train-writing

[helenic]

On Friday maga_dogg unexpectedly gave me a small suede-bound notebook, and I have started writing in it: it's been a long time since I've really written for myself, and it's made me remember how important it is, how much it makes me feel like me. Most of it will stay decidedly private, but occasionally I might transcribe things into here, so my public and private voices don't become too separate. I'm including these scribblings from today as accompaniment to the photos - I should probably add it's not trying to be Proper Writing, just random emotive train-thoughts, unedited and unashamed. I was in an odd, wistful mood. I usually am when I'm travelling through the fens; the sky is so big it seems to make my heart expand just looking at it, and anyway, the countryside always tends to make me maudlin.



13.01 Doncaster-Stevenage

Writing on trains again. On the seat in front of me is a stunningly beautiful redhaired girl; I keep trying to surreptitiously sneak a photo of her when she turns her head, but I'm always too late, or one of the other passengers is watching, and I have to pretend I'm taking photos of the clouds instead. This is a plausible excuse, as they are pearlescent and edged with silver, the gaps between them casting long pillars of smoky sunlight onto the fields below - and higher up glimpses of a clear blue sky, impossibly bright.

The girl's hair (she has her back to me) is coppery and fine, cut so it hangs in uneven, tousled layers around her shoulders. Her cheek, which along with her long, fair lashes is all I can see of her face, is so pale as to be almost transculent. When she turns to look out of the window I can see her eyes are large and grey-blue, her lips full and the same creamy colour as her skin. For the brief moments I see them, before I gather the nerve to lift my camera and she turns back again to her book, her eyes are half-lidded - she seems tired, or bored, or wistful, as if daydreaming. If you were to run your fingertips lightly over those lips, I think, they would be dry and cool and soft to the touch. She is wearing a thick, ribbed black poloneck jumper, to which cling stray red hairs, and she is sitting next to her boyfriend. He is immediately in front of me and I can see him only in his reflection in the train window; he is reading FHM, and has longish thick brown hair and a strong jaw. He is good-looking enough to deserve her, the bastard. I can see her through the gap between their seats, and when she lifts the article she is annotating to turn the page I notice it is something on feminism, suffering in totalitarian societies or something of the kind. She is bent over it with a blue highlighter, frowning slightly, biting her full, pale, innocent-looking lips. I feel voyeuristic, inappropriate. Sitting behind her close enough to touch, writing this down.

   

   

15.11 Stevenage - Cambridge

It's tranquillity, but it's also a sort of dimness. Solitude. Moving alone beneath grey skies, beneath low-hanging blankets of dark cloud. Twilight at 3pm, the fields seeming very green in the flashes of sun escaping through the low mass of cloud. Around the edges of it, the horizon is gleaming silver-white. The dark shapes of hills and woodland stand stark against it, like the brink of a cliff against the distant sky. It is grey and dim here beneath the cloud, but on the horizon there are the beginnings of another world, a streak of far-off golden light.

It's almost hopelessness. This solitary quietness is no longer beautiful, no longer pure and stirring in its melancholy. I long for love again, someone to brighten this slow dimness, but how can I think of that without thinking of him? I no longer love him in the same way but I miss it, miss the quickening heartbeat, the breathlessness, the flushes of unexpected arousal. The comfort and the companionship, that particular safe, full, warm kind of companionship when neither of you can stop thinking about the other. Who's to say it's wrong, it's bad for me? Actually I think we're designed to be in that state. It's not the person necessarily, it's the being in love itself. I don't mean him, it's not him that's missing, but I do feel incomplete without someone to love in that way.

Perhaps it's just habit. Just the state of mind and body I'm accustomed to being in. But oh, I miss it. My own company is not enough. I'm close to tears and not for him, not him in particular. At the moment I even miss being with Alastair. With Laura. Being with, co-being. As opposed to just being, intransitively, moving forward on my own. Dogged, but without joy.

Last night, trying to sleep, I found whenever I closed my eyes I was in Plymouth again. Exploring the steep, narrow streets with him. The balcony overgrown with plants, the bus-station and all its painfully remembered partings. Heartache, an ache in my chest and throat. A throb. It hurts to swallow. I thought I was over this, I thought I'd moved on. I'm past this, this despair at ever being happy by myself. Surely it's simply a matter of acclimatisation. It's nothing, it's sleep-deprivation, it's the lovers in The Blind Assassin, it's the memory of that piercing, impossible happiness not matter how many times I try to think of something else. Oh, fuck. There's no use wondering whether it's wise or not because right now I don't have a choice, I'm single and I'm not going to let it debilitate me like this.



I will conquer this.

Comments

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

Love the photos. Captures a lot about the East Anglia countryside - depressing, flat, damp fenland of the variety that should be trudged across by depressed and muddy Vikings - but with immense, transcendent skies flooded with light and shadow.

And yay for note-taking.

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[libellum.livejournal.com]

yes! you write that much better than I did. I doubt I'd get quite so much pleasure out of my pilgrimage if most of it didn't take place in the fens. Either the fens or Norfolk, so we also get picturesque little villages with duckponds.

Thankyou so much for the book, seriously. Sometimes the little things are the most touching. You wanna meet up for a smoke sometime this week? Any time from Wednesday onwards is fine.xx

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[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that would be excellent. Wednesday evening'd be perfect.

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[libellum.livejournal.com]

you wanna come to Downing? we can get munchy food and either watch a film (I have labyrinth and robin hood: men in tights, both of which would be pretty cool stoned) or just talk. what sort of time? (sorry, I like to know what I'm doing when ... :S )

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[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

How's eight? I shall bring munchables.

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[libellum.livejournal.com]

great. does this mean you're denying me an excuse to give into my secret longings and get a kebab?

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[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

I have sworn off the Vans and their evil brethren for life.

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[libellum.livejournal.com]

I confess to the odd chip indulgence from City Kebabs on regent street. Although now I live in the realm of singledom I no longer have kebabs. twould be unseemly to buy my own - I always used to steal half of iain's. and now and then, when I'm suffering from particularly bad protein deficiency, I crave the damn things...

Still, I agree with you on the Vans. Although Gardy's ain't too bad.