I believe it was around the 9th of June. I was not in a good place. I was sleeping in the living room but I couldn’t sleep. Things just weren’t right in any plane of my life. And I was processing something that had occurred to me. I realised something quite stark. And it felt like lightning hitting me. And at the time, I suppose I cursed the timing because I needed sleep. But I was also restless and agitated because of another relationship that was going south fast. I think at this point, I was angry and frustrated with someone who didn’t seem capable of looking outside their own needs and their own emotions. That I really wasn’t high enough on their agenda.
It was during a weekend and I think it was Saturday night. Then on the Sunday, I just endured the day with distractions until some time in the early evening when the news filtered through that someone I loved had died. And I don’t know what to call him here. He was a man like any other but he meant so many different things to me. I’ve written about him before. We were just very good friends. I shared him with so many others. But always, he was something in particular to me that I could never really define.
And the problem that I had was that I have never understood how I felt about him. I loved him, mostly in a platonic way. But back when things were critical for me, I felt like I was in love with him in many ways. And now he’s gone, it’s as if all the memories of that feeling don’t matter. It’s as if all the feelings of friendship since don’t matter. The part of him that occupied me has died and this huge part of me has died. And you see, I don’t think anyone realises this. And that’s a huge thing.
Almost in the background, my actual relationship just collapsed into itself as it had been approaching the event horizon for weeks and was looming over me on that Saturday night. And when my lovely friend died, my now-ex-partner just walked away, and has never offered me any kind of condolences or tried to sympathize or empathize in any way. Quite the opposite is what I’ve found in many ways. And it was rude bloody awakening to the fact that he was not who I hoped he was. And in total contrast, my lovely friend who died was that person, maybe. They didn’t warm too much to each other. But my ex never warmed to my friend. Meanwhile, my friend just wanted me to be happy. I never asked and he never said if his thoughts or feelings went beyond that.
It is lonely and sickening to have to be here until I can find a new home. And it is awful to walk out there in this town and place and know that a man with such a good heart is gone.
In order to preserve a small amount of my own sanity, I made my escape to my home county last weekend. And I was well aware that visiting family comes with a risk but it was a strange and upsetting experience. Part of what made me realize there’s something different about my brain is the way that emotions cling on to me like tangible particles. And now, when I feel grief, all sad emotions seem to flow toward me and engulf me. I was saddened by several things stemming from family and also from the way my brother and father see me now. A friend of my father’s asked me to go out with him and I wanted to be ill. I can’t think about this right now. But the guilt and the mix-up of so many emotions it caused stuck to me for days.
He’s older, and about as old as my lovely friend was. His wife died years ago leaving him to raise his sons and no doubt he was lonely. And I’ll do. Because I’m not young. I’ll do. He emphasized to me how he was a good person and he’d be good to me, like it was some kind of business proposition. He based this on knowing my family but I don’t know him and meanwhile, my brother emphasized to me how good a man he was and I could do worse! Because i was there. In fact, he seemed quite taken with me. But I’d just met him and hadn’t even spoken to him very much. My brother could say all kinds of things about him, but I don’t know him. Because my brother held him in such high esteem (or at least said he did), I felt I had to be polite.
I thought, I could have had this with my lovely friend who died. I didn’t because I suspected this wasn’t what we wanted. But if i were to be with someone for the reasons this strange man seemed to be suggesting, then it would have been my lovely friend. And that logic is probably contrary to how a normal person would think. But I was thinking as a person who is grieving and confused, who is disappointed and exhausted.
It wasn’t enough for these parts of me to die, for the hope of a relationship that had made me happy for months to wither, for the loss of a person whose being radiated happiness for me, and for me to find myself lost and adrift again. No, I was also to give up on looking and to resign myself to rot away with a person assigned to me by my father and brother like something out of black and white film. In the space of a few weeks, my life went from the most amazing colours of perfection to something grey and barely alive.
So I stopped eating very much. I slept a lot. I cried a lot. I hid away a lot. And I know I have to get out. I don’t quite know how to get out. But I can’t let this thing kill me entirely. He wouldn’t have wanted this. He told me I was a natural anarchist and he approved of my sometimes messy logic. If we were back in the studio, and he was teaching me how to paint again, he’d tell me to put the painting away for now. Start something else and learn something new, and come back to the old work when I’d learned enough…
So that’s what I have to translate into my life now.
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