.

Habituated loneliness was bearable, but the heart was not built to endure glimpses of what it could never truly have.

But he remained disconnected, withdrawn, furtive, and committed to a slow self-destruction disguised as survival.

‘Well, look at us. I could have asked for the full tour – you could have shown me around all your own facts and circumstances, given me the tourist board version of yourself. A whole story that I would later have to revise or unlearn based on who you turned out to be. But if I start with what you’re actually like, pick you up where I found you, then at least I’m starting with my information. I can sketch you my own way, and then colour you in over time. And you could do the same with me.’

After all, a few crumbs of love could be made to last a long time if they are all you have.

There were times, she would admit, when for all her heroic independence, her sacred resilience, she would have liked to trust her weight to the love of another person like that. To fall backwards in absolute security. But she had only known doubting love. Love that needed to be weighed against what it cost. She was exhausted. Everything was so hard.

‘For so long I was afraid to stay close to anybody because I had so much anger and confusion inside me. I knew that I couldn’t let anyone into my life until all that had passed. The problem I could never solve was how to relate to people in the meantime. Other people’s love is frightening when you’re suffering. It’s overwhelming. When you’re consumed with the effort of processing internal pain, it becomes impossible to do anything else. It’s like holding your breath under water: you realise that you need to breathe but if you breathe at the wrong time, you drown.

I would dearly love to have you in my life, if only you hadn’t come so late.