Fear has overtaken me as I understood it would and saturated all my recollections in a sense of wrongness. Why was I so stupid year after year, letting all those bad decisions compound, push me further along the narrowing road that has lead me here, to this little shack and my shallow saintliness? I thought I would purify myself somehow, as though by giving away everything I had I would lift burdens from myself, but perhaps that was the burden, the desire to be pure, to be elevated above life, uncompromised. The difficulty of accepting that I must renounce some part of myself that others seem to give away easily, gratefully, in order to enter fully into the world. Burdened by my inability to take on a burden, the exhaustion of all that remaining inert.
Paradoxes. Perhaps I though time and patience would resolve all those for me too, bring me serenity, calm. I have had it in stretches, have it intermittently even now but I am back to being tossed around again, cold dark waves lifting me, the dizzying plunges. What is there to miss in this half ruined, half rebuilt world except for the stubborn sense, no matter how late in the day it gets, that still somehow there is one last chance to grasp at the wholeness that has always seemed somehow just out of reach. The punishment of Tantalus, the hell of Tantalus that is what...
I clamp closed my eyes to avoid the sense I have suddenly of the ghosts thickening around me, all crowding in in mockery. Who was that fool, that has condemned me to this life, other than myself?
Calm yourself. This will get you nowhere. My room seems hotter tonight than it has been and I am tempted to go shuffling out into the town, seek someone out. A women, probably, only a woman can soothe these terrors at the end of life, in the way she soothed them at its start. Should I say that? It seems true, perhaps only true now for men of my age. Perhaps I have been brave, perhaps I have resisted that urge to replace the mother by the wife, by the child, the urge to pass the burden of your own fear along to those who will outlive you.
I almost smile to myself. How easy it to pass from self recrimination to self regard.There is no state but...
Perhaps I will go out. The weather is unpredictable of course but it looks as though the rains will hold off for another week or so. The winds, though. The lights are on in what I still think of as the old Fullfillment centre, they are staying in there to be close to me, discretely monitoring me perhaps and no doubt they will intercept me, bring me back, sit patiently with me. Won't want me wandering about Lear-style in some midnight dust storm.
I can't sleep. I should write. That always soothed me. Perhaps all that anxiety I felt was just the urge to write making itself known. Libido trapped in the body. Geshwind Syndrome. Whatever it is, it hardly matters now.
Perhaps I have grown even more restless thinking of Amar as he was back the first time we met, that first day I went out to the Community centre at Nick Boscombe‘s request. Agitated, yes, my fingers want to tap at something, the flow of nervous energy, dread, the body shaking out words. I constantly tapped my leg as a child I remember my father telling me off about it, making the dinner table vibrate as he leaned in over his mug of tea; and I did stop but perhaps that energy was simply transferred to my hands.
Anyway. Enough of the present.
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