A la sinistra

I seem so nice, don't I. Don't believe it.
A lady does not take kindly to being ignored.

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.

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.

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.

Where it all started / finished

The health visitor was a guy, quite a sexy guy in a gay way. You can find him on facebook if you know the name, a comical sort of name and uncommon enough to be unique, unlikely the rest of the lexicon of male names, each of which has apparently been appropriated by 300 bald, square-shaped Americans. I grew quite fond of him in the weeks that were to follow, when he came round to my home in the company of one young lady or another, who wittered while he sat on my sofa and stared, hopefully feeling guiltily responsible for inflicting this shit on me. I became familiar with the gluey sheen spray-painted all over his face, perhaps to stick on the permastubble - a look that suggested "park bench" rather than "caring health professional".

He spoke then as ever in a breathy whisper like Baccara breathing "Yes Sir, I can boogie." The expression of his face and voice said, "I care. I'm worried about you." His actual words were, "I think... that you've lost your identity."

He had just done this amazing card trick where by he had given me an exact read-out of my state of mind based on some outward clues and his own acuity. I was unhappy; I was crying out for help; I had lost my identity. He was off-track with some of this. Only that morning the baby and I had trundled happily around a kid's zoo, scoffed some tomato pasta and most excitingly of all spotted Prof. Brian Cox in the park, whereupon I had pushed the baby into his vicinity and taken a couple of photos with the two of them in the same frame. But like a child in the courtroom I haplessly agreed: yes, yes, I am unhappy.

Are you a danger to yourself, he asked, and more importantly (he didn't say it in words but he said it with emphasis and tone) to your children? From there on in, in the midst of social service referrals, psychiatric chitchats and all the rest of it, every talking head I encountered was clearly intervening for the sake of the children. Don't get me wrong. Good for them, fair play and all that. But all in all they rubbed and chipped away at my identity until what was left of it was gone.

Who am I and how did I get here?

I was leaning out of the window so the cigarette smoke would drift outside. This only ever works to an imperfect degree, as any secret smoker will testify, but my two young children would be too busy to notice the smell on return from nursery and school while my partner of thirteen years - who I’ll call Dave as testimony to his love of Cameron - had no discernible sense of smell. I flicked the ash and watched it spiral down the three storeys to ground level and one more for the basement. Presumably it landed somewhere in front of my Tory supporting neighbour’s front door. Not polite but hardly enough to start a great conflagration, I told myself, as I flicked and flicked.

Jump. Go on, just fucking jump.

I smoked another. I’m not really much of a smoker. When bad things happen I rush off to the newsagent’s and get a pack of ten menthols of any old brand and a pint of milk to cover my tracks. The last time I made the guy fish through all the packets to find one with a written health warning as opposed to a graphic image (too much for me in my current state of mind). I generally smoke the first while I circle the small park where I live, keeping a sharp eye out for the first floor neighbour who practically lives there, taking care not to mutter and mumble. Usually I’ll follow with a seamless second before trotting home with a cheery “I’m back!”. By the evening or the next day a ball of tobacco grunge has taken residence in the pit of my stomach like a heaving ball of sick and at this point the rest of the pack goes in the bin, only to be replaced by another ten-pack whenever the next bad thing occurs.

I leant out of the window and looked around. A neighbour, the father of my daughter’s friend, was going down the pavement outside the school where he taught. For reasons I never cared to ask, he has been in a wheelchair the whole time I have known him. You should be ashamed, I told myself, wanting to jump from this window and maim your body down there on the street. What would that guy make of you if he heard. He would think you were such an ungrateful prat.

I visualised a swastika-like arrangement of head and limbs, by no means necessarily dead, or more likely a haystack-shaped pile of blood and guts waiting for the Tory supporter like a bird carcass left as a little present from a loving cat. No no, I told myself as I drew back from the window. No way am I dying down there. If I am going to leave my sloppy corpse as a little present for any man, I know exactly the man and I know his address too.

Fear not. I am too afraid of heights to have believed even for a moment that I would really make it over the balcony, but nonetheless the return of the “jump” impulse shook me deeply. “Jump” hadn’t been around for a couple of weeks and I had dared to hope it had gone away. But no, it was back and hanging in the air like a rotting vegetable smell.

Back inside, the sight of the computer screen made me sick, horrible sick like a particularly insidious motion sickness from reading comics in the car even when your mum says not to. (“I told you!” she proclaims as you vom all over six months’ worth of the Desperate Dan, expected back by the lot next door before the end of the week.) I would have liked to go to the bathroom and throw; but I knew it would not come and I lacked the skill to make it come even after many practice sessions of poking away at the back of my throat, desperately trying to imagine oral sex with some horrible guy in an attempt to make the retching feel more real.

I made myself a rum and coke. I’m pretty sure that when my employer’s physician told me to take some time off at home and rest, a return to adolescent-style forays into self abuse was far from her mind. But when you’re labouring under obsessive love, it is no toxic substance but rather the computer from which you have most to fear.

Who am I and how did I get here? These are the questions I aim to answer. I’ll write it down as I go along in case I fall under a bus or more likely a police car or in case I do one day find it in myself to shuffle my flab off ledge or bridge. It’s not the romantic comic novel I had hoped to write but I see now that it isn’t in me to write anything else. You could task me to write anything, from a shopping list to a letter to the Times, and this is what you would get.

Maybe by the time I get there I’ll have worked out a better ending, something more positive - redemptive even - from which others can draw inspiration and hope. Then my collected blogs could get published and even adapted for the big screen starring Katy Perry and Russell Brand. Maybe.