There was something comforting about the all encompassing darkness that pervaded throughout the winter months from November to January. He would go walking at all times of the day and night in these months, enjoying the feeling of anonymity that the veil of the weather provided. It was during one of these walks that it had first consciously occurred to him that he was effectively hidden in plain sight, the novelty of being outside at five in the morning and walking the roads before anyone else is yet awake now afforded to him at all times by the almost constant darkness of the time of year. The feeling of owning the streets was appealing to his solitary nature.
He had been seeking solitude since a young age, always more at ease with his own company, stimulated more by his own imagination than by the thoughts and actions of his peers. That feeling of quiet superiority had never left him and he now found himself as an adult able to go through weeks at a time with nought but the most slight contact with other people. His work was done from home, remotely submitted to his publishers by computer and only occasionally warranting a telephone conversation with his publishing contact, Nick. It has fascinated Nick no end that his writing could enthral people and that readers could connect with his work, but that he would never have any interest in meeting his fans, reading their opinions or connecting with them personally. His refusal to publiscise his work or carry out any promotion was a constant thormn in Nick's side, albeit one that he had learned over the years to simply work around. If anything, it seemed to add to his appeal amongst his fans. The chill wind whipped the powdery snow hard into his face and he bowed his head into the wind and increased his speed, ironically now going nowhere in particular at greater speed.
It had been at university that he'd last had friends, and even then they were few and his dealings with them had been rather more occasional and civil than frequent and meaningful, which only accentuated his reputation amongst his classmates as a loner. 8 years had passed since then and he had spent every one of them totally alone, bar occasional dealings with delivery men, postal workers and Nick.
Of course it helped that he had no family, his mother having died in his teens and having no other living relatives. It was amazingly easy to be anonymous when there wasn't anyone to call you or care about you. He had occasionally wondered how long it would be that his corpse would lie in his house before anyone thought to enquire after him? At such times his self-imposed isolation ceased to feel comforting and he would instead feel withdrawn and anxious, but he'd been alone for so long that he didn't know anymore how to speak to anyone about it, regardless of the fact that he didn't have anyone to speak to about it anyway. It was at such times that he would take to walking in the darkness for hours at a time, the cold air distracting his mind and the fact that he was in public, albeit alone in public in the darkness, made him feel more like he was still a member of society. "If I was to die", he thought, "this is when I want it to happen".
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Friday 17 February 2012
Wednesday 15 February 2012
The Ending
He didn't entirely understand her reasons, but he didn't blame her for them either. It wasn't that she was being cruel, just that she was the one to snap first and finally bring an end to the tension. The atmosphere between them had been loaded and thick for days... no, weeks. The fact that he was trying to sneak out of the house at 6am without waking her in the first place tells the story in itself. If only she hadn't hidden the key then he wouldn't have needed to rouse her and this conversation wouldn't have happened. Yet. A stay of execution is all it would have been. And what would it have achieved anyway? In what way could her waking to find him gone, having left in secret, possibly have been seen as a positive? No, this was for the best. Still, the nagging suspicion had been with him ever since the text message. Was she leaving him for the ex? He'd asked her, of course, during that brutally tense and awkward discussion, but she'd immediately denied it without going into any detail or getting upset. That only made it worse for him and made him more sure than ever. Still, it made no difference anyway. This wasn't ending because of someone else. Someone else was being sought because this was a sham.
He'd always been intimidated by her. Never felt he was of her league and therefore had refused to open himself up to her, even in the early days when it was clear that she cared about him. After all, hadn't she been the driving force in this relationship? Wanting more than a casual fling was her idea, proof if any were ever needed that she had no such worries about incompatibility. Once again his own inability to handle matters like a fully functioning adult had cost him something. The real tragedy here though wasn't that it was ending, it was that it had been allowed to limp along like this for so long before being put out of its misery. He knew that if he'd acknowledged it to her, rather than just to himself, months back then things could and almost certainly would have improved quickly and the affair would have gone back to its roots, passionate and exciting and overcoming both of them, the antithesis of the tense shell that their relationship had morphed into due to their extended bouts of silence throughout the late weeks of summer.
It was fitting that the relationship had begun as the snows melted and became serious with the first signs of spring in a flurry of newfound excitement and had climbed like the new shoots towards the sunlight of the first days of summer, only to plateau and then fade and wither as the summer wore on and the autumn drew in. So now here he was, walking in the oh so appropriate drizzle the 6 miles home at 7am feeling a curious mixture of melancholy, suspicion and relief.
But that kiss. Now he understood the meaning of the word "bittersweet".
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He'd always been intimidated by her. Never felt he was of her league and therefore had refused to open himself up to her, even in the early days when it was clear that she cared about him. After all, hadn't she been the driving force in this relationship? Wanting more than a casual fling was her idea, proof if any were ever needed that she had no such worries about incompatibility. Once again his own inability to handle matters like a fully functioning adult had cost him something. The real tragedy here though wasn't that it was ending, it was that it had been allowed to limp along like this for so long before being put out of its misery. He knew that if he'd acknowledged it to her, rather than just to himself, months back then things could and almost certainly would have improved quickly and the affair would have gone back to its roots, passionate and exciting and overcoming both of them, the antithesis of the tense shell that their relationship had morphed into due to their extended bouts of silence throughout the late weeks of summer.
It was fitting that the relationship had begun as the snows melted and became serious with the first signs of spring in a flurry of newfound excitement and had climbed like the new shoots towards the sunlight of the first days of summer, only to plateau and then fade and wither as the summer wore on and the autumn drew in. So now here he was, walking in the oh so appropriate drizzle the 6 miles home at 7am feeling a curious mixture of melancholy, suspicion and relief.
But that kiss. Now he understood the meaning of the word "bittersweet".
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Monday 13 February 2012
Timing is everything
Now, I'm not one for burial (I'm an ashes scattered kinda guy), but if I were in a burial sort of mood then I'd want my headstone to read "Always with the best intentions".
Now, allow me to clarify; The foregoing is not intended to convey that I have gone through my life thus far trying at all times to ensure I did and do the right thing at all junctures. To say that I have or that I do would simply be untrue, I'm imperfect, just like the rest of you. What I am referring to is the unique kind of vanity that comes from planning ones own send-off. When indulging in such behaviour, as only those who aren't faced with the situation in earnest are able to, we tend to spend time imagining profound and meaningful ways to describe ourselves, rejecting early drafts of our self-composed obituary as we whittle the wording down to something understated, elegant and profound.
But what is it that drives us to such insane, introspective vanity? I must admit that I myself, when daydreaming in such a fashion have found great comfort in the process, a sort of enjoyable melancholy akin to the feeling of sadness at the end of a particularly engrossing novel or the effects of listening to downbeat-yet-beautiful music. Is this a symptom of our spoiled and needful collective nature? Is it something for which we should feel genuinely (not self-indulgently) guilty?
As we go through our lives, we will often be met with challenges in various forms; bereavement, heartache, illness, financial concerns etc. but it is how we deal with these problems, tackle these obstacles and continue on with our lives in spite of them which defines us as people. Daydreaming is a luxury which we allow ourselves in order to give our minds some small respite from the metaphorical holes which we find ourselves in. As Sigmund Freud puts it, "As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now fantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called daydreams. I believe that most people construct fantasies at times in their lives. This is a fact which has long been overlooked and whose importance has therefore not been sufficiently appreciated."
"Castles in the air" is a wonderfully descriptive and imaginative term which Freud has used to describe this acute and deeply personal behaviour of adults. The statement by Freud that we as adults have created daydreaming as a surrogate for childhood physical and mental play is an interesting and intriguing one, the inference being that we quite simply require to fill that void with something else as we pass out of our childhood stages. With that in mind, now let's re-visit our earlier feelings of guilt for self-indulgent death fantasies. Do we, knowing as we now do that we are drawn to flights of fantasy, still feel the same sense of shame about our secret and personal thoughts?
And so it is, that we will continue to fashion our castles in the air and imagine bittersweet ways in which we'd like to be seen by others, luxuriating for a brief time in the self-made ego massage of it all. We are, after all, only human.
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Now, allow me to clarify; The foregoing is not intended to convey that I have gone through my life thus far trying at all times to ensure I did and do the right thing at all junctures. To say that I have or that I do would simply be untrue, I'm imperfect, just like the rest of you. What I am referring to is the unique kind of vanity that comes from planning ones own send-off. When indulging in such behaviour, as only those who aren't faced with the situation in earnest are able to, we tend to spend time imagining profound and meaningful ways to describe ourselves, rejecting early drafts of our self-composed obituary as we whittle the wording down to something understated, elegant and profound.
But what is it that drives us to such insane, introspective vanity? I must admit that I myself, when daydreaming in such a fashion have found great comfort in the process, a sort of enjoyable melancholy akin to the feeling of sadness at the end of a particularly engrossing novel or the effects of listening to downbeat-yet-beautiful music. Is this a symptom of our spoiled and needful collective nature? Is it something for which we should feel genuinely (not self-indulgently) guilty?
As we go through our lives, we will often be met with challenges in various forms; bereavement, heartache, illness, financial concerns etc. but it is how we deal with these problems, tackle these obstacles and continue on with our lives in spite of them which defines us as people. Daydreaming is a luxury which we allow ourselves in order to give our minds some small respite from the metaphorical holes which we find ourselves in. As Sigmund Freud puts it, "As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now fantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called daydreams. I believe that most people construct fantasies at times in their lives. This is a fact which has long been overlooked and whose importance has therefore not been sufficiently appreciated."
"Castles in the air" is a wonderfully descriptive and imaginative term which Freud has used to describe this acute and deeply personal behaviour of adults. The statement by Freud that we as adults have created daydreaming as a surrogate for childhood physical and mental play is an interesting and intriguing one, the inference being that we quite simply require to fill that void with something else as we pass out of our childhood stages. With that in mind, now let's re-visit our earlier feelings of guilt for self-indulgent death fantasies. Do we, knowing as we now do that we are drawn to flights of fantasy, still feel the same sense of shame about our secret and personal thoughts?
And so it is, that we will continue to fashion our castles in the air and imagine bittersweet ways in which we'd like to be seen by others, luxuriating for a brief time in the self-made ego massage of it all. We are, after all, only human.
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