F*king awful

Trapped, asphyxiated, breathless, feels like you’re drowning. I’m so closed in in this tiny little flat that I’ll get up from the couch and walk to the bedroom just to get a taste of movement and then the brush of feet against carpet can be transporting  and  I’ll go and fold clothes as a diversion  not to mention open the doors to the balcony and just stand outside on the soggy decking socks taken off first to stop myself  spontaneously petrifying and completely wedging up.
 

I realise I need people but I hate most of them. When I think of the people I know, the old friends, oh my god all the odds, sods and relics, the scraps on the scrap heap, its like they’re sticking to my feet and legs like wet pieces of toilet paper, I know I should once and for all shake them off, and I just can’t deny that what comes to mind are images or thoughts or whatever they are exactly I don’t know, ideas that I don’t like those people, I feel indisposed and cold towards any impression that comes, and I wouldn’t want to be with them anyway. But along with that, just as it has been for aeons, is that desperation that they reach out notwithstanding and that that they show they care.

Trapped, fighting for air but having to reach out to people I hate. No not hate, that’s  too strong, but certainly more than a fair amount of disdain and resentment. Hoping they’ll come my way and show interest, some sort of love or care, show that they’ve got time and that I mean something and am not just a convenience or a passing thought. 

Waiting inside in the darkness of the descending winter evening with a few of the lights on the low setting of the dimmer switch banally relaxed but gulping in this breathlessness for human contact. Wanting more than just two cats who sit  immobile. Needing more than WhatsApp for proper friends and Messenger for my backgammon contacts. Wanting more than casual conversations in the kitchen with lodger/flatmate forced on her when it’s clear she doesn’t want to talk and wants to keep herself to herself with the door locked, like I’d just otherwise burst in and rape her, dissect her, protecting herself from some childhood trauma that has nothing to do with me but it still shuts me out.

Desperate aren’t we all for contact and love and taking what we can get.

Scared now in these times of change for me, with this new attitude to say what I want and what I’ll take and what I won’t and what I expect without oodles of justification and rationalisation and explanation without fear of recrimination and losing favour and being ostracised, scared now when the dust settles at some resting point in the evening that I’m making things worse and should just settle for the old tepid contact and minimal respect the likes of which I experienced for god knows how long.

Desperate aren’t we all to be loved and to be seen but also to be respected to have someone have our backs and to not be controlled and manipulated and to have some sense of fairness and power in our affairs and perhaps hope and the sense that we can get things done for ourselves, that we can ask people for help and favours, that we can persuade and negotiate that we can do what it takes to look after us up to a point without having to cower and bend and beg and make a nuisance of, small and people-pleasing and fulfil tacit conditions and budge just a little bit when it feels wrong for fuck’s sake, please can I just get on from now on in an equable human-to-human fairness sort of way and feel ok about things. 

Hard to really believe I really deserve anything, that’s the nub, so always worried and second-guessing myself  and when people, new people, do respond with helpfulness and perhaps a little too much readiness, younger people than your old gnarly drag-along friends, then I don’t know how to take it and almost feel better off if they start treating me in exactly the same conditional offhand cemented-dynamic bullshitty way that I have always been used to with the old ones. Nothing is really comfortable yet.

Funny how now the worst crime - and the associated  liberation from it - is that you take your own power, that you tell people what to do, you guide yourself, you are your own authority irrespective of what they say, how they look, what a gaggling group of them come out with, funny that now the worst crime you could possibly commit or ever have committed was to shy away at some juncture from that perennial and muddy sort of compliance.

Funny to realise though the belt and braces of it that you can ask for things and even if you do alienate now and then, people are even less forthcoming than they ever were, that you bathe in the certainty you never did anything wrong, nothing remotely as potent as the terrible things you accused yourself of in the past, which can only resurface in this moment, and those shadows come creeping and when those shadows do come creeping it’s so incredible really to see the pitiful value you placed on yourself such that being a little too forthright now at this age could suddenly be the death of you, its just so fanciful and I suppose rather sad.

Funny what we’ll settle for just not to be alone, something to be said for that certainly, but the downsides so big having a family you can’t stand a lot of the time and no downtime and kids and being hectored and always being busy and having to do and be somewhere for them, something I would not know very much about but can imagine its inherent claustrophobia. 

Too late now for us in our late 40’s with our families. Too late to break out and change, too much riding on it and too entangled but you do get the consolation of having people in your rooms and beds in the evening, people to commune with and have shouting matches and arguments with, people unduly shaping each other’s worlds to the exclusion of almost everyone else. 

Funny how the best times, the best medicine, is so unpre-empted and curveball when it comes: that moment the lift doors close in any tube station, say in the evening after my acting course, or after whatever, and the lift is fullish after people have shuffled self-consciously in to each end and side, and you get to feel human closeness just knowing you won’t really be judged by anyone who knows you and you can look and they can look at you with a sort of blissful neutrality and time is slow and bearable and good suddenly again, something is repaired or stitched up and the love that overflows in those few moments before the lift gets up to ground level is palpable, it sounds ridiculous but it’s true, these people are forced to provide me with company and I’ll lap it up every last drop of it thank you very much.

Seems a bit of a theme then that what I hanker after is this closeness, warmth sense of enclosure, like the best times are piles and piles of people,  not just pointless noisy inner city chaos, but let’s say when the plane’s been airborne for about ten minutes if that and you’ve relaxed and had a chance to scope out anyone within eyeshot and you can see they’re all just normal hapless loveable middle-class money-for-flying people with their neck cushions and noise-cancelling headphones or whatever and sometimes the very best feeling is actually when the plane is full and you’re smack bang up against everyone, a little alcohol can enhance it, you’re snugly in and you know theres enough space for you and no one will encroach on it and you can get to feel these people’s aura, I don’t know what it is exactly, without really ever having to talk to them, without there being any threat of starting a conversation unless you really want one and I suppose it’s like being back in Mummy’s tummy if its true there ever was one.