I stand at the railway station anxiously tensing my stomach to look as flat as possible, arms tight and reluctant to leave their position next to my rib cage. It’s all so familiar, countless adulthood hours stranded in discontent at nearby transport terminals, waiting to be delivered from this daily dis-ease.
A kind of inertia, repetitively trying to get somewhere, to a place on this earth, hoping that this time when the train pulls in, the constellation at the final destination has reconstituted itself into somewhere I can inhabit.
I’ve spent my life wanting to get beyond what has felt like an invisible wall, preventing my transcendence into an actual adulthood I can embody, as of yet unable to grapple with applying inner peace to a self that feels so deeply insufficient and wanting. That’s why I’m stood on this platform at 3pm which actual teenagers, 20+ years younger than myself.
My destination doubles down on my current displeasure. What was I expecting? Somebody to finally scoop me into their healing arms outside the train station doors? Put me together again like Humpty Dumpty?
Once more, I’ve forgotten the certain kind of emotions that cities provoke. That you have to train yourself to not absorb everything, not to take everything personally. Because if you do, and I have many times, your’e in a pub trying to soothe your emotional exhaustion hours before the acceptable watershed you’d previously set.
There’s a point on my current journey to and from home, on the A66, a road that almost mimics the river Tees on one side and the Eden on the other. A road where the county boundary signs literally match a symbolic threshold on a landscape, a threshold that upon seeing the outline of the Lake District can feel like a boundary between the ancient tribes that I’m sure it once was.
It is at this point, or should I say the very point where the rocks above the road hang above your vehicle, that attribute a sense of meaning and belonging to the journey. A sense that ultimately disappears once I reach my destination on either side.
I can relate to rock and landscape as a reflection of mood. These dark grey stones stand like watchmen, on a more northerly passage over the pennines to my more familiar Woodhead Pass. Yet, somehow they share its essence, they feel like they sing the same song/speak the same language. Yes, it is a mournful tune, a tune perhaps more somber than the more dramatic tune that comes from the mountainous Lake Districts, and the warmer red-stone of lower Cumbria.
I attest that there’s a difference in wallowing in ones sadness and being in a space that allows it to breath, and these thresholds between ‘realms’ on the pennines certainly allow for this. It is here that I can see myself for what I currently am: somebody uprooted at the core of myself, and lookign for it, perpetually.
I’ve not been at home in this sense since my teens, and I say this with no ignorance to the knowledge it’s on me to alter it. I just haven’t managed yet.
Until your 30s, whatever it is, if it exists or if we make-do, makeshift or make ourselves believe it’s arrived, it feels like it’s coming towards us. It is literally the train we wait for at the station.
In your 30s, we realise that the world is becoming less interested in us, that most social spaces aren’t occupied by people our age, unless in a family-orientated way. When we realise this, it is literally like the train came in the station, and, maybe we got distracted, went to the shop for a beer or something, and when we come back the train is leaving the station.
I have spent the last ten years desperately chasing a train that has already gone by. Unable to accept this, because I’m unable to face the kind of adulthood it leaves me with, because it is certainly neither an adulthood I anticipated or wanted.
However, the displeasure over presence meant I was never REALLY present “when we getting high” – when my age group was practicing life-long coupling and life-roles. I was in avoidance, waiting for the train to arrive and take me to space where I could do the aforementioned things in a way that I felt I could so.
The aimlessness doubled down in my 30s, it was prompted both by displeasure in space, and a sense of running out of time. The amount of hours I’ve sat in pubs by myself hurts to admit. Very few of them were memorable or even pleasurable, all of them sat waiting for something to arrive.
I used to just think, “this time, next time, next art show, next thing”. But even at my art shows I’d be crawling out of my skin, people-pleasing to manage outcomes, and running away for the next drink to punctuate the grey, undeclared moments in all social events.
Like usual, no conclusion only explanation.
John B Ledger 