No sense

I wish I could understand why it is I feel like crying whenever somebody does something nice for me, unprovoked. Like just now, I was offered a blackberry and I nearly welled up. It’s not as though people don’t do nice things for me on a daily basis. Okay, one person. But I know that if my lovely friends were around, they would tip the contents of their minds on a little plate between us and we’d have them with our coffee for hours on end. I tend to forget there are people in the world who think I’m good company, regardless of how I see things.

Three or four blackberries later and I’m ready to have a stroke (not that kind). Some people flower with more attention and some people shrink. I’m definitely the shrinking kind.

There’s a boy who works across from me – not right across from me, but one section over – who looks like the friend in Ferris Buhler’s Day Off (the wealthy one whose car they ruin) except skinnier and more pinched. He keeps sneaking looks at me and I keep catching him. He seems miserable there in front of his little screen and he never talks to anyone. He’d never talk to me either, but I bet he wonders why I keep to myself and how it is I manage to maintain my sanity when sales and design start to volley tense words at one another over my head. I’m glad that I’m married, because I’m a beacon for tall, skinny, tense boys who want to inflict their misery on just one other person who understands (I don’t).

Last night I dreamt about old friends I haven’t talked to in a long time and woke up feeling like I was not in London and not at home (well, ‘home’) but some in-between place where everything made perfect sense. Then I opened up an email from my mother who sent me a link to the house I grew up in. It’s up for sale on a real estate website. That brought me back to earth.

I wish that I could resolve the difference between their home and the one in my head; between the setting of so many childhood traumas and the first raw materials of imagination – the only ones I had access to for those first ten or so years. Now I have to feel this way about an entire city and I just don’t have the energy. I’ve become very good at encountering strange landscapes and drawing a blank instead of incorporating them into what’s familiar. Sometimes it feels as though the unfamiliar is taking over everything, including everything inside me that was once a given.

Though on the other hand, I’m not giving enough credit to the kinds of improvements I’ve made in the last few months. I can do several things in a row without getting discouraged or feeling like I should be doing something else. I can go days without feeling angry about not feeling angry. I’m always the last to know that I’m doing just fine. I only realise it once I’ve finished dismantling the fine and you stare at me with wounded eyes and I want to take it all back. Because really - I’m fine.

The designer just shouted You can’t handle the truth! Apart from it being funny, I think he’s probably right.