#337 or the endless steppe

So I've moved country, again. It's nice to have a hobby. I didn't do it quite so well without her, I was the packer, the lifter of heavy things, writer of multiple lists and neurotic check-and-check-again-er. Mostly she laughed at me, and unpacked essentials that were caught up in my whirlwind of over-zealous packing. I managed this time, to pack everything four days before I left the country, once I was finished I stared around the empty flat and could hear her laughing at me as I decided whether to unpack a toothbrush and some clothes or just buy new ones. 

I suppose, in theory, I've moved to what most people would call home. People with happier childhoods and some general sense of belonging to a place, a culture, a people. I've never felt particularly attached to this country, certainly not this bit of it, which holds such a wealth of terrible memories that I was dreading this move. It was, on paper, a terrible idea to move here. I'm in the middle of nowhere, several hours and a bridgeless river away from the coldest city on the planet, no friends, no family. So far I've found it oddly comforting to be able to spend great swathes of time completely alone working to get the house (inherited) and estate ready for sale. I'd prefer, obviously, to be able to do that in a country where it's not suicide to leave the house without two pairs of gloves, two scarves, and swaddled in fur or feathers. 

The absence of family seems utterly normal here, my Grandfather lived here alone and I was sent to visit him alone. I remember meeting him for the first time, a great bear of a man in furs and a face mask. I would stay with him for two weeks or more and hear him speak only a handful of sentences. The man was a battleaxe, even on the first day of spring you would find him preparing for winter. When I was very young he had a pet wolf that he had trapped, it had escaped and eluded him for three days in the forest. He believed it was a spirit trying to teach him humility and couldn't bring himself to kill it. I remember a great beast of a man in furs looming out of the ice fog to meet me in Lenin Square and an endless drive over the frozen river, stopping the car to let a pack of wolves overtake us. Most of all I remember a four-day walk with dogs and the utter misery of it. He didn't speak a word and I was so cold I thought it would kill me. When we got there the farmer asked why we hadn't driven and my Grandfather said 'the boy needs to learn.' I didn't understand, but I think it's coming to me now. 


It goes without saying that it has been almost a year. I imagine the first of January will find me sleeping in the bottom of a vodka bottle. A year. An entire year without her, without them. I'm not proud of this year. I've worked, too hard, scraped a handful of friends, sunk into bitter depressions, drunk too much, talked too little, remembered too often, and broken the heart of an exceptional man who deserved far better. I've taken myself away from the few remaining people who know me and still managed to care, and have dropped myself into my ideal environment. Here, I can go weeks without seeing another person, weeks without saying a word. She would be appalled. I suppose I can't keep weighing up my decisions based on what she would have thought, but why not? Surely better her judgement, the best person I've known, than mine, possibly the most despicable?

#254 OR embossed emails

So, it's been thirty seven days. I'd like to say I've been frantic with the business of living, with rebuilding my life into something enjoyable, meaningful, or at the very least just full. Instead I've been miserable for three weeks weaning myself off oxycodone, going opiate-free was the brilliant idea of my shrink. He believes I'm avoiding pain, and he's right, damn him. Of course I'm avoiding pain, physical and emotional, who wouldn't, given the choice? So he suggested stopping painkillers and, to add lemon juice to the papercut of my physical pain, insisted I choose between attending a wedding or a christening. I've been avoiding invitations all year, disposing of embossed envelopes without opening them, but apparently it's acceptable to send wedding invitations via email now, which makes it harder to spot the embossing, the virtual rose petals and overused italics that seem to feature heavily in the invitation market. I chose the wedding, for obvious reasons - I can take a plus one, getting outrageously drunk isn't as frowned upon, and there's no danger of being asked to hold a baby. Unfortunately I've been asked to make a toast, I used to be funny, occasionally charming, good at that sort of thing provided I was given a little notice. Now...now I'm not so sure. I can't imagine standing up in front of everyone without her to look at in the crowd, I used to practise beforehand, a dry run of the speech without the jokes, it would sound so disjointed that she'd be in fits of laughter anyway. And after the speech was done she'd hold my hands to stop them shaking (I'm a tragically nervous public speaker) and tell me quietly that she preferred the earlier version. Ever the critic. 

So I need to prepare a speech, dig a suit out of my still-packed boxes, and find a plus one who knows what happened and why everyone will be staring at them. I imagine, for some reason, that everyone will judge me if I take a date. As though it hasn't been nearly a year, as though friends won't be glad that I've finally moved on a bit and stopped my endless whining. I can't really imagine doing the wedding thing with anyone else. We used to have a fine time, especially when people started regaling us with tales of never-ending wedding planning; entire years devoted to making sure that one day is perfect, and the tens of thousands of pounds that they spent. The first wedding we went to, almost a year after ours, was unbelievable - stately home, colour scheme, hundreds of guests, giant reception, the whole deal. I have pictures, group shots, and we stick out like scruffy, tanned sore thumbs. My suit doesn't fit, her dress is brand new, totally at odds with sun-faded bracelets, and high heels reveal sandal tan lines on her feet. We'd only arrived in the country two days before, still jet-lagged, the entire weekend was overwhelming. Cutlery and table cloths, dressing for dinners, speeches and toasts, and what felt like herds of people. The bride kept laughing that she should have eloped and saved all the bother; she about cried when Lena told her that our wedding took two weeks to plan, cost twenty five pounds and was over in about as many minutes. 


I try not to think about whether I'm getting over things as fast as I should be, but it's inevitable. I wonder how other people do after something like this, whether nearly a year later, they still aren't quite right. Still aren't nearly back to themselves, still haven't...I don't know, the phrase is "moved on" but I'm not entirely sure what that means. I hope it doesn't mean forgetting.




 

#217

I've lived, quite happily, with my ghosts for the last eight months. Grief is comfortable, after a while. A comfort blanket of misery that you can take everywhere with you. I couldn't or wouldn't let it stop me working but I allowed it to extend cold, dead, clammy fingers into all other aspects of my life. It became convenient to nest in my sadness, to spend ninety hours a week working and the remaining hours alone, talking to ghosts. I could have made more of an effort, months ago, to pick myself up and dust off the darkness, little by little. But I didn't. I didn't want them to leave. A part of me loathes the intrusive memories, the nightmares, despises the shock of seeing her face in a crowd, of ironing a shirt and discovering the faded pink heart she stitched inside the cuff. The rest of me clings desperately to those small moments of shock which leave me standing, stricken, remembering her. After all, without those...what are they? If I forget, then what? What's left? 

 

I argue with the rational part of myself that thinks, repeatedly, perhaps now - perhaps it is time. I fight fiercely with that side of me; I gave up their ashes! I gave up her things! I gave in to her family, their graves aren't even in this country! I gave up my job, our house! Isn't that enough? What more am I meant to do? And so I curled, safe and sad inside my nest of grief. And there I stayed. People tried to tempt me out, to drag me out, to pull the words from me, and force my sadness into the light. As though it would crumble in the face of their happy little lives. But it doesn't work like that. I gave up those things because it was easier. Because if I gave up all the things that reminded me of them being gone, then I was free to live with my ghosts. 

 

I'm drawing myself out slowly now and trying to find people I can bear to have near me. People who didn't know her, and people who did, some of them. I've never particularly liked people, or really understood most people, which makes it even more important, somehow, for me to find people I can bear. I still miss them, daily, hourly, sometimes minute by minute. I still have nightmares. I still get intrusive memories. I still see her face in crowds. I still haven't held my friend's three month old daughter, and I still haven't returned my mother in law's calls. I still work ninety hour weeks. I still talk to my wife. I still have that awful, hollow, clenching pain in my chest. But I've talked to an actual living person every day for two months, returned some calls from old friends, been outside more, drunk less, and tried a little harder. I'm not going to suddenly forget her because I put down the bottle and go sit in the garden.

And tonight? Tonight I had a date. A third date. Which I barely even thought about because I was so tied up in work, and so thrilled that everything went smoothly. So no guilt. Well, a little, when the extremely odd thought that my dead wife would have liked him. Which isn't a thought I can deal with, it's one that I keep boxed in the corner of my mind. Things are getting better, I suppose, which brings new guilt, new sadness, and correspondingly little happiness. Which makes it hard to see what all this was for.

#206 OR longhaul

For the last few nights I've been wandering the streets of the city late at night, through til dawn. Talking to police officers and appalled members of the public, watching London burn. I feel strange, disconnected from it, this no longer seems like my city, don't recognise these people. Youths in hoods kicking in shop windows and burning down one hundred year old department stores. That's not the mad British way I've come to appreciate, like a fine tea. But during the day, during the day Londoners appear incredibly brave in that stalwart English manner. Marching down the streets with brooms and binliners, or in the early evening making plastic cups of tea for police officers, handing them round on an upturned riot shield.

I'm staring down the barrel of having to move again. It seems as though I'm constantly drifting, although I never thought that this move would be permanent. I used to enjoy moving. We, used to enjoy moving. We moved yearly, every July brought the same old kit bags, different tear-filled goodbyes and parting gifts, the same drive to the airport and the same long, long flight to Paris, the same strange month seeing old friends, stocking up on odd little essentials (me - marmite, zippo wicks, biros, toothbrushes, and razor blades. Her - liquorice cigarette papers, underwear, birkenstocks, embroidery thread, and tampons. Both - pills, bandages, endless piles of first aid supplies until it looks like our luggage got switched with that of Médecins Sans Frontières.), and leaving our tatty, stained old Lonely Planet on the shelves. Then we'd head off again, with a crisp new guide book full of post-its and her over-excited red pen circles and exclamation marks. Heads together on the flight over, checking and re-checking the list of things she wants to do, and books I posted to myself from the airport, laughing at our mispronounciation and wondering whether it wouldn't have been easier to stay put? Seeing as we finally knew the language? No, of course not, why even bring it up?

She always talked to the person sitting next to her. I sat in the aisle, to stretch my leg out and get run over by the trolley. I always fell asleep to the sound of her answering questions about why we were moving and where from and gosh wasn't it exciting? I'd wake up hours later, the cabin dark apart from television screens and flickering orange floor lights, to find her straddling my lap, shaking silently with the giggles, her hand on my shoulder. Clearing my throat, what are you laughing at? She laughs harder now I'm awake, tears on her cheeks, sat on my lap now. 'I'm sorry, it was just your face!' Oh, nice I say and wrap my hands around her waist, kiss her chin and tickle that spot above her hip until she squirms and I have to lift her off into the aisle. I haul myself up while she's in the bathroom, as she weaves her way back through the chairs she sees me and scowls, points a disapproving finger at me. 'You didn't need to get up' I know, I say, catch her hips in my hands and kiss below her ear, but I don't know if I could have restrained myself this time, my voice is a low breath against her throat; I can feel her lascivious laugh against my lips. 'From doing what?' She bats her eyelashes, pouts, laughs at herself. Tickling you to death I say, she squirms away 'you better sit down before you fall down, old man.' Bitch I mutter, sitting down beside her.

I was always envious of the way she slept on planes. Over a foot shorter than me she curled up like a dormouse in a blanket, eyemask, and earphones, she shut out the world, pressed her face against my side, and draped my arm over her. The first time she did it I looked up at passing passengers, embarrassed to be seen so entangled. Because you never think it'll end, do you? Even when the dark recesses of your mind whisper those thoughts to you in the dead of night, causing you to reach for your other, better half across the mattress, just to brush them with the side of your hand. Reassure yourself that they're there, warm, and breathing. Even then, with horror clutching at your heart and squeezing, you never think it will end. Never really comprehend waking with the tight clench in your chest and reaching, reaching, fingertips curling over the edge of the mattress with nothing but your arm and empty stretches of cotton in between.

Those vile few minutes of sweating, shivering terror are why I walk the streets at night, why I watch late night television, why I avoid bed like the plague.

#196 OR quietly

I spent yesterday in a froth of anxiety and indecision (as opposed to my usual fug of misery and despair) over the approaching date. I changed my mind about going every ten minutes and crashed and burned horribly during my weekly meeting with my boss. I told him I had a date after dropping my notes and losing my third set of blueprints. He took a step back, aghast. 'A date? Already?' His voice was slightly shrill. 'Yes, a date, already', after a mere one hundred and ninety six days of being alone, a period of time which seems both interminably long and barely the length of a heartbeat. 'Are you, you know, ready?' I paused for a while, twisting my wedding ring and fiddling with my blueprints. 'No, no, of course I'm not ready. But I don't think I'll ever be ready unless I start somewhere.' He looked rather taken aback at that, but then it is perhaps the most I've ever told him about myself. Frankly, it came as something of a revelation to myself as well. 'Well, yes, you're probably right. I can't imagine starting over meself. Don't know if any woman would want me! Of course, you've got double the pool haven't you?' Thankfully, at that point, I managed to re-shuffle my notes into the correct order and weigh down my blueprints so we could return to things that did not make me cringe.

I do not have 'double the pool' I currently have a pool containing one woman, who I can no longer have, and a whole array of other people who I appreciate like I appreciate a work of art; completely asexually. But I agreed to a date, and dithered for so long that it was too late to cancel. So instead, I dithered over dressing, forgot my oyster card, spilled lighter fluid all over my hands and zippo, lost everything I required to get out of the house, and eventually arrived thirty five minutes late. My date was waiting, patiently, nursing a glass of wine and flirting with the barman. Apart from an awkward moment where he estimated my age as a full decade older than I actually am, everything was positively delightful. Charming, witty, a nice line in dry black humour, and a lasciviously throaty laugh. I would rather have had a dreadful time, I felt guilty. I still feel guilty. I took my wedding ring off, naturally, not quite able to leave it at home, so instead it burned a hole in my chest, hanging from the leather cord I carried her engagement ring on for so many months.

It ended early, thankfully, as things wound down I was increasingly cracking up under the weight of eating in public, being my most charming self, and not mentioning anything tragic. So we milled awkwardly outside, my date waiting for a cab and myself waiting for a cab to whisk him off. We dawdled, I smoked, and was surprised with an invitation to a collection he is curating in a few weeks. Another date. An invitation to a second date, made on the first. I mumbled, stuttered, dropped my cigarette, bent to pick it up, stumbled, and was hauled up slightly too close to him with his hand on my arm. He hung on a little too long, I apologised, and laughed at my own bumbling ineptitude. We stood like that until a cab showed up, I kissed him on the cheek, pre-emptive in case he went for the lips.

It was early, so I went to the cinema, alone. Harry Potter, again, and sat in the dark and cried, quietly.

#194 OR base camp

I worried, less than a year ago, that I would be a terrible parent, that despite years of teaching I'd suddenly be unable to cope with a single child. That I'd drop her, or break her, or even worse simply fail her in some profound way so that she grew up sad, angry, and confused about why I did that to her. In the quiet, dark moments I spent lying awake beside her I wondered if I would take after my father and somehow be unable to stop myself turning into him and driving her away with fists and harsh, mocking laughter. I worried about losing Lena and being left with a girl I couldn't possibly understand. I worried about being unable to talk to her, or whether she'd turn out like me and our combined silence would drive my wife to distraction. I worried about losing her, like I worry about losing everyone. In spite of all this fretting, I figured that by the time she was fourteen, we'd have it sort of worked out, be almost forty years old and have some semblance of a grip on life. In short, it would be very different to having a fourteen year old dropped into your life and scrambling to make the best of it.

I don't know how to deal with him. I don't know what he needs, I don't know what he wants, nor do I know what he likes to do, his favourite food, colour, the names of his friends, what vaccinations he's had, where his birth certificate is, who is listed as his next of kin, what he's allergic to, when he last had a doctor's appointment, what the hell the name of his asthma medication is, or any of the other stuff that I really do need to know. Things that I assume I'd have got to know over the last fourteen years if he'd been mine. As it is, I'm fumbling around in the dark, making huge catastrophic mistakes, and lying awake at night worrying. He needs new clothes; I have no idea where to take him, no clue what he likes, and a sneaking suspicion that we'll be that teenager/adult pair having a quiet, vicious row in the middle of a department store.

Worrying about all these things now, brings back the quiet panicking I did while she was pregnant, except there's no one telling me not to be so ridiculous, and to shut up and go to sleep already. I've been on my own for seven months now, which seems an interminably long time and is the longest I've been single since I was twelve. It still scares the shit out of me, as well as being somewhat liberating. Unfortunately I don't do well with freedom, I devolve into a shambling, shuffling, dishevelled creature, wearing the same paint stained shirt for a week, and forgetting how to talk to people other than myself. I smoke too much, drink too much, and attempt to live on a biscuit and tea diet. Luckily Godson has adopted a pack of friends and is running wild over London, occasionally stopping by to complain that there's no food, drink soda, and lounge in front of the television in bizarre yellow and purple pyjamas, leaving me free to carry on my semi-feral existence.

In an attempt to remember how to relate to people I have a date tomorrow night. Accepting seemed like a good idea at the time, now...I am not so sure. Real clothes? Shaving? Taming my hair? Attempting polite conversation, appearing interested, talking about myself (the horror), navigating through crowds, eating nice food in public, not blurting out that I'm sort of heartbroken and still talk to my wife. I might as well try climbing Everest.

#186 OR why am I writing?

When I resurrected this blog in the wake of January's assorted tragedies and uprootings, I contemplated making it private. In the end, obviously, I did not, because I thought no one would read it. I'm still not quite sure why anyone has. I re-read posts only on particularly dark days when it seems impossible to reach the light, when there's a deep, dank place inside me which nothing will illuminate, which nothing can reach. Or on days when I've forgotten a little bit more of her and the agony of that is almost unbearable. I was convinced that no one would want to spend their spare time reading about such pain. And yet it seems that people have, and do, and while I'm grateful...I am also extremely confused. This is not the sort of blog that I read, I don't read widow's blogs or surround myself with the bereaved in an attempt at self-soothing. Instead I come here, and write (poorly) about whatever is hurting me most. Usually it's memories of her, of them, sometimes it's my frankly useless body, and sometimes it's the end of a series of books. I write about what hurts most because I come back to it later to open old wounds and remind myself that I am indeed capable of feeling something. 

I didn't have an audience in mind because I couldn't envisage there being one. I don't have an audience in mind now because...it still seems unbelievable that anyone should want to read anything I have written. That doesn't mean I'm not incredibly grateful for comments, or for people linking to my meagre little corner of misery (something which is absolutely astonishing to me). I am, fawningly so. Even though I have no real idea who I'm aiming this blog at, apart from myself, it's a little unsettling to think that I may manage to disappoint someone that I don't even know. 

I have laid bare very specific aspects of myself here. Things which I cannot say out loud to anyone. But this agony is not (thankfully) all of me and life is improving, slowly. After 186 genuinely awful days, I do still feel guilty about having fun, about doing things, about living. I do still feel that I should not be, that everything I do which is not limited to crying in the dark, is a terrible betrayal. I squash those feelings down. Because what's the point of being alive if that's all that I can do?

I think about them all the time. Right now, even. How ridiculous she would find this situation that I seem to have got myself into. She had to apologize for me not talking, for absent-mindedly wandering off while people were talking to me, for telling people to just be quiet already. The absurdity of me, in my own roundabout way, apologising for talking too much, to complete strangers, would make her howl with laughter. She'd be smug, too, because I'd finally understand how annoying it is to have to smooth down the feathers that I've ruffled.

Really, anyone who reads this...you probably know my wife better than you know me. There's thirty posts about her, about Cambodia, about grief and pain and loss. Posts which make my heart ache when I read them back, posts which bring clouds of memories to sit, heavy on my shoulders and follow me through the day. 

Looking back, it would make more sense to have introduced myself back in January, rather than awkwardly appearing here, in July, after exposing the darkest recesses of my mind. Unfortunately, in January, I wasn't particularly coherent. So here we are. God. It's always at the strangest times that I find I need her, that I realize all over again exactly how much she did for me and how I just don't quite work without her.