I seem so nice, don't I. Don't believe it.
A lady does not take kindly to being ignored.
Wednesday 9 June 2010
Tuesday 8 June 2010
A killer crush
But why then, why there, why him?
That's not hard to explain. I was coming out of a period of exhaustion. I had worked relentlessly in a lonely, secretive job for a year exactly before pulling out. He was one of the first people I met after that. That was how it started.
It persisted because he was unknowable, a big Pandora's bag of complexes and issues that he fought to suppress and hide. Occasionally they burst out of him in an incandescent rage that he unnervingly denied or perhaps genuinely forgot about within a matter of hours. People talked scurrilously behind his back and stuck ridiculing pictures on their walls. One former colleague stopped me in the lift to tell me he was a "waste of space." Another said "He's just take take take." Gossips talked of his bodged track record and the time he wasted hanging round young women's desks trying to strike up flirtations. Truly a figure of hate, workers avoided him and when his promotion was announced a resounding silence filled the room. But once promoted, he was suddenly not someone you could mock and ridicule any more. He had the lot of them by the balls and how he knew it.
I was there in the early days when he was just a flagging, failing workhorse with a shocking reputation for incompetence and selfishness. I knew all this and yet I saw something in him, something special that made him a misunderstood man in my eyes. I saw the face and gazed at it at every opportunity, gathering little cuttings and clippings, even purloining a passport photograph. I saw his body and watched him move and there were many telling gestures to observe. But I never found out who he was. Honest or liar, idealist or cynic, clever or stupid? No idea. Did he love me, hate me, fear me or is it vain to think he had an opinion at all? I don't know and it seems certain that the inevitable will happen and one day I will be confronted with the fact that I never will know. One day I will hear that he has died, or I will learn that I am dying, and I will know it is all over. By implication, until one or the other of us is in a box, I will never give up trying to find him.
Because, at the risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfeld, knowing unknowing goes against all human instinct. The brain fills the empty space with made-up stories of gods or laws of nature, things that cause other things to happen. Like an eager spider working on a web too large for it to see in its entirety, I spun string upon string and linked them all up into a big mesh complex and deep enough to capture any passing fly or speck of pollen. My explanatory framework was, essentially, this: that he is a mirror image of me: a misunderstood idealist who needed someone to love and nurture and be loved and nurtured by. And so my spider self stared at its own image in the dew and thought it had fallen in love.
Enough. I tell myself that writing is helping me recover but I am doubtful. Is it not just another way of stretching out the one spoonful of sugar I have nourished myself on these last three years? Is there a part of me that feels gleeful at throwing out these little clues to his identity, he's asked for it after all? Shall I stop?
Not just yet. It's too early to say that "jump" won't return and the crush won't turn out to be the crush that killed me. I have to keep writing because that in itself is a form of excretion, toxins pouring out of my brain and into this blog. I can only apologise to anyone who ever reads it but I really do feel it could be saving my life.
That's not hard to explain. I was coming out of a period of exhaustion. I had worked relentlessly in a lonely, secretive job for a year exactly before pulling out. He was one of the first people I met after that. That was how it started.
It persisted because he was unknowable, a big Pandora's bag of complexes and issues that he fought to suppress and hide. Occasionally they burst out of him in an incandescent rage that he unnervingly denied or perhaps genuinely forgot about within a matter of hours. People talked scurrilously behind his back and stuck ridiculing pictures on their walls. One former colleague stopped me in the lift to tell me he was a "waste of space." Another said "He's just take take take." Gossips talked of his bodged track record and the time he wasted hanging round young women's desks trying to strike up flirtations. Truly a figure of hate, workers avoided him and when his promotion was announced a resounding silence filled the room. But once promoted, he was suddenly not someone you could mock and ridicule any more. He had the lot of them by the balls and how he knew it.
I was there in the early days when he was just a flagging, failing workhorse with a shocking reputation for incompetence and selfishness. I knew all this and yet I saw something in him, something special that made him a misunderstood man in my eyes. I saw the face and gazed at it at every opportunity, gathering little cuttings and clippings, even purloining a passport photograph. I saw his body and watched him move and there were many telling gestures to observe. But I never found out who he was. Honest or liar, idealist or cynic, clever or stupid? No idea. Did he love me, hate me, fear me or is it vain to think he had an opinion at all? I don't know and it seems certain that the inevitable will happen and one day I will be confronted with the fact that I never will know. One day I will hear that he has died, or I will learn that I am dying, and I will know it is all over. By implication, until one or the other of us is in a box, I will never give up trying to find him.
Because, at the risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfeld, knowing unknowing goes against all human instinct. The brain fills the empty space with made-up stories of gods or laws of nature, things that cause other things to happen. Like an eager spider working on a web too large for it to see in its entirety, I spun string upon string and linked them all up into a big mesh complex and deep enough to capture any passing fly or speck of pollen. My explanatory framework was, essentially, this: that he is a mirror image of me: a misunderstood idealist who needed someone to love and nurture and be loved and nurtured by. And so my spider self stared at its own image in the dew and thought it had fallen in love.
Enough. I tell myself that writing is helping me recover but I am doubtful. Is it not just another way of stretching out the one spoonful of sugar I have nourished myself on these last three years? Is there a part of me that feels gleeful at throwing out these little clues to his identity, he's asked for it after all? Shall I stop?
Not just yet. It's too early to say that "jump" won't return and the crush won't turn out to be the crush that killed me. I have to keep writing because that in itself is a form of excretion, toxins pouring out of my brain and into this blog. I can only apologise to anyone who ever reads it but I really do feel it could be saving my life.
Monday 7 June 2010
Dying Star
When I finished my last post, it came to me.
Until now, I had thought I just wanted to feel one more time a trance-like state I was privileged to know for a few moments over a few days some fifteen years ago in the company of a snowball-throwing marajuana addict from afar. I had supposed it was a delayed response to an experience that had been, as I imagine, like a hit of heroin before dependency takes over: something so eye-openingly wonderful that you devote the rest of your life to doing it again.
I believe that men are afraid of this power. It seems to me that they know that such a power is a furious enslaver of beings and they run from that just as we try futilely to banish drugs from the streets. Like law enforcers seizing drugs one piecemeal packet at a time, they take every opportunity to chop sex up into commercialised cliches of crapness and scatter their toxic shit all over our faces via the calendar on the wall, the redtops, the music industry, in-flight magazines, whatever.
But I'm not a man and I seek the pure stuff, not because of the enslavement but in spite of it. At the heart of that once-lived hit is escape. It's not a state of being that I crave but a non-state, a non-being. And having devoted my later life to not-being, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised or shocked that I have no discernible identity according to our whispering health visitor. Having failed to hurl myself into the black hole, I'm just a star among zillions of other stars, unmoving and remote, quietly burning itself out beneath the shine that others see.
Until now, I had thought I just wanted to feel one more time a trance-like state I was privileged to know for a few moments over a few days some fifteen years ago in the company of a snowball-throwing marajuana addict from afar. I had supposed it was a delayed response to an experience that had been, as I imagine, like a hit of heroin before dependency takes over: something so eye-openingly wonderful that you devote the rest of your life to doing it again.
I believe that men are afraid of this power. It seems to me that they know that such a power is a furious enslaver of beings and they run from that just as we try futilely to banish drugs from the streets. Like law enforcers seizing drugs one piecemeal packet at a time, they take every opportunity to chop sex up into commercialised cliches of crapness and scatter their toxic shit all over our faces via the calendar on the wall, the redtops, the music industry, in-flight magazines, whatever.
But I'm not a man and I seek the pure stuff, not because of the enslavement but in spite of it. At the heart of that once-lived hit is escape. It's not a state of being that I crave but a non-state, a non-being. And having devoted my later life to not-being, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised or shocked that I have no discernible identity according to our whispering health visitor. Having failed to hurl myself into the black hole, I'm just a star among zillions of other stars, unmoving and remote, quietly burning itself out beneath the shine that others see.
Gifts
I knew I was home again when I found myself wiping the piss off the back of the toilet, as I do every day. I postponed the shit till later. What is it about the lot of a woman, I asked myself, that we are condemned to be the servants of grown men. And yet, for the right man I would do this happily, a gift that would go unnoticed and unthanked day after day.
The shops are full of World Cup shit right now. Almost any item you can conceive of is available to purchase in white with red crosses, from coolbags to deelyboppers. Whenever I see this load of old crap on the shelves I think, "I would love to get this and that for him." It's coming up to his birthday but I won't buy anything this year. How could I? An innocent gesture from my perspective could (who am I kidding? would) look sinister and wierd from his.
After all, I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen him in the past eighteen months:
1) Chance meeting in the street where he seemed quite pleased to see me actually.
2) A nasty and dismissive encounter at a contacts party.
3) A conference where a mutual colleague looked at me in a "you're so transparent" sort of way.
4) Someone else's leaving drinks at Xmas.
I gave him a Christmas present on the last occasion, maybe the fourth or fifth unreciprocated gift. As I rustled in the bag he seemed jumpy, perhaps wondering what on earth I was going to produce and whether it would incriminate him in the eyes of others.
I don't want him to think I've forgotten and moved on, that would make me like other people. And I resist that. I prefer to think this love is so special and unique that it will never fade like ordinary loves. But what is unique and special to me is just strange and bizarre to another. I can't impinge on his consciousness in any way except in a bad, creepy way, so I just have to accept that the black hole sucks up whatever it sucks up and doesn't even know it because it's not a conscious actor, just a force in nature. I've stuck a face and body on it but it's not a real person that I love, just an artefact of my own mind, driven by a desperate hunger for someone to (s)mother.
The shops are full of World Cup shit right now. Almost any item you can conceive of is available to purchase in white with red crosses, from coolbags to deelyboppers. Whenever I see this load of old crap on the shelves I think, "I would love to get this and that for him." It's coming up to his birthday but I won't buy anything this year. How could I? An innocent gesture from my perspective could (who am I kidding? would) look sinister and wierd from his.
After all, I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen him in the past eighteen months:
1) Chance meeting in the street where he seemed quite pleased to see me actually.
2) A nasty and dismissive encounter at a contacts party.
3) A conference where a mutual colleague looked at me in a "you're so transparent" sort of way.
4) Someone else's leaving drinks at Xmas.
I gave him a Christmas present on the last occasion, maybe the fourth or fifth unreciprocated gift. As I rustled in the bag he seemed jumpy, perhaps wondering what on earth I was going to produce and whether it would incriminate him in the eyes of others.
I don't want him to think I've forgotten and moved on, that would make me like other people. And I resist that. I prefer to think this love is so special and unique that it will never fade like ordinary loves. But what is unique and special to me is just strange and bizarre to another. I can't impinge on his consciousness in any way except in a bad, creepy way, so I just have to accept that the black hole sucks up whatever it sucks up and doesn't even know it because it's not a conscious actor, just a force in nature. I've stuck a face and body on it but it's not a real person that I love, just an artefact of my own mind, driven by a desperate hunger for someone to (s)mother.
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