[Edited post originally from New Years’ 2016]
A morning
I had a dream last night. I can’t even remember what it was about, but to be honest the fact I know I had a dream is rare enough. Once more, from I how felt upon waking, it wasn’t a bad dream, it was a dream about being alive.
Just the sensation of romance, for an object of desire or for the world at large, slowly deflates like a balloon slowly losing air, as the components that harden your chest slide into place within the day at hand.
You want to find somebody who will listen when you say “I’ve had enough: it shouldn’t be like this”, but most of them are too busy trying not to think about it to be enable to give you that empathy you need so much.
Better you forgot the dream in the first place.
A night
In the waking hours before my dreaming I had failed to control my frustration again.
I was holding it together so well! Keeping The Noise in check. Channeling it on to better things. Or so I thought. I can’t help noticing the invisible punches, and believe me, it’s better if you don’t. Especially when I see them landing on far-less fortunate folk than myself, who meander amidst our blindspots on normally-familiar streets; who lacked my support system; who were destined to lose in ‘the game’ before they even got started.
I’d kept my cool since the new year began, but it literally took one thing, the hiking of already high rail travel prices, to start a downward spiral that put the seal on the soundtrack of this day.
It all fell back on me like an poorly stacked supermarket aisle.
Cumulative computerised images of the “Epic Fail” culture came streaming back into my head, as the woman sat across from me on the train pointed out that an abandoned water bottle I pushed off the table in front of me in frustration was leaking onto the seat opposite.
I felt like a paint-by-numbers pathetic person her judgmental gaze easily took the moral high ground, and in a 100 variations of the scene she was correct in 99.9. But in that 0.1 variation I had so much aimless and hopeless empathy for the hundreds of angry people who become “Epic fail virals”.
We shout “get down, mate” as their morally-wayward actions slap them in the face in front of a camera phone. We don’t question anything else, literally everything that happened prior to that.
I moved from this no-doubt decent woman’s gaze, and found a seat on the next carriage.
I want to be wherever I am not. I want what they (seem to) have, but I don’t want to be them. I want to be myself but the not the self who I am.
I know the railway lines between the disjointed conurbations of urban Yorkshire so well that there is barely enough room left to know anything else.
I stare at the train destination boards, like they’ll show me a way forward, or a way out of this hour of exhaustive indecision, often because the only other way out available is in the nearby pub.
No gap year trips when my find need to get out is so immediate. I waste any savings on train tickets to nearby cities, trips that anyone else would see as pointless.
The deadlock I have usually becomes unavoidable within the Christmas/New Year burnout. Maybe it’s the sight of so many young rosy-faced adults with luggage (the clear indication of having purpose and of being wanted, by someone).
When I’ve got a project on the go, I can shout ‘I have a destination too!”, knowing that once the project fades to grey under the passing weeks, I’ll once more become a wandering ghost on these streets.
Class plays a large part, and as much as I get close to losing friends when I utter this unspeakable word, the reason I bring it up isn’t so straightforward. I’m quite honest about where I stand, precisely because I have never known where I stood.
It took me way too long to realise that those who humoured me in polite conversations held in jobs which were to them, mere stop gaps, had preordained destinations, high or low, before them.
I never knew how to get along in the world I had to get along in because I didn’t know how to be anything in this world.
The view from nowhere
So here I am in an overly-familiar train station, on a day off from work, anxiously thinking how I can break through the aimlessness, knowing that I no longer have the time to dwell.
You go to University. You make far-flung friends. Develop a full-student life. I see you when go back to your home town at xmas. Showering glittery sprinkles of ‘elsewhere’ upon its dying night life that usually has to rely on underage drinkers and those embroiled in slow battles with their own deaths of despair.
We cross paths agains as you head back to university on the 29th/30th December for New Years’ celebrations with your new friends. Suitcases at railway stations.
I see you one last time, when you leave University and have a brief spell of indecision in low pay, temp jobs.
Then you slowly evacuate ‘the building’ for good to a relatively-fast ascent to career-building and family life-building in the appropriate community where people talk and think like you.
I try resent not you. And perhaps, if I do, it’s because part of me wants to be just like you, and find myself cheerfully nestled into those appropriate communities too.
I’m not even pretending you haven’t got heaps of shit weighing you down you as well.
It’s just that from this view from Nowhere, you are people, and that’s what I don’t feel like much of the time.
You’re all grown up now….
Except you’re not. You’re a human bonsai tree.
I walk out of the station to find a pub that I already know the location of. I do a round walk through empty December streets, cursing a pre-new year urban landscape that talks over you every time you justify your life.
I try so hard not to be like this, genuinely.
Today was another day when I really wanted the streets to open up and welcome me, so that I didn’t end up staring at train destinations hoping my number would come up.
I have longed to see the cold city streets warm with compassion, warm with a knowledge that if I were to fall on harder times on this street, people wouldn’t walk past me as they race to sustain their position within the miserable middlemass that suffocates the unreabilitatable vulnerables.
A pessimist is resigned to such a world.
I’m a damaged optimist, who like many opened his heart incautiously to a world that fortifies emotions behind closed doors, of fear, with spite for anybody who believed they could flower out in the open. I survived by becoming lost in another life, a life that has long since had any cause, but has lead to nowhere else either.
The night is cold, revealing the stress scars on my face.. I accidentally glare in at a female only fitness club just as its members appear to reach their endorphin climax. I turn away quickly, trying not to look like a creep.
I see a Guardian newspaper headline telling me to cut down my drinking to no more than a pint a day. But there’s no Guardians here for me now, as I try to avoid my need for alcoholic comfort.
It is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a five a day diet in a sick society, or something or other.
As I get to pub, I’ve caught a strange lull and there is spare seats for a lone drinker. I’m smiling in the pub I enter because a barman error lands me with a free pint, and somebody plays Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive, a paint pallette for perpetual pop invention, on the jukebox. Little things make the here and now manageable. I just wish it could last…
John B Ledger 