6 :

Then one day, without warning, my life became a song by The Clash. I wasn’t Joe Strummer. I wasn’t even Mick Jones. I was Lost In The Supermarket.

The most terrifying place of all to be lost. I, alone like a child, surrounded by strangers, marooned in a sea of people who looked as if they knew what they were doing, where they were, who they were with. I was a big boy now, everything looked too small, and nobody would help a grown man. It wasn’t as if I could walk up to one of the checkout girls and hold her hand, tell her I was lost, that I had lost her, that I needed her back. Nobody would listen to a thirty three year old man.

I was lost in the aisle. I knew what this place was, but not where I was, let alone how I get out of there. The one thing I wanted was the one thing they wouldn’t sell.

I want you back. Another song.

Admittedly, I didn’t actually want her. I wanted what we had, what I lost. No. I wanted what was taken away. I wanted love. I wanted the knowledge that somewhere, someone who wasn’t my mother loved me, and that that someone somewhere didn’t just love me for my mind. I wanted to be safe ; I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to be standing alone at 31, in the eye of the storm of people, lost in the supermarket.

I stood there, alone in a crowd. A walking cliché. Go on now, I thought, go, walk out of the door, just turn around now.

I could do this. I could live alone. I could be brave. But this wasn’t being brave, this was survival. No less. No more. Around me, children played, babies ran, mothers choose between brands of corn puffs, and fathers sighed and their minds dwelled on football. Trollies crashed, phone buzzed. Old ladies – The Octogenarian Army – sleepwalked through their retirement, and I, my Lord, may I say nothing?

I know this place. I’d been here before. But I couldn’t find what I needed, let alone what I wanted : I knew I needed to do the daily things I had to do, I needed the mundanity of life, the comfort, the order of boredom.

Bread. Milk. Bacon. Where was the Bacon? Dammit. I used to know this. I’ve been here before. I used to know who she was, I used to know how to make love. I only needed the simple things, but even those seemed a lifetime away. Break. Milk. Bacon. My impossible dream.

And then someone came when I wasn’t looking and changed everything. Everything moved and nothing was ever going to be the same again.

I no longer knew where I was. What I wanted, I could not have. And I didn’t know the way out. Stuck between Haberdashery and Heartbreak, this was my limbo, the loneliest layer of Cupid’s Inferno.

I was lost in the supermarket. Neither going backwards or forwards, I wanted a love of my own. I didn’t know where I was I was, or where I should go. From despair to where. There were no answers, just more and more questions, and I needed to know. I was lost, and I wanted to be found.