train-writing
Feb. 8th, 2004 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
helenic
On Friday ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
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.
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no subject
on 2004-02-08 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-02-08 04:11 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-02-08 04:55 pm (UTC)Sometimes it takes me by surprise how much we seem to work in parallel. I've felt appalling and lonely all afternoon, too. When you write and talk about love it makes me ache for it in a way I almost can't bear, to understand it and feel it, just the slightest bit.
I find train journeys pivotal and oddly intense. I love this entry and the photographs and I'm going to save it.
no subject
on 2004-02-08 05:20 pm (UTC)I know that I would rather experience every single iota of heart crushing pain that I have had, to know what it is to love and be loved. I know how you're feeling in the wanting to not be single arena, but simply remember that you are an intelligent, beautiful young lady who does not need completion. You are special enough without someone by your side, but that empty space you are feeling will be filled, but it needs to be by someone that is complimenting your personality, not completing it.
Saying this however, I know from experience that once you have truly loved someone they leave a gemstone in your heart, a shining but sharp and heavy byproduct of the intensity of your feelings for them. It doesn't go away, but like a gemstone should be kept, and remembered fondly.
no subject
on 2004-02-08 06:01 pm (UTC)Oh, and *hugs*. Yes, you will conquer this!
no subject
on 2004-02-08 07:27 pm (UTC)those photos are wonderful.
xo.
no subject
on 2004-02-09 12:55 am (UTC)And yay for note-taking.
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on 2004-02-09 02:13 am (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 02:15 am (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 02:30 am (UTC)Aaaaanyway. I was nervous posting this where you could see it precisely because of the love thing, so this comment surprised me. I'd say don't ache for it, but that would be hypocritical. I don't think what I've experienced so far is the best it gets (I certainly hope not! Although I worry that a less damaging relationship would lack that intensity.... but anyway), but it's all I have to long for. It's a stupid sort of loneliness really, because it's not like I'm alone.
"pivotal and oddly intense." yes. I always have. it's like what I wrote about here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/libellum/21971.html). It's like a pause for breath and all your thoughts and emotions start clamouring at once, and it's watching the country rush by and being forced to consider what you are in relation to that ... there's something I'm trying to say but it's eluding me and, unfortunately, I have a lecture to go to. I will think about it.
Thankyou so much for the compliments. Not what I was expecting at all, and means a hell of a lot. Still, I'm glad I'm out of that mood. I hope yours passed as quickly. xxxxx
no subject
on 2004-02-09 03:37 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-02-09 04:47 am (UTC)But that's a good thing, mind.
Love is a deliciously painful thing. But remember that you are loved by loads of people already. And if you need a hug do find me in the faculty...I pride myself on being an agony aunt outside of the ranty realms of my LJ :)
no subject
on 2004-02-09 06:35 am (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 08:52 am (UTC)Still, thankyou for the comment and compliments :) The gemstone simile is cheesy, but it actually makes a lot of sense ...
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on 2004-02-09 08:55 am (UTC)I'm meeting you a week on Saturday, aren't I? Hurrah.
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on 2004-02-09 08:57 am (UTC)glad you like the pictures, although if they're beautiful it's the sky's acheivement, not mine ...
xx
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on 2004-02-09 09:00 am (UTC)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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on 2004-02-09 09:06 am (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 09:11 am (UTC)you know what I mean by love, though. I'm lucky to have the support network I do, especially since I started being more sociable in cambridge this term. And it's not that I don't appreciate that, of course not. I guess everyone gets occasional Singledom Depression. It's irrational and it's annoying but you just have to grit your teeth and wait it out. It's not really something dating or sex or even friends can really help, and even though I know for a fact I don't want to be that involved with someone in the near future, of course I'm going to miss it on occasion. It's fairly inevitable, unfortunately...
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on 2004-02-09 09:12 am (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 09:41 am (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 10:24 am (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 11:45 am (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 02:23 pm (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 02:26 pm (UTC)hee :)
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on 2004-02-09 02:26 pm (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 02:29 pm (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 02:30 pm (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 02:35 pm (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 02:39 pm (UTC)Still, I agree with you on the Vans. Although Gardy's ain't too bad.
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on 2004-02-09 03:51 pm (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 03:53 pm (UTC)I emailled Jon about wendyhouse and he said you're going. I'm so confused!
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on 2004-02-09 03:56 pm (UTC)Re:
on 2004-02-09 04:04 pm (UTC)Yes, this is very true. I think it's something I need to do, too. To just, occasionally, be content with you, not with everything surrounding you. Like taking a Formalist view of a text, perhaps - that's the only parallel that comes to mind.
I've been trying to work out exactly how my problem with rejection works and came to the conclusion that I'm so used to living in such ruthless emotional solitude that the idea of letting someone in in that way is so terrifying now I can't do it. And when I have, even slightly, it's just always ended up being so painful I distance myself from it even more.
Anyway, self-indulgence. I'm feeling a little better, although writing the above paragraph has made me pathetic and teary. Plus I'm listening to a Judy Garland song called 'Never Will I Marry'. Ha! In fact, I don't know why I wrote it - stupid self-indulgence. I started writing you a letter today, accidentally. I'll finish it, though, I promise (I never finish letters, though I start dozens).
Train journeys home are particularly bad, of course.
I'm.... ok. Long chat with mother, possible trip to doctors and perhaps begin trying to find a good psychotherapist up here. Boring. xxx
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on 2004-02-09 04:10 pm (UTC)wet?
on 2004-02-09 05:16 pm (UTC)Re: wet?
on 2004-02-09 05:20 pm (UTC)As for YOUR icon, missy, I didn't realise what it actually was until I saw your keyword! it's very convincing. I want one.
wet?
on 2004-02-09 05:33 pm (UTC)I want one of those tuxedo jackets you've got flaring open in YOUR icon. (andthetitstoopleasekthnx.)
pussy?
on 2004-02-09 05:37 pm (UTC)it's a tailcoat. All good g0ths should have one, to be worn with a top hat and, obviously, bare boobs. (Not that that one's mine; I borrowed it from
eek! I'm running out of sexy icons.
Re: pussy?
on 2004-02-09 05:48 pm (UTC)since I'm being completely crude, I'll just explain that sentence. PUSSY and ASS look much better in real life than they sound and than they look writteon down.
good luck with the stupid latin. tonight I'll be working on stupid Irish literature. stupid school, stupid.
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on 2004-02-10 02:30 am (UTC)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
Re: pussy?
on 2004-02-10 02:38 am (UTC)aha, I gotcha. have to agree. Ass is a stupid word, I always get the urge to write it @$$ simply to make the point. It's stupid. Also why is pussy rude and puss not? Haha, I've got a postcard somewhere, but I seem to have mislaid it.