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

Re:

[libellum.livejournal.com]

I think one's happiness being inextricably wrapped up in one's surroundings is fairly inevitable ... it's the level of escapism I tend to go in for though that's dangerous, it always has been. Spending most of my childhood consciously pretending to be someone else, it's no wonder I need to train myself out of it.

I think I understand your rejection thing a bit more, these days. I mean I know it's sort of silly to compare ourselves but I can't help it when I'm wondering why I make one set of mistakes and other people another ... I suppose I exposed myself to that sort of emotional love-pain very young and now take it for granted, but I'd still rather the good and the bad than neither. Also, I didn't have depression, so I had pain to spare, if you see what I mean. I expect letting yourself be hurt like that happens one of two ways: either a sharp shock, which you either survive or not (risky), or a slow process of gradually letting people in more, which is tedious and leaves you far too much time to think about it. So I'm not sure. I think "ruthless emotional solitude" is a bit harsh, though - you've always had very intense, loving friendships. I mean when I've been in love before I didn't really have any other friends, so perhaps it balances.

I know that song. Yes, it's depressing. Turn it off! Not that I can talk, I spent all last night listening to Metallica in the hope it would give me an energy spurt and I'd tidy my room and do lots of work. It almost worked.

And .... I hadn't realised things were that bad. argh. *tighthugs* Still, a good psychotherapist is always a good thing, and it's been a while since you've had a really good counsellor, isn't it? Good luck with it. And be careful with the drugs but - well, you know. Wasn't there a possibility it was a seratonin thing anyway, in which case you should be taking them the whole time? Gah, I'm so ignorant.
xxxxxxx