end of the line


After a very difficult week, this weekend has been one of introspection and self-analysis. It has been a good weekend and I feel strong and happy to be alive and to be single. I love to meet many different people and to have the freedom to talk to them as and when I like and to be able to consider any option that is available… not in a sexual or relationship sense, but in a sense that I can go out at any time to any place, I can travel anywhere and go with whom I please. I am a natural flirt and it can get me into trouble. Therefore, being single, it is pleasing to be able to flirt freely and not worry about it.
            It’s simply pathetic to continue pining for the one who already has a family and is terrified of disturbing that. I change from being an exciting bond to being a terrifying threat within a period of weeks. This threat is love. Fortunately I do realise that love is transient and that relationships are sterile. I long for the incredible excitement of the first six months but I fear that terrible banality of three years and beyond. To suffer ennui once more is something that I prefer not to do.
            And so I awake to this blustery autumnal day and know that in a few hours I will walk or cycle into the centre of Guildford to meet a friend for drinks and lunch and I feel excited about the casual freedom of it… the potential. In each day of freedom there is potential. Many may call me selfish but often those people are envious of my adventures as they sit within the confines of white pickets and white lies with their unloving partners and demanding children. Their children are the light of their lives, and I understand this completely, but they are also a link to a person often no longer wanted or needed. I don’t see why it is selfish to remain single and to not have children. It is as if we believe that we owe life to… to what? To our sperm cells and ovarian eggs? We owe a life? It is our duty to create life? Duty to whom? The world is full… over-full, it does not require more and more people flooding into it with only one certainty… the certainty that the future will be competitive and difficult. We have children for ourselves. We have children because we vainly want to see a miniature of ourselves. Why not just enjoy your one and only life. Love and live and travel and drink and eat and read and explore and discover. You don’t have to do what your grandparents did and everyone who ever came before them. Someone said to me ‘but my family name will die.’ My answer is ‘so what?’
            Live and stop worrying about traditions. There is no God and you are not a failure if you don’t have children and if you don’t buy a house. I consider you a failure if you have not spent enough time alone to ask yourself questions and to question structures and conventions in order to understand your own unique and individual position within those and then to challenge them.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

San Diego & Las Vegas

Image
  The flight to San Diego was delayed, but only after we were in the plane. At first, there’d been a terminal change that I almost failed to notice, but I made it easily to the correct gate just as boarding was beginning. Upon boarding, I couldn’t get the arm to retreat into my bag, so I couldn’t get it into the overhead locker the way it was supposed to go. After much fuss and, finally, a guy somehow hitting it back in, we were told there was a delay due to a maintenance issue. After 45 minutes, the issue was resolved and the very same second of the announcement we had a lightning strike. The captain informed us that each lighting strike triggers a fifteen-minute wait period to ensure the sky is clear. In total, we sat on the runway for just over two and a half  hours before finally taking off. The morning had been one of joy, for I was on vacation and my ear infection had almost entirely disappeared. I could hear for the first time in seven days. I made breakfast and then a sandwich
Read more

no reply

Image
  You come to me in my dreams at night. It is frequent, and I don’t understand it. It was precisely 11 years ago that we met. It only took me two weeks to fall in love. 11 years have passed, and there has not been a day that I have not thought about you. I think it has been 7 years since we last met. In the dream last night, we sensed each other on a sports field, then we embraced. We were suddenly in an aquarium with others… we escaped to a secret room that started to drop like a faulty elevator. I was certain we would be crushed, like the scene in Star Wars where Luke, Leia, and Chewy are caught in the trash shoot with the closing walls. Crushed by walls and by desire. We kissed… it became heated and sexual. Then I awoke to a deep longing and a sense of despair. I sent a message to wish France well for their game in the Euros that day, but mostly to make contact. There was no reply.
Read more

winter

Image
  The winter wind howls outside. It explores the windows, looking for gaps and fragilities. The temperature drops and I find myself thinking of the stray cat who has become my friend. Where does he hide? Why will he not come inside? What has he been through? We spend a few moments together each day and I feed him. Then it is time for some human interaction… but, you see, most of them are not listening. Most of them don’t care at all. It’s seven weeks since my mother passed away, I miss her each and every day. For others, it seems to be forgotten history. And, I suppose, it is not reasonable for me to expect more than that. I remember the day that my grandmother, my mother’s mother, died. We made it just in time to her bedside. We’d driven from the south of England, where I lived, up to the north, to the town I was born in (the town all of my family had been born in). I walked into the ward first and saw a lady lying in a bed with nurses nearby. I asked the nurses where Winnie was and o
Read more