Two days of hangovers in a row. I will never learn. In my defense only one hangover was caused by pathetic solo-drinking in my basement. The other was with people (!) my own age (!!) which required grooming (!!!) and real clothes (!!!!) as opposed to flannel shirts and sad old jeans. The first time I have been out and about on a Friday in, well...years. Sure I'm outside most Friday evenings, at least, some Friday evenings. When I don't sleep at work. But then I'm covered in sawdust and miscellaneous glues and metal shavings, dragging myself through the tramps and feeling out of place amongst the hordes of revellers on the tube. It was rather reassuring to find that I haven't quite forgotten how to talk to people, although I have apparently forgotten how to hold my liquor. Or at least forgotten (or gleefully ignored) the boundary between cheerful blurring, merry swaying and blind drunk. Instead I shot straight on through to embarrassingly pissed which led to an 8am meeting sweating neat whisky and trying not to vomit in pot plants. In fact not puking in the foliage might have been the only thing I achieved that day.
It feels odd though, I did all this at University and left with my degree and a minor in hangover cures (alka-seltzer in vodka was a personal favourite) freshly resolved to forge ahead with other things. Which I did. And now here I am again. Living alone, working too hard and for too long, drinking and making merry with not-really-friends but coming home to an empty bed, empty flat with everything exactly as I left it that morning. And no amount of liquor stops me slipping back into the same old nightmares; still terrifying after 113 nights.
My lack of furniture preys on my mind an awful lot. Not what other people might think; no one comes here, they go straight to the basement because that's inevitably where I am. This enforced emptiness feels impermanent, which I like, gives a false impression that this misery won't last forever. The grief will pass, I know. Soothed by long hours sanding things and working through everything. Buying a full set of furniture wouldn't have the same therapeutic value but this way each new piece is terrifying, represents Progress. Progress which I'm not sure I've made; still wake each night shouting myself hoarse, sweating, tangled and sick, still spend the first half hour of each interminable morning crouched on the bathroom floor retching.
Perhaps this way is better, this starting from scratch. From heaps of lumber stacked against a basement wall, not from an Ikea catalogue. Nothing that she slept in, sat on, lived with, nothing which draws out agonizing memories of her. Just her things, still heaped in the spare room. Going in there is becoming like scaling Everest. Even leaning my forehead on the door, hand resting on the door handle exhausts me. Each night I decide, not tonight. Each night retreating, coffee instead, a few hours work downstairs perhaps. And then it's three am and I'm awake, bolt upright on the basement sofa, throat hoarse, heart pounding, all too soon crouched on the bathroom floor, still dressed in yesterday's clothes.
Of course, the trouble with starting from scratch is that I don't know where to start. It feels as though everything that was anchoring me has gone and now, now I can do anything, go anywhere, be anyone. Except, somehow, I don't get to choose. I get nightmares, flashbacks, nausea, shaking and shivering, insomnia and this unshakeable, unbearable numbness. Mostly I get anger and mostly I aim it at myself.
And of course the problem is that it's not quite nothing, for I am a sentimental old fool. I have one thing, a chair of hers that a very kind gentleman came to view in Paris and offered to pay for and remove. But I was stuck, stricken by the memory of her in that chair, us in that chair. Of holding her in my lap while she cried after her Grandmother's death, of her falling asleep still in her graduation gown, of the way she shyly held up ultrasound pictures for me, of hours nursing ginger tea and crackers, of her giggling and tipsy in my lap all tangled up in me and missing my mouth with her kisses. Couldn't part with it but can't look at it, out of place here in this empty flat. Just one more thing to keep me out of the spare room.
It feels odd though, I did all this at University and left with my degree and a minor in hangover cures (alka-seltzer in vodka was a personal favourite) freshly resolved to forge ahead with other things. Which I did. And now here I am again. Living alone, working too hard and for too long, drinking and making merry with not-really-friends but coming home to an empty bed, empty flat with everything exactly as I left it that morning. And no amount of liquor stops me slipping back into the same old nightmares; still terrifying after 113 nights.
My lack of furniture preys on my mind an awful lot. Not what other people might think; no one comes here, they go straight to the basement because that's inevitably where I am. This enforced emptiness feels impermanent, which I like, gives a false impression that this misery won't last forever. The grief will pass, I know. Soothed by long hours sanding things and working through everything. Buying a full set of furniture wouldn't have the same therapeutic value but this way each new piece is terrifying, represents Progress. Progress which I'm not sure I've made; still wake each night shouting myself hoarse, sweating, tangled and sick, still spend the first half hour of each interminable morning crouched on the bathroom floor retching.
Perhaps this way is better, this starting from scratch. From heaps of lumber stacked against a basement wall, not from an Ikea catalogue. Nothing that she slept in, sat on, lived with, nothing which draws out agonizing memories of her. Just her things, still heaped in the spare room. Going in there is becoming like scaling Everest. Even leaning my forehead on the door, hand resting on the door handle exhausts me. Each night I decide, not tonight. Each night retreating, coffee instead, a few hours work downstairs perhaps. And then it's three am and I'm awake, bolt upright on the basement sofa, throat hoarse, heart pounding, all too soon crouched on the bathroom floor, still dressed in yesterday's clothes.
Of course, the trouble with starting from scratch is that I don't know where to start. It feels as though everything that was anchoring me has gone and now, now I can do anything, go anywhere, be anyone. Except, somehow, I don't get to choose. I get nightmares, flashbacks, nausea, shaking and shivering, insomnia and this unshakeable, unbearable numbness. Mostly I get anger and mostly I aim it at myself.
And of course the problem is that it's not quite nothing, for I am a sentimental old fool. I have one thing, a chair of hers that a very kind gentleman came to view in Paris and offered to pay for and remove. But I was stuck, stricken by the memory of her in that chair, us in that chair. Of holding her in my lap while she cried after her Grandmother's death, of her falling asleep still in her graduation gown, of the way she shyly held up ultrasound pictures for me, of hours nursing ginger tea and crackers, of her giggling and tipsy in my lap all tangled up in me and missing my mouth with her kisses. Couldn't part with it but can't look at it, out of place here in this empty flat. Just one more thing to keep me out of the spare room.
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