clinging to the wreckage

Awake and reading Bukowski at 3am. A few classic poems I have just encountered. The man understood. It's good not to be alone in one's desire to be alone. Even if the only other person I know who felt that way is now dead.  What is it about 3am that wakes me so? Why is it that my mind is tortured every morning from 3am? And in only a few hours I'll be back with the talkers... The ones who've not spoken enough over the weekend and need to hear more of themselves. All the while, I feel as if I've not yet had enough silence. 

Her eyes ablaze like fires watched me as I moved around the supermarket. A gentle smile touched the corners of her mouth each time she noticed me looking back. A line or two around her mouth betrayed her age, early forties, but her hair and her figure were those of a woman in her early twenties. Her two young children ran around her incessantly as she shopped and it was uncanny how many times we bumped into each other even though my shopping method was completely erratic. At the check-out I looked up only to see her gazing at me from the check-out a few rows down. She smiled again when she realised I’d caught her looking and she looked down. I realised I’d forgotten a few items so I ran back in and went through the process once more. A few moments later, as I started to walk home, I walked past her car that was parked up against the pedestrian path. She looked at me through the windscreen and smiled as she reversed out. I walked home alone and had a glass of Orange Juice.

You are in my dreams almost every single night. In last night’s dream we were walking through the streets together in the cold and looking for a place we could have some privacy and possibly some warmth. You suggested we go into a parking lot and I thought this was a bad idea if warmth was what you wanted. Never the less, I followed you in hopeful of some time alone with you. You held my hand and led the way towards an opening through which the sun was shining. We sat down in the sun and it was warm. We had a blanket too and put that over us. Still holding hands we kissed and I asked if you would come to see me at home... but before you answered I was suddenly in a room in another country holding a tub filled with baby lizards and I was trying to release them into the pond in the garden.

A day of utter shame and humiliation! Having handed over that card there was a cold silence... a look of horror... an obvious avoidance. It is possible to lose track of one's position at times but even the hopeless cling to some form of hope at some deeply buried level. Reaching out is often rewarded with pain. But the alternative is never knowing. The alternative is waiting around and hoping that the one you love notices that you're alive. The alternative is waiting through days of pain for death.

The card I bought for you is etched... the dastardly thing has been handed over... like a play… a child’s play… some form of high school playground drama... and a foreboding sense of inferiority has struck. It’s not that any human being is better than any other, but most are definitely incompatible. What was I thinking? How dare I even hope for a flicker of attention from one of such beauty, such grace, such delights?  So, for now, I sit here writhing in shame and await a future point where more pain sets in and all self-belief drifts slowly away.

The temperatures seem to have risen somewhat and so I wear a lighter coat and begin the short walk to the bus station. Within a few minutes of leaving the house I begin to wonder if the coat will be sufficient, it’s been a clear day but this has resulted in the temperature dropping deceptively again and it’s just above freezing. Tonight, unlike last time, there are no French visitors with their English student friends waiting alongside me at the bus stop and I feel disappointed about that. The bus is due to arrive one minute early and I am happy to learn that I have one minute less in the freezing cold. I have my ear phones in and the sounds Bad Religion’s True North accompany me. The first bus comes – not the bus that I need – and I go on messaging a friend who has just messaged me. The bus driver swerves the bus towards the curb and stares at me in anger because he doesn’t know whether he should stop or not. I wave him away. Strange that they are quite happy to drive by if you d