clinging to the wreckage

You once came out with one of the most accurate analyses of life that I have ever heard… you said ‘Sex leads to emotion. Emotion leads to love. Love leads to stupidity. Stupidity leads to marriage and children.’ I must confess that it was brilliant. Still, this morning I see the world through different eyes. It is Saturday morning and I do not need to get out of bed to face endless amounts of pressure. I am sick with some strange virus and, with all the panic about Ebola, that is never a good thing. Never the less, I feel almost happy. Jets To Brazil’s Mid-Day Anonynmous plays as I type and a cup of hot coffee soothes my soul even if I am drinking it from your mug. Somehow the reminders are no longer so painful because this time I have had to let go… I simply have no other choice, for it is clear that you would rather do anything than interact with me and, of course, I am not a child who believes that you are sitting around alone and feeling sorry for yourself. I

There is joy and there is pain. There is little to gain from thinking of you. You reappeared and reignited hope and happiness only to retreat rapidly and lash out with venom at my attempts to show love. But there is some joy in the productivity of the weekend days and mid-week evenings. Time to spend studying, reading, listening to music and so on. Weekend nights, however, turn to tragedy when I watch a film in an attempt to escape and you fill my mind until it overflows with memories of what we once shared. Now you share your bed with others and I fade fast into an increasingly distant past.

I sit here in the early morning darkness, sipping a cup of coffee that reminds me of the desolate isolation that encompasses me now and stretches out before me like a vast and empty ocean. The love in my life, the beauty of youth, has departed to find fulfilment in other people and things but I am kept company by this familiar feeling of loss and sadness. There is relief too for there is no longer pressure to provide happiness or comfort or love or laughter or hope or help to another one so close and so meaningful. I gave all I could but ultimately loved too much and hoped for too much love in return. Too much love is like none at all, it pushes people away and sends them spiralling into the wilderness of dreams of something better. We spend much of our lives searching for better but when we finally find it, we find it in someone who is searching for better. We all lose.

Christ, I am so tired of seeing the photos of their meaningless perpetuation. Perpetuation of the suffering, the banality, the tradition, the blind following of faith and instinct and rules and dogma and orthodoxy. Perpetuation of stupidity, of poverty, of grim hopeless pathetic reality. And when I say ‘Christ’, I speak not of their Christ, I speak of some other weak and hopeless feeble Christ who will just as much listen to my pleas for help as will theirs. I am tired of it all… tired of them all… just tired.

From my earliest memory I have been tortured and tormented by longing and desire: Desire to share a few moments with a particular person, the one person of that moment who seemed to be beyond everyone else in their unique qualities. I still recall the smell, the light, the time during primary school when, at approximately ten years of age, I’d feel a great panging of loss as a film would beam onto the huge screen in the hall to celebrate the last day of school before the holidays and for me those holidays only meant a time when I would not see this person. We did not have computers or the internet, phones or social media and there was absolutely no hope of contact, the holidays were simply a long and stretched out period of isolation. The school would close for the summer and I would linger with my friends at the gate hoping for one last glance, or for something miraculous to happen and to share a few words. I remember a different time, in high school, when I st

Outside they play… and make noises like wild animals. The noises match their behaviour and, in most cases, their intellects. There is no attempt, or perhaps no ability, to fight the primitive impulses that they feel. Primitive impulses can be a good thing, of course, but there is also the need, at times, for composure, control, reason, empathy, compassion, kindness and respect… respect for others and for one’s self. Add one or two insecurities and even the intellectuals join in. Their quest for self-validation knows no limits as they transform themselves, and others, into objects. Men using women and women using men. The drunkest, the loudest, these are the proudest as they do anything they possibly can to be the funny one of the crowd. They hurl abuse at the innocents walking by and this is their form of entertainment.

I miss the smell of your cigarettes. I miss the sight of you sitting sensually sipping a glass of red wine whilst a cigarette burns between your fingers. Slightly inebriated you would discuss everything from the folly of traditional relationships through the hopelessness of social networking to the problems of modern politics and I would listen with a smile on my face and try to resist the violent urge to get up and kiss you. A few hundred metres down the road you’re alone, playing piano, and I am here, alone, writing this note and wondering what the future holds for two who are lonely and lost, self-destructive and sensitive.