Separation

It’s been so long since I’ve written anything. I’ve eradicated all familiar points of reference and, as such, I’ve not given myself a great deal to write against, or towards.

When I moved to this country five years ago, I didn’t imagine that one day I’d remain here to orbit the uninhabitable planet of my old life, where my errant genes - my own heart that multiplied and grew around it an entire person - would need me to circulate for the foreseeable future. I am here for my son. On the margins of that relationship, I am building a life of my own out of new and untested materials, out of people and places and experiences born from my own, small initiative.

When I find that I’m plumping for a more substantial intersection between the old and the new, I remind myself that the union will take some time to resolve, that it will be one of substance over symmetry, of perspective rather than location.

My old life is a fishing rod cast into the sea of my day. As the hours tick over, I am reeled in by my heartstrings, and by dinnertime I am kissing and bathing my tiny boy. I’m putting him to bed and I’m slipping out the door into the dark matter of this new self who does none of these things, in a home that is, for the time being, insulated by objects instead of memories.

I used to worry that I would disappear without the props and settings and characters that helped to define who I was. Who wouldn’t be? But it was easily done, to put the book down and leave the room - frighteningly so. To walk like Gulliver through the landscapes of my history, brushing the clinging, miniature ghosts of identity from my arms and torso and thighs, until all that remained was myself.

All that ever remains is a self, and then one day, that self disperses, like a ghost, or like fog over an infinite, roiling sea, and is gone.

500 days of nonsense

I’m finding this whole ageing* business a bit of a nightmare. The older people get, the further into themselves they seem to tunnel. I used to think that tunnelling into others was a viable solution to an identity crisis, but these days I’m just trying to dig my way out and into the light. I’m not sure if anyone or anything lives up there, or whether I’m actually tumbling disoriented inside a dark sea, swimming my way down, the air and answers at my feet steadily gaining distance.

This weekend I watched a film called It’s Kind of a Funny Story – it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets 500 Days of Summer, if you can imagine such a thing. It was at once heartening and completely irritating to see a film try so earnestly to normalise the experience of being admitted to a psych ward. There were familiar elements to the story (Who is that figure beneath the blanket, are they dead, and do I really have to share a room with him/her?) and elements that make a mockery of mental illness, however unintentional (the David Bowie sing along, and the Hasidic-Jew-with-sensitive-hearing shtick, for instance).

As I said, I did enjoy the film, and I think it’s a fairly good primer for the uninitiated, but if you come away thinking that suicidal feelings, mental illness, depression and personality disorders are the binding agents of universal solidarity in an institutional setting, you’d be wrong about that.

I’m not going to arrive at an actual point, or weave these into an afghan to hide beneath, in case you were holding out for something of that nature. This is simply an unhelpful map of my tunnelling – a kind of You Are Here for anyone who crash-landed on Planet Me today. Apologies, Earthlings - themes and variations, themes and variations.

I’ve been busily inventing new forms of self-alienation (I don’t know, I’m not Freud, am I?) and one thing that occurred to me before the weekend hit, which I think might be true, is that some houses are dead. Am I right? Just as it would be wrong to manipulate the arms and legs of a corpse and call that corpse alive, I also think that people mistakenly believe that moving their shit into an accommodation that died decades ago will somehow turn that place into a home**.

Wanna come over and watch movies? Didn’t think so.




*‘Aging,’ not ‘getting old,’ I hasten to add; it’s an important distinction. Especially if you’re old. Which I am not. (Yet.)

**I don’t believe my house is dead, but I’ve lived in a fair few dead homes, and this is the only explanation. Shut up and let me have my explanation.

Systematic unpicking

Other people frighten me. I approach them and pull faces and they react and I back away slowly. Sometimes I’ll lie right up against the glass and trace their topography for hours, imagining they spent their childhoods hypnotised by the dirt clods that sprung off their bicycle wheels as they bounced over broken tarmac slightly faster than their reaction times dictated, and then I can almost feel the barrier dissolving.

Our lives are predicated on this underlying assumption that we are known, and that we can know others. We think that because we can agree to certain fundamentals that keep the motorway generally unclogged, we must also conduct more or less the same symphony beneath our shirts. But regardless of which parade we succumb to, amidst the props and paints and perfumes, the vagaries of continuity will invariably betray a lie that remains most invisible to even ourselves. I’m talking about our souls here.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a religious person. I don’t think you can peel away the pragmatic layers of a human to reveal the frightened inner specter of their gossamer truth. Life winds its expert fingers around the lip of our trembling essence and we emit a tone that answers in the only way that it can. Others glimpse our identity through a whirling zoetrope that blurs our static moments into a unified narrative, into a seamless 'you', until one day...

Well, one day I discover that you’ve saved every tissue your mother has ever sneezed into inside a desk drawer. And there is nothing in my toolbox of experience that can answer the 'why?' of this one anomaly. I’ve pulled a thread, and the entire fantasy of knowing you unravels and spools around my feet. A realisation swims up from the deep: You are not me. And, furthermore, I am alone. This gives me a terrific sense of vertigo, and then I must wait for the normalising properties of time + space to whitewash the graffiti this notion produced.

If ever you find yourself seeking your reflection in the shallow pool of someone else, instead see if you can appreciate the illusion that you’re not buried alive inside a fiction of your own making. Scatter the crumbs of your history and watch the birds make off with them, one by one.