The whole time I was in London and the whole time I was with him I had this itchy feet feeling. This hyperactive, get me out of here, unsettled, uneasy hum to me that meant I was skittish and quick to make decisions. More recently this has taken on a quality whereby if I stay still too long, I begin to feel myself getting older, and a strange sensation comes over me as if all my greatest fears are galloping towards me. I have always felt, in my bones, that I don’t have much time.
He wasn’t like this. He was a content young man. He was chatty and polite. He was intelligent and there was nothing more attractive to me than when he would gently teach me about something. He would teach me because I was interested, not because he felt there was any kind of deficit in me for not knowing (which is how I often feel when men are explaining things to me, as if they think they are gifting me with something I would never have come to realise myself).
One winter I suggested we go to a seaside town, to a house that was vast and extremely cheap. It was a bungalow on a street that faced directly out onto the ocean. Next to us were a parade of desolate holiday homes – glorious, converted houses with balconies and front gardens with white lawn chairs. Our bungalow had five rooms, all closed off when we arrived. When you opened the doors, they were decorated like little children’s bedrooms, with crocheted, doily-like blankets in pink or blue atop flowery duvet covers. At the back was a kitchen that was freezing cold with a long garden where the railway line ran along the edge. In the evenings we would stand quietly, watching the food cook through the window of the oven, and as the trains rushed by the cold air would blow through the cracks in the conservatory window with an eery whistle that caused us to shiver and shuffle closer together.
By about day three we were starting to run out of things to do. We’d been round the town and found cafes and pubs to sit in in and we’d been for walks all the way along the beach until we ran out of path. There wasn’t anything to do. It was cold after dark so by about four o clock we were back in the bungalow flicking through the TV channels. We decided to get fish and chips from a local chipper for dinner and were sitting on the floor playing a board game I’d found in the cupboard. When we were alone this is when my uneasiness would rise to the top, unabated by distraction. When I would start to feel cruel. I remember leaning across the carpet and kissing him gently, in the hope of starting something. Above the living room was the master bedroom, a loft conversion that came off the stairs just above the television with a view over the water. I took his hand and led him up the stairs and placed him on the bed and asked him wordlessly to show me my worth. Could he tell that what I wanted was something he didn’t have in him? He told me no in silence, and as he slept, I sat in the dark with my legs folded under my chin looking at the black expanse out the window next to the bed. No wind, no waves. The air and water were thick like a dark oil leak from the city. I got up and walked downstairs and sat on the chair by the window looking out expecting something different only for the water to rise to eye level, unmoving, so black that it swallowed my reflection.
The next day we got the train home, without acknowledging the previous night, or the holiday or all the other times where the same thing had happened. He was light and unaffected by it. I felt like I was disappointed in everything and everyone. What a shame, I thought to myself, that you are with someone so wonderful and yet you find their every move an irritation. Do you not know what is good for you? Do you not appreciate what you have? Are you not satisfied by this life? The knot in my stomach stiffened as I wondered if all along the problem was me. That the world would give me the things I wanted, and I would reject them time and time again until I was alone. Maybe this is the best it’s going to get. I would think. Maybe my expectations of relationships are wrong. Maybe my expectations of work are wrong. Maybe my expectations of life are wrong. Maybe I’m spoilt and selfish for the things that I want, for the lightness that I want, but can’t seem to find.
I looked out the window of the train, careering back to the place that reminds me over and over again that I am not enough and yet over and over again I would try to be enough for it as I would try to be for the gentle man in front of me all the while fearing if I show him or them or it, what I need, there won’t be anything there for me, that my desire will manifest as a white expanse of nothingness with me in the centre feeling along for an edge, for a door that will open into the park with my friends. My friends. My friends! Only to find that it’s too expansive and no one else can bare to be there with me for it unsettles them, requires them to ask too many questions of themselves, to feel too much, to recognise things that are uncomfortable, all because that is the realm within which I reside, like some kind of pond dwelling monster who’s companions fear being eaten alive.
