Alone

I wish I could be at peace. I wish I could still my mind and just stop thinking. I wish that I could enjoy the things I have without always feeling that the grass is greener just over the hill or enduring endless guilt since I am convinced that I don’t deserve any brief moment of happiness I gain. I feel such intense anger and fear and I am afraid that it will only get worse. I read endlessly about Mindfullness, and am attracted to its apparent simplicity and yet fail utterly to practice it for fear of simply being alone with myself and my thoughts. I have become afraid of myself (and everything and everyone else) and I fill my small flat with loud television in the evenings to prevent my thoughts from finding voice. I feel such longing to write and play and sing and for the simple comforts of friendship but consistently allow my fear of failure to stop me from trying at all.

Work is a constant pointless exercise in busy work, an overwhelming and never ending procession of tasks which distract me and exhaust me and from which I derive little pleasure and see little benefit. I do more than my share and perform well but I am not noticed for it and I end each day feeling bitter and taken for granted. The smallness of life is overwhelming and my glass, truly, feels empty and dry as a desert. I long for a complete change in lifestyle, employment and routine but cannot imagine how to even begin and the task, in its enormity, is enough to send me to my bed to hibernate (or as close as I can get) until I am once again numb. I read books and blogs intended to inspire but end up feeling further deflated and incapable; I have always been more ‘I can’t’ than ‘I can’.

New York is a beautiful city, all life is here; vital and varied and never sleeping but it is possible to feel so alone, to know no one and to go unnoticed. To die, even, without the city taking a breath or noticing that its load of heaving life is one soul lighter. In my building there are new people every day, boxes in the hallways and moving vans on the street and I find I cannot remember who lived in those apartments before today and I cannot imagine where they might have gone. Have they crept away from the city to somewhere smaller and more intimate admitting that they tried and that this life simply is not for them or have they, flushed with success of city living and grasping the American dream, moved uptown, to bigger, smarter apartments with views of Central Park and a shorter commute? I long to escape this small dingy space with my noisy, nameless neighbours and litter strewn street but I cannot decide whether I am aiming for small town life, with its charms and inevitable boredoms,  or whether I am still driven to succeed here as I originally intended. All I know is that I am not moving, I am stagnating in a torrent of life and if I do not decide soon I will surely drown.

Tonight I arrive home to the hum of the air conditioner and the forlorn wailing of a child in the apartment below. The air is stiflingly hot and I shed my smart jacket and heels in which I feel like a pretender, dressing up and presenting a face, in favour of a light skirt and vest. My thighs are sticky and my whole body feels too hot, too constrained. I am hormonal and feel an explosive kind of anger boiling inside of me, all day I have pushed it down and all day it has weighed on me. My venom is waiting for a trigger, ready to escape. There are too many people here, their needs and opinions press in on me until I can’t find my own mind among them. I know I used to be able to think clearly and instinctively but not anymore.

Waiting in the sink is the bed sheet, soaking with cold water and salt so that the blood stains do not stick. All my anger and sadness expressed in the simple failure of my body to do what it should do. For all that I feel desperately isolated I am not really alone at all, you will be home soon and if you notice the drying sheet over the window ledge you will say something sweet and supportive. You will try to make it our failure and not just mine but, after a year of trying, I am alone with my body and its stubborn refusal to give us a child. I love you and have become desperate to fulfil your desire to be a father and I fear what will happen to us if I fail. My loneliness and sadness has become an insult to you, your warmth and kindness and to everything you mean to me. In those first months it seemed like an adventure we were on together, trying for a baby, but increasingly it is a battle between me and myself and I long for an end to it. Maybe if I were pregnant I would know what to do. I would be able to justify fleeing this city at the first opportunity in favour of a more family friendly place with more parks and get away from our 6th floor apartment where the lifts never work.

I need to lock my bitterness away before you get here, I need to find the sweetness within which you still love and try not to be overwhelmed by my repeated failures. I need to find the rational streak which still exists deep within me where I know that a lack of children does not define me and that there are other options for us and that it is too soon to give up. Those positive parts of me still exist but it is increasingly difficult to speak to them and in the face of pumping hormones I have a job to find them at all. I’m sure you don’t understand my growing anger and desperation, perhaps it is less personal for you, perhaps you deal with set backs better.

I scrub the sheet, cold water on my hands and the consuming rhythm of the work soothes me and calms my pounding head. When I’m done and the white cotton is spotless I scrub the sink too and then the cooker. I wonder how long you will take to get home and whether I can maintain this momentum until you get here but I know I will not. Halfway through the washing up I abandon it and go to sit, over hot and exhausted on the sofa with the television on and that is how, as always, you find me.