The existential predicament of trying to get somewhere but never getting anywhere defines my adult life, but, by extension, my inability to actually arrive in adulthood.
It’s a small story, based on a small measure of freedom to act in ways that I deemed would get me there, against a background of big big stories; of financial crises, of high costs of living, of reality-warping lockdowns, a background of millions of people silently feeling psychologically stuck between marker points on the mandatory road from birth to death. So much so that a new word, ‘adulting’, came into existence – an affirmation of how widespread the anxiety of never becoming adult actually was.
But one must own their own doings, and the aforementioned cannot explain away my uncountable train journeys to nowhere. It cannot explain my fear of accepting that nowhere may be forever.
But as I near 40, this is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Spending nearly 20 years getting the train to towns and cities within a 20 mile radius of the Yorkshire village/suburb I exist in with no reason that felt anything but ridiculous once spoken to another. I felt shamefully attached to something I couldn’t get past as if by an elasticated umbilical cord.
All organs, the entire torso caged in a perpetual state of flight, their tensions speak a well-known language that says “Get out! Need to get somewhere”. All the hard work is thus passed on to the very front of the frontal lobe, where the pressure is on, for some abstract manifestation of ones necessities to burst out of the cranium and put in place that undefinable requirement that feels more pressing by the year.
“Don’t just stand there! Be something!”; Metamorphosize into that adult self who is secure and successful. A mandatory manifestation, which, left unfulfilled, wraps around your shoulders, so increasingly heavy by the year that you can begin to see those fellow weary frames its worked its evil on as comrades in shame. For me, it’s the straps of my rucksack, this heavy rucksack, which I’ve carried with on every section of this yoyo route; there on my back in every situation i’ve found myself in over the past two decades.
Always working to escape being turned into stone, forever condemned to act out in a form that isn’t my own making. So I chase and chase like I’m being chased. Because I am, by my internalised sense that I am desperately inefficient.
So I’m here again (Leeds this time). Mental pictures on repeat prior to arrival, but with no clarity fade away into trying to figure out what the hell to do, what streets to walk down, what anxiety hotspots to avoid.
I go to a cafe… and get a Mocha.
I’ve done this for 15 years…literally.
And I always forget what anxiety the city causes. I choose to forget, so that I have a destiny for at least enough hours before the day is done.
But the high street is way too much, and I cut under the railway line because the high streets don’t follow. Like so many times before…
Beneath the soon-to-be next row of skyscrapers on this city skyline, one can get close to the dense foliage and en-frame into their view these shrubs, which, oozing over the fences are forced to look like a triffid-like threat to social order. Yet, on the contrary, they afford me a vision of cohabitation, the mergence that I’ve always seen as essential within desires for the lived-in promises of a urban Modernity that remains forever elusive.
The November rain pours and begins to provoke the discomfort that makes one long for privacy. Yet I look into the windows of a corporate office at a large semi-abstract painting that hangs above reception, and recognise this dislocation with public space in political rather than personal terms.
There is no further destination now, Just the expected. The ‘TYPICAL’
But something has changed, something else is in this recipe. And it is worth investigating, despite being nearly 40 and being ridiculous.
John B Ledger 