Everyone’s in their own bubble, their own world within the void. Each of us, in our own polished steel sphere, all float aimlessly about the cosmos, without steering, without gravity. Without control. The closest we truly get to one another is when we bump, just briefly, but always moving on our own path, sometimes parallel for a time, but not by design. By coincidence. All of us carry the force of our encounters with other bubbles and the impact they had and have upon ours, the straight line back to our origin long lost, contorted in coincidence after contact after collision. Connection. Our paths are irrevocably changed by every contact we make, some slight, some head on. Bubbles do not burst, they do not merge. Steel grinds against steel, resonating into the void in choirs of high frequency harmonics. This is the sound of our friendship, our loss. Our loneliness. Our love.
The air beyond the glass reeks of Samhain. The charge of gunpowder peppers the air as the season’s fireworks creep from hibernation. I imagine them crawling out of the rich chocolate mud from beneath a sea, tealike, of rotting leaves and crunching twigs, their snouts sniffing at the unburnt air before they shriek like banshees towards the stars, scorching the earth with sparks and smoke as they fly. I sit, hear, and smell the air, listen to the distant thud of reds, whites and blues creeping in from the cold between the gaps in the window. I sit here and my head is spinning in a mad, oxygen-high dance. And I’m going nowhere fast, the lyrics say, but it’s okay. It’s okay now. This is Samhain, Halloween, the eve of ghosts and spirits. This is the night of the dead, the end. This is the thirteenth card, poised inevitable between the magician and his trinity of cups, almost spilling their mulled wine in their eagerness for celebration. Nothing is eternal. Full moons now burn brighter than new ones ever did before, and magpies have taken the place of ginger cats. I see them everywhere, everyday. I see them watching me. Tonight is the eye of the storm, the last dance before the big push. This is the day I know things will begin to change. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know that this is when it begins. I can feel it, as strongly as if the planet had shifted its poles. Again I smell fresh gunpowder in the air, like the last shot of a musket. Now there is only the silence. This is a war. This was a war. This will be war. Everything in our universe is in conflict, save for this one peaceful moment, breathing in the sway of a slow Autumn candle, glowing like a thousand suns before me in the dark confines of my manmade room as I stare, and stare, and stare, until the world beyond - its weather and their war - melts into one glorious nothingness, enveloping me in a breath.
Today you are ten thousand sunrises and ten thousand sunsets, ten thousand pirouettes around the Milky Way. I hope you never stop dancing.
13:00 Wake up v bad. should have been up earlier than this.
13:01 Get up. Try and remember if I’ve had any nightmares but can’t remember any. v good.
13.03 Run bath. Have not washed in days since I went home to see my mum. v good. Attempt small activities throughout the day that you can accomplish.
13:09 Stare at own reflection, trying to see a soul behind the eyes looking back at me. Cannot. Notice how my features just hang off my face when feeling empty inside. Feel like laughing. Do not. v bad. You have not taken your pills yet.
13:15 Lie in bath. Listen to rain outside window. It’s like Grimsby outside. Grey. Oppressive. Relentless. Cold. Isolating. But fresh, cleansing. Consider the phrase ‘pathetic fallacy’. Feel warm water irradiating my dirty skin, fragmenting dirt and grime with near-intolerable laser blasts of heat. Think about oblivion. Imagine every cell in my body fragmenting like the dirt - dissolving, crumbling, melting. Feel calm as I listen to the rain. v bad. If you had taken your pills you would be feeling better by now.
13:46 Towel self dry. Do not like this towel. It is of pour/poor? quality and leaves little bits of itself all over me like fragments of shedded wormskin. Brush teeth. Put on freshly washed white dressing gown and feel clean. good. Pills?
14:04 Self-awareness: Sit down to finish Housing Benefit Form. Realise instead that I am 9978 days old today. Feel the necessity to do my washing up soon. Realise I have missed Deal or No Deal. Realise I had to think about what my name was. Think about my mum instead and hope she’s okay.
14:14 Sniff the rain. It has no smell. You still have not taken your pills.
14:16 Play Midnight Radio from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. No lights on and the storm makes it dark. Just the music and the rain. What do you mean you don’t have any pills?
14:20 Have a cigarette and listen to the rain. Realise don’t want to dirty white dressing grown or make it smell of smoke, so pull on a pair of jeans and a t shirt. The jeans are still damp from the washing machine. I wear them anyway. Continue smoking. Listen to Wicked Little Town. The door’s open and it’s cold but I’m used to it. What do you mean you don’t take them?
14:38 Acceptance: Feel sick of feeling like this, all the time, just when I start to feel better. Do not know of any other way to feel. Feel nothing. Listen to the rain. You wouldn’t feel like this if you went to the doctor and got some pills.
14:42 Attempt to do housing benefit form.
15:22 Finish form and collect necessary papers. Speak to a very nice woman at Haringey Council who talks to me like I’m a human being, and not a phone call she needs to make before she can go home. She says I can take it into the housing office rather than risk the postal strike. You really should consider taking them, you know.
15:28 Leave house. Dress like a person and take my umbrella. I do not open it. I let the rain wash my hair and trickle down my face as I walk to Crouch End through sedate suburban terraces. I still do not feel cold.
17:17 Resolve: Home. Feel better for having gone out. Do not think about tomorrow. I am getting better. I will get better. I give up.
“Is this going to go on much longer?”
“Less than I knew, more than I expected.”
“I can’t believe he chose this.”
“Why?”
“It’s a tragedy. A tragedy.”
“Such a waste.”
“Blimey, I haven’t seen him in years. Hasn’t he got fat?”
“Do you think he’s watching us? Do you think he’s laughing his arse off?”
*silence*
“I can’t imagine what it must be like.”
“Are you okay?”
“Angry. I feel angry. It’s so stupid and senseless and so typically like him.”
“I need a drink.”
“Milking it, much?”
“Makes you think I guess.”
“No.”
“Yeah, thanks a bunch.”
“He just wanted to be loved for fuck’s sake, why was that so fucking scary to him?”
“I didn’t really know him.”
“Someone’s going to have to sort it all out.”
For anyone who has never been there, they’d probably find it similar to something out of a (cough, spit) J K Rowling novel. Every city has its districts (Chinatown, Gaytown etc) and London is far from an exception. London, like many larger cities, has Alientown, and Camden Market is its kooky and vibrantly beating heart, choking through the incense clouds and in a sea of Chinese women screeching at you to buy their food.
For someone not entirely human, it’s not at all surprising that The Stable Market is one of my most favourite places in London, if not the world, and I always take people who’ve never visited the city before there because it really is like nothing else the city has to offer. Over the years I have purchased from there pocket watches, clay skulls, occult texts and retro military clothing (proper original trenchcoats mind - none of this US Marines dress uniform-wearing Emo nonsense.)
Twinkle twinkle like a star…
Now this precious little oasis of cobwebs, bric-a-bracs and insanity is set to become the next retail moonbase - a sterile, characterless, charmless commercial plaza that favours glass and steel over brick and damp wooden huts; of high street store label clothes over original retro clothing, handed down from attics, charity shops and discount bins over the years. It will be a place entirely without the aromas of sandalwood, Chinese food, tobacco smoke and candle wax, and indeed the aroma of ‘aromas’.
This now sits somewhere near the top of my list of reasons to get out of this increasingly unpleasant, money-blinkered and homogenised cosmonopolis as quickly as possible.
Back only five minutes, I kick over another mound without realising, trampling the crazy paving of the undone. The Road to Hell. The half-finished, half-started journal entries and half-read books. Unfinished chapters and half eaten plates of food; plates and chapters staling together in the gardenshed air. This is London, where I could just as easily have kicked over an old woman. I stare at thy which has not been done, and my bed like a whore on tap perched despotically above it all. Slow sad breath.
This is a war.
It all looks exactly like the peoplechaos I encountered when I stepped off the train. An Asti bubble bursting into the bigger bubble of the surface. The world. Broken bubbles puffing air at the universe. London is more anonymous than ever.
People scream across its paving with silent heavy footsteps. Not Tom, Dick, Harry or Harriet. Just people. Just Tomdickandharry. A sea where everyone is sludged together. A boiling pot of coffee, custard, beef, liquorice, bean sprouts and honey; a sickly adrenaline goo of loneliness, alcohol, money, terror and frustration. Is this really my home? This great hungry mouth, this vomit, this violence? Away for only a week I can now see its teeth, hidden behind the shale, the rain and the neon - all decayed, uncleaned and stained with indulgence and neglect alike in another unhappy marriage of convenience.
Are you happy?
Exiled from saltwater all over again, I pretend I’m back on the train, pulling a coat I no longer own over me and staring out at vistas through Mona Lisa glass. Reflected over the sea like an oil slick and beneath hair clipped in a receding pique I see my face - my baggy eyes, two day stubble and chapped bitten lips. I watch the sea. I see my face. I look at the clouds. I see my face. I try and read the names of stations, shops and sidestreets as they whizz past like bad decisions, again and again and again. I see only my eyes trying to take it all in, desperate, clumsy, failing.
By London I see nothing. Saltwater, seabreeze and sunsets become McDonalds, pavement and traffic lights. My face bobs in the Tesco Value soup of other faces, all dilated pupils and trackmark smiles. This neon drug doesn’t work anymore. There is clarity only after that inevitable next hit. London. London London London. We can’t go on like this, London. We just don’t talk anymore, London. You know I’ll always love you, London. I think one of us should move out, London.
Concrete. Concrete after the rain, or just before it. It’s hard, and damp, and coarse, and cold, and pale. Colour is sluiced out of everything. Your vision throbs and spins from the lack of summer. The whole world has gone World War II documentary. No vaseline-lensed laughter here. No thunder overhead, but thunder isn’t the scary part. It’s the anticipation of it. Just concrete. Walking, or at a bus stop - every limb in your body aching, and your mind tries to make sense of the world through the grey, through the fatigue. Your heart pounds because it knows there will be thunder. At any moment. You try to think of something calming - seaside, ocean. Your brain crumbles and fails. Too big. Smaller. You think of a lake - serene, calm, peaceful, quiet. But you can’t. The lake is grey and freezing and shale cuts the sky overhead. Suddenly you’re in a boat and unseen boots kick it from the shore. Big heavy brutal and black - the kind that crack bones or kick boats. You’re adrift in the lake, shivering in a cold and lonely abeyance. No oars. There’s nothing you can do. Just sit it out. Sit it out and hope some benevolent current brings you back. Sit it out and hope it doesn’t thunder. Breathe. Breathe. Close your eyes and breathe.
Last Thursday was another one of those bipolar sort of days I’m now starting to get used to. AC/DC Thursday, where life is nothing but an alternating current of opportunities and chance, and you’re just an electron at the whim of whichever way the flow of things moves you. But this has nothing to do with brain chemistry. This isn’t the familiar ‘buzzing in your head, waking up in bed with someone you’d rather shoot, walking down the road against hard and cold molecules pushing against your every step’ sort of thing. This is the world itself gone cyclothymic. And you can tell by the weather. Thursday started with the usual way all my days have started recently.
Blind panic. Terror.
There were the usual three, maybe five seconds of insidious bliss between waking from a fitful sleep in the cuddly warmth of my own bed, and then the sledgehammer on my chest as I remember. As it all comes back to me with the heaviest heartbeat I’ve ever felt. As my heart beats faster and faster and I forget how to breathe. “I’m chronically in debt. I can’t get a job. My bank doesn’t care and just keeps on charging me anyway. I can’t pay these charges. I tell them this but they just keep charging me. What’s the point in continually charging someone for having no money anyway? I don’t have any money. I’m totally broke and I’m increasingly in debt. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”
Stress occurs when the mind is not able to handle day-to-day events and challenges.
Get up. Walk around for ten minutes trying to calm down. Chain smoke to a disgusting degree. Remember I’m only twenty seven, and life can’t be like this forever. Only twenty seven. Twenty seven. Realise I’m twenty seven and life should be much better than this. That most of my friends have decadent things like savings, or impossibilities like their own home, or even insanities such as a wife, husband, or child. Somehow my collection of dusty Star Trek videos and a dogeared promise to one day finish a novel doesn’t really compare with that. Twenty seven. Give up trying to calm myself down - I’m obviously useless at it - and plod on with the inevitable daily campaigns of the war that has become my life. This Is A War.
Ring my bank. Go through infuriating automated call system for ten minutes tolerating questions designed to tax the patience of the slowest five year old. Eventually find something that could be considered the right department for my request. Type in my convenient two hundred and sixty seven digit card number on demand. Type in my date of birth. Wait in a queue for half an hour. Believe less and less that my call is important to them. Finally speak to someone with a thick Indian accent who wants to call herself “Susan.” Go “through security” with “Susan” which causes no end of problems because all the questions on her script involve me confirming regular amounts going into my account. “I don’t have any,” I reply. “Susan” then asks me for regular amounts going out of my acount. “I don’t have any,” I reply, “unless you count the charges I’m constantly getting from you.” “Susan” does not see the funny side of this. I don’t blame her. Discover that my bank have not, for the third time, done what I’ve asked them to do. Begin to lose temper with “Susan” when she tells me I am going to again be fined for going over my overdraft limit, despite this latest infraction in fact being their fault because they didn’t cancel my direct debit as requested. Point this out to “Susan” who makes a sort of audible shrugging noise down the phone. Hang up, another £50 worse off than when I started this morning.
Panic is the result of an excess of autonomic nervous system activity.
Can start to feel an anxiety attack coming on, so roll another cigarette - the logic being that it is clearly in fact oxygen that my body needs to be weaned off, as its withdrawal causes panic attacks in the first place. Then decided to ring my mother hoping she’d make me feel better.
Quite what I was thinking I have no idea. I must have been out of my mind.
What with the smoking and the general panic attackness I was obviously feeling suicidal, or at the very least irredeemably self-destructive. As the phone call went on, being told as usual how much worse her problems were than whatever it was I could maybe be perhaps going through, I started to tune out. My mother’s voice just became that of a distant jabbering bully, but I stopped listening. Someone once said that your parents never really see you as anything but the screaming lump of pink flesh whose nappy they had to change day in day out years ago. Sons and daughters on the other hand always want to believe in that smiling summer day deity, who kisses scuffed knees better and promises you an ice cream if you’re a good boy or girl. Someone who makes everyone okay. I just want my mum to be my mum again. Sometimes I just want her to hug me, like she used to until about ten years ago. Fat chance. Hang up.
When I rang my dad afterwards and he agreed to lend me some cash I very nearly burst into tears. He didn’t give me his disappointment, didn’t give me any lectures. He didn’t tell me how insignificant my problems were and how much worse life is for him. Suddenly, after weeks of waking up to french-kiss total panic about my financial situation, I now have enough to begin to dig my way out of debt and do something about getting rid of it and getting more work. And indulge in the most ludicrous luxury of actually eating something. Actually eating food. Tomorrow I may celebrate by going mad and buying some eggs and a value loaf, and having fried eggs on toast for lunch. It’s a little tragic that my current financial situation deems such things as luxuries. I am so sick of chasing the heels of scurvy with pasta after pasta after pasta. Pasta. Fucking pasta. Pasta is incredibly dull. There’s only so much you can do with it bar painting it blue before you realise you’re living on a very dull diet of flour and water.
It’s easy to tell who your friends are. They’re the people standing next to you. It’s so simple, but you only really find that out when you need to. Always. Every time. Without question, protest or excuse. I really do not deserve the support and love I’ve received in the past few months since leaving work, and I can only try and return it to those who offered it so readily - the listeners, the cuddlers, the chefs, the beer-bringers and wine-wagglers, the cigarette donors and fiver-bungers - everyone who’s given me as little as a smile when I’ve needed it, you all give humanity a good name.
I need to plough on. Every day makes me more and more a full time writer, largely because I’m amassing rejection letters (the second arrived on Saturday, WITH my undelivered postcard I might add!), but also because I’ve again started, for the first time in ages, waking up and wanting to write. After speaking with the very charming playwright Jane Bodie, I’m still desperately trying to get hold of the elusive administrator at The Royal Court to get onto her 26+ scriptwriting course later this year. There’s also a very exciting project with an artist that I’m waiting to hear back on, that involves compiling short pieces of verse and prose to go with his paintings in a book being published. Sigils crossed.
It’s good to be slowly feeling busy again, but busy in things that matter - not busy as in chasing my bank every morning to find out what charges I’ve incurred today or what request of mine they still haven’t done. It’s refreshing to have, at least, just a few weeks to wake up each morning without remembering The State That I Am In™ and feeling cripplingly unable to get out of bed to do battle with the debt-demons that cannot be defeated.
Sometimes I worry I’ve spent so long fighting for my soul that I didn’t notice it slip out the backdoor, bound for sunnier lands. Other times I just wonder why it didn’t take me with it, and let this fleshy form get on with its ephemeral footsteps, unfrustrated by my own crazy and unsung aspirations that have nothing to do with the body, society or the respective everyday insanity of both.
I’m outside on my balcony. Everything’s where it should be. My laptop is on my lap, my cigarette and its ash are in the ashtray. I’m glugging Port from the bottle and the sun is shining. Peri The Jasmine Plant needs watering. iTunes is playing and the song lyrics are singing to me - ‘make your own kind of music, even if nobody else sings along.’
The world is alive with taunting life - a hornet buzzing beside me, for one. They say their stings are out of this world. A magpie perched upon the roof. “Hello, Mr Magpie.” Hornet loves the jasmine, but is disappointed by her drying leaves.
I’m sitting here trying to write, trying to think, trying not to remember who I am and The State That I Am In™. I’ve been thinking about, you know, stuff. A lot of stuff. What I want to do, where I’m going. Boys. I’ve been thinking about boys. Why I cannot really fall in love anymore. Whenever the last time I ever really did I can no longer remember. Have I ever? How impossible it is to survive in human society without their god. I understand my fellow human less and less as I get older and older. If I lose any more weight I’ll slip through the next drain I walk over and wake up with the trolls.
Have brain will eat itself.
All I ask for is a long coat, and a street to walk her by. There was a town once, a little town by the sea. Perhaps I left my soul there. Things seem to be moving on much faster than they used to.
But still, with these tired lungs scratched with smoke and burnt with ethanol, there’s the breeze. Oxygen’s weird, ain’t it? It’s always there. You can always breathe the world in wherever you are - sip the cool breeze like you did lemonade when you were little. In. Hold. Out. It tastes different sometimes but it’s always the same ingredients. There’s nothing happening here. Nothing going on but life.
I’m afraid of the hornet, sating itself on the dry leaves of my plant. I go back inside my human cave for another day. Cry, run away, run. The world is a cruel, beautiful and frightening place.
Let me try and explain what it feels like. I’m assuming of course that you have no idea, but there would be no point in my writing this if you didn’t.
It’s like someone’s gone out and left a light on in a house. It’s a 100 Watt bulb. But it isn’t just one light. They’ve left every light on in every room. And three televisions on as well, tuned to different programmes in different languages. Blaring out. And the stereo. The stereo is playing a thrash metal band whilst the wireless on top of it hums a crackly Bach Cantata. Both phones are ringing. And the microwave is making popcorn. And the dishwasher’s washing knives. And the glare of a computer’s monitor burns flickering fragments of half-glimpsed data into the world. And a washing machine spins laundry, round and round and round, again and again and again…
No. No, forget all that.
Just imagine a motorway. At night. Like those long exposure photographs you see of just lines of the bright white and red lights of cars whizzing past like electrons along a static path.
Imagine each and every car is an individual thought, yet thoughts you can barely distinguish as individual because they are moving so quickly, and you’re already exhausted from lack of food. Know that somewhere in the blur of lights is the crippling certainty you are simply spiralling further and further into debt with no way out. Know that lost in the haze you can hear the tooting hooting Judas that maybe you shouldn’t have been so cocksure in quitting your job now that you’re seriously considering prostitution as a way of paying the rent you’re so heart-stoppingly behind on. You can just make out the familiar engine of every relationship you ever attempted, never lasting more than a year, some barely lasting a month, and always wondering if it was your fault that it ended. Always wondering if all your relationships will end before they begin. Sense in the dizzying chaos the irrational but concrete certainty that maybe, just maybe, you’re not remotely worth it at all. You know that you don’t even try anymore, that you’re just another frightened human with absolutely nothing special to their name at all but the excuses they made and the particular brand of TV trash they watched instead.
Be aware of everything you know and fear.
Keep it all in mind - shove it to a corner for now. Let it set your pulse racing in terror, but now think of everyone you call a friend. Everyone you’ve heard say they love you - people you would go to when you need help, support and comfort as you have so willingly helped, supported and comforted them.
Now imagine they’re all gone.
Imagine they’ve moved to another country. Imagine they no longer respond to your emails or phone calls and try not to think if this means that you are suddenly no longer to be considered as worth their time. Imagine calling out to those around you, but they look away, or don’t understand what you’re saying. Imagine the first person you ever met, the person you thought would always love you no matter what, has reminded you of how utterly insignificant what you’re feeling is. How whatever it is you’re going through is peanuts to the problems of real people. Imagine realising you have nowhere to go. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide from the beast as it closes in on you, sits on top of you, its weight upon your chest cracking and splintering your ribs as panic pushes its full weight down onto you. Panic, and then the cold and damp clasp of utter despair. Imagine the certainty that you are lost.
Imagine realising that you’re totally alone.
Imagine all that. Imagine that this must be what it feels like to slowly lose one’s mind as one loses all things - money, love, friends, self-belief. Imagine feeling yourself succumb to crippling blind panic. What do you do?
