Sunday, January 01, 2006

11 :

I was not taking being separated well, to be honest. Takeaway pizzas I couldn’t afford and alcohol was my staple diet. That’s not the kind of life I wanted to live. I had too much time, spent too long immersed in the Internet, not enough time trying to meet people I hadn’t already met. Though, one admits, I did want to. I was just very scared. And money was tight. Life was starting to slow to a lonely crawl.

There’s an emptiness at the heart of life. A human being needs stimulation, movement, action. A shark that ceases movement will drown because it is not moving. There’s no movement through its gills – it quite literally drowns through inertia.

A human being is like the shark. I am. I need something to prevent my mind from wandering. If my mind wanders –

I start to contemplate the emptiness of leisure time. I start to realise the void at the heart of my life. I start to crave somhething to fill the void.

There’s no answers. No big solution to the puzzle. Nothing but the eternal questions. Why? How long? Who? When? And she would never give me the answers I wanted.

Just simple questions. Does he have a name?

The hands that crawled over skin I loved. Who did they belong to? Would I like him, if I met him? Would I approve. Or would I think that she could do better? What did he have that I didn’t, except her?

That’s why we go out. We escape the cold facts. We escape what’s inside. We break free from the prison. A prison only needs four walls and the mind is the smallest prison of all.

So I broke free. I tried to escape. Inside or out, we create an alternate universe.

I went out. I wanted to meet people. I wanted to forget that life was largely boredom, fear, and poverty. There is a better world out there – I knew there was. Finding it was the problem.

In the panties of drunken fumbles. At the bottom of a glass. At a midnight train station shivering in the cold waiting for the slow train to dawn. The day after, I woke with the cruelty of an early morning.

I had slept the sleep of a drunk. Not the flat, REM vegetative state where the body recovers and is refreshed. But the perpetual state of kicking that intoxication and dehydration have. Like a cuckoo clock, I announced each hour with a startled grunt as I woke during the night. My heart beating like a fucked clock, my dreams broken like an old, stolen car.

I was fucked. I was alive yes, but not living. This was some kind of weird, fucked up, middleground of non-death.

It wasn’t sleep, but some vague imitation of it. I woke up tired. I couldn’t remember my dreams. All I want to do is close my eyes. There’s a small line between Being Drunk and Being A Drunk. It’s only a letter, but a gulf wider than an ocean. Being drunk is so glamorous. So much more than waking up like this.

I knew I was getting old when I no longer felt the highs, only the lows.

I stumbled in my shorts I slept in to the living room. I fumbled for my glasses, found them, and then wondered what the hell had happened here? Newspapers strewn all over the place. A half eaten bowl of cornflakes stagnating on the table. My phone abandoned on the desk alongside a mountain of unpaid bills. Unfiled, just opened, and direct debits set up, so I never have to think about these things. It’s easier to live a lie than a harsh truth.

It was coming back to me. Junk food dinner. A quick drink that turned into a few pints that turned into an all-nighter. An attractive princess way way out of my league, just like the rest. A final last attempt to do more than just stroke her fingers and put arm around her slender waist. Paul’s protestations about the last tube home, falling asleep dribbling on the tube, a hasty, rushed drunken bit of junk food, and deciding since it was after midnight, a new day, a new morning.

Breakfast. That explains the half-eaten cornflakes. I’m sure there was some logic that since we were past midnight, and therefore technically in the morning, that breakfast was a completely acceptable name for whatever it was we were eating. But I came home alone as normal. We are all individuals these days. All of us, with over one in four of us living alone, lonely islands drowning in streams.

I picked up the bowl, drained the milk with a spoon (somewhat messy, I wouldn’t recommend it) and poured the sodden sludge of last nights breakfast into the bin. Lost, without direction, I turned my phone over from where I left it on the sofa.

“1 message received”.

If somebody didn’t want to tell you something they wouldn’t would they? They wanted me to get the message. So I opened it.

“Morning. Hair of the dog for breakfast? x”

I didn’t recognize the number. And I can’t remember giving it out to anyone. A stranger.

We’re all strangers – even if we know each others names. All we know about each other is the surface.

I debated if I should reply. Was it someone I had given my number to? Was it someone who had given them my number? Someone else who made up a number to give to someone somewhere in Huddersfield?

It could be a girl. It could That Girl.

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