You Could Be Happy.

You could be happy and I won't know...

Is it too late to remind you how we were
But not our last days of silence, screaming, blur...

For the tiniest moment it's all not true
Do the things that you always wanted to
Without me there to hold you back, don't think, just do.
 

It's funny really, the way songs can make everything come rushing at you. I've written about this before, I know. And tomorrow I am starting another NaBloPoMo which this month means I'll be writing to prompts, so you can at least be assured I'm unlikely to write about it again, but I wanted to do a bit of a free writing blog post, working from an audio prompt*. So here we go...

And miles from where you are
I lay down in the cold ground
and I pray that something picks me up.

That's where I arrive, after that first lyric. Pick me, oh god please let something come and pick me up and return me to that place. Make the line "you could be happy and I won't know" a lie, make it something I create not respond to.

Increasingly though it's not her arms I want to be delivered back to - just someone. I miss that intimacy. Indeed I miss it so much I had a very confusing evening with my ex on Saturday where we fell back into a coupley-intimacy we rarely shared when we were actually going out. But then copious amounts of wine spritzers (yes, really. And no, I've never drunk one before) will do that for you.

In my dreams I keep saying "I love you" and then turning around to find out who I have said it to. Not once has it been Ali. Friends, family, acquaintances, strangers. But not once has it been her.

All of this is probably particularly confusing because the last week has been spent in a manic haze. The end of this period of nervous activity was bookmarked in the usual manner - I slept for an inordinate amount of time. Saturday night I went to bed at 1am, slept until 3pm, got up for 2 hours, napped for an hour and a half and then went to bed at 11pm - bringing the grand total of hours I was awake on Sunday to 6 and a half. An unremarkable 11 waking hours continues the trend today.

with a name I've never chosen
I can make my first steps as a child of 25....
just because I'm sorry
doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it at the time

It's coming to that - I'm none of the things I wanted to be - would have chosen to be, but it's time to try and dismiss that nagging feeling of being some how displaced from my own life and attempt to forge ahead with what I have. I have contradictory feelings of regret (I regret I regret things I regret I regret anything, I regret nothing...)but there simply isn't time to sort through them. Somehow I need to just step out of the place I have been in for the last year and a half.

I realised the other day that I really do want to stay in Brighton and the move back to the East Mids if I don't get a job by September is a second choice, not a first one. But part of taking this step as who I am not who I want to be is going to be sucking it up and doing that if that is what is required to move closer to some of my longer term ambitions.

I've waited here my whole damn life
And I've forgotten what I wanted
Maybe I can do it
If I put my back into it

I am so saturated in regrets these days that I find it near impossible to look forward. But increasingly I am recognising that is what is holding me back. Or at least, I think it is a big component.

I've got one thing coming up next month - the ArtFor Pride exhibition - and I really want that to go well. I've got one painting sketched out to do on Wednesday and I'm hoping to get a couple of others done in the next few days as I have some holiday from work and apparently the weather is going to be shit so holing up in my attic room and getting on with it is a really appealing prospect.

It's the longer term which it remains difficult to envision. I need to let go of how things ended with Ali - no amount of self flagellation, soul searching or in depth analysis of the dynamics of our relationship is going to provide me the answers I was once convinced I would eventually find.

In slow motion the blast is beautiful

I think my Romantic inclinations are at least partly responsible for turning what was, in the end, a disastrous relationship, into something tragically beautiful. I rewrite my own history as some sort of tortured artist who creates the apotheosis of her academic career as the defining, life-giving relationship crumbles unacknowledged around her ears. Falling into a pit of alcoholism and despair in the face of a betrayal she rewrites as a refutation of everything good and pure in the world.

Except it wasn't that.  It was mundane, and yes, hurtful and distressing, but mundane.  Why is it that I can only understand my own history by writing it down and translating it into something more than the sum of its parts?  I need to learn how to make my life and my actions worth more because of their objective value rather than because of the value I can impress upon them through the smokescreen of forcing them into a neat narrative.


* Snow Patrol's Final Straw and Eyes Open.

NaBloPoMo - When I Grow Up I Want to Be....

 Writing Prompt for Tuesday, June 1, 2010
When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I couldn't decide between two careers.  For years - until I was about 12 and discovered I wasn't great at maths - I wanted to be either a vet or an astronaut.

A vet for the very simple. and largely uninteresting reason that I liked animals.  The astronaut ambition has more interesting motivations...

Some of my earliest memories are laying in bed waiting to go to sleep and I would sing to myself.  All the songs I sang would be about the stars, or the moon, or the sun.  Somehow I just arrived in the world with an innate wonder at the celestial display.

My Dad taught me to adore and respect Nature.  I think, deep down, he's a Romantic in the most absolute sense, he understands the Sublime in a way few Romantic writers could ever manage to express.  In the appreciation and awe of Nature comes a sense of the absolute wonder at the fact of our planet.

My Dad also assured me that there were and are aliens out there.  It sounds laughable but my Dad is not prone to flights of fancy, he rarely if ever reads fiction and is a salt-of-the-earth type.  But one night, in the early 80's, when he was still a policeman he was on a night patrol with a fellow officer and they were in a stretch of open ground.  Suddenly a bright light shot to earth and hovered a few feet above the ground.  It was so bright my Dad struggled to look directly at it.  He tried to approach but as he got close enough to really *see* what he was looking at the light shot back up in the air, hovered overhead for a few seconds and then jetted into the atmosphere.

He still has a copy of the official report he filed after this inexplicable event.  It was duly investigated - which is to say the RAF and Air Traffic Control were contacted and requested to supply any pertinent information which might explain the spectacle.  There was no explanation available.  My Dad is, to this day, convinced of what he saw.  

As a kid this made a dramatic impact upon me.  My imaginative world exploded.  I had no doubt that aliens existed; that every space expedition brought us a little closer to a bigger universe.  I used to ask my parents exactly how many years it would be before we could live on the moon.  I played endlessly with my lego space-base set and sang David Bowie's Space Oddity as I played; just the first verse and chorus, over and over again.

Of course, my absolute faith in my Dad's judgement waned, as it is want to do as we mature.  Indeed it was around the same time I came to the conclusion that there was no God and that Christianity was well intentioned twaddle that I also concluded my Dad was not lying in as much as he believed what he saw, but that he was mistaken - it was not irrefutably alien life, there were as many terrestrial explanations as extra.  And then, then I stopped wanting to be an astronaut.
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...more or less.

What came with maturity, with disentangling my personality from my parents as children do as they grow up, was fear.  Awareness of the hugeness of earth, the fragility of life, my own mortality.  And space ceased to be a gap waiting to be filled and took on a new role as a hostile....it is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.  Oh shit, hang on, I just turned into Bones....but you get the idea.

The power of stars, the beauty of our Earth, my continuing astonishment at the many and various ways the natural landscape can alter in a second through the combined forced of our atmosphere and the barely known powers beyond....all these things have not yet lost their power over me.

One of the things I miss the most about living in a city is losing the stars.  In the country the sky is full, every night.  One of the most remarkable sights I ever saw were the stars in the Southern Hemisphere one night, in Australia, from the deck of a tall ship in the Whitsundays.  I will never forget falling asleep to that spectacular display.

And somewhere in there is the reason I'm not an astronaut.  I think.