Sorry I didn't blog in a bit - the whole concept of writing pretty much anything seems to have just about left me - maybe temporarily - but...
Things happen quick sometimes...
May 29th, 5.30pm I am sitting in the hammock, girlfriend is crying in the bedroom. I go and sit with her and she says some stuff and cries. After a bit, she doesn't say anything. I go back to hammock. I feel tired to have to drag things out of a person, I can't be bothered with it. 6pm she comes storming past me and goes for a run. 6.30pm she comes storming past me back into the flat. 6.35pm she goes storming out says she's going to stay at a friends for a few days. 7.30pm she comes back, says friend isn't in, and when I walk in the house she's busy packing her stuff.
We talk. She's not happy with me. No feeling of togetherness. Feels that I don't love her and that it makes no difference to me whether she's there or not. I don't disagree...
11pm we make love. And the next day too. She goes away then for a bit on a trip with her parents that I was supposed to go on but now don't. I feel quite peaceful in the flat, and happy too...
Monday the 4th, 9am I get a call saying my coaching course has been cancelled: that was my summer plans. Suddenly, everything's free. 9.15am I put an ad online advertising the flat for rent for the summer. 9.20am I look into flights to Canada. I find one leaving the 15th for a half-decent price. A friend in Vancouver has recently emailed with an opportunity to build a cabin in the Okanagan Valley in BC. And I've been thinking about Canada for a while - and America too...
Tuesday the 5th some people come around to look at the flat and I agree to let it to a young couple from the 13th. And I start to pack.
Fingers poise several times over that plane ticket...
But on Thursday the 7th I find out about an awesome sounding perfect job that I would love to do and the interview's in Leeds at the beginning of July and now I know why I never bought that plane ticket. Not old age fear. Not the ever growing uncertainty. Something wonderful and good - and unseen - just around the corner. But - damn! - I've given up my home. Well, nevermind: freedom and saving money and sleeping in my tent and in rooms at uni and visiting friends will suffice...
Monday the 11th girlfriend moves out. We've been sleeping together and acting pretty much the same ever since she said she was going. I feel absolutely on a level: could be some sort of inner well-being, could be some sort of emotional disease. But the contentment and happiness I feel seems real. Still, when she says I seem to have an attachment disorder relating to mother issues I panic and twitch and book myself into free university counselling, 'cos no doubt it's there. Then she goes and I pack my stuff.
Wednesday the people move in and I move out. It feels okay. I like sorting all my stuff out and cleaning the place. I go to the postgrad room at the uni and do computer stuff and it's much the same as any other day until bedtime anyways - apart from the drying laundry and dirty squash gear lain around me...
I barely sleep that night. I'm haunted by visions of getting found out and blowing the job. Maybe an hour, maybe two in total...
The next day I take stuff to my dad's shop. I leave myself my tent and my sleeping bag. Not another night like that. Too stressful, too exhausting. I know now despite my feelings and freedom and ease in leaving my flat I've made a mistake in vacating. Old habit, up and leave. I toss an I Ching and say, what would you have said if I'd come to you about subletting the flat? - why didn't I ask it? - and wise old always correct I Ching tells me, now is not the time for movement: you are being driven by an old emotion that has already found its fulfillment. And, yes, of course: many months ago the seed of Canada and the US and freedom and getting away was planted in...relationship dissatisfaction! Felt a feeling: didn't express it: built a monument on it: had the thing satisfied - but by then monument was so big, seed sprouted and grown so thoroughly...I didn't even realise it. What feeling had wanted had come to pass: and unseen, around the corner thing - the unknown future that mind knows not yet but I Ching does - was yet to arrive. Arrive it did. Now I knew I wanted to stay in Leeds - knew that I loved Leeds and loved my flat and was happy and settled in the city and quite comfortable at the idea of not leaving there - but had gone and made myself homeless - again!
D'oh. Still. Lessons learned and hopefully never repeated. Memory stronger when it's filled with sleepless nights and silly desperation and realisation at these daft old habits so inferior to new ones of content, settled in one place Rory no longer dreaming of far flung travels and fantastic, dumb adventures of danger and women...
And that night I go to work refereeing 5aside, and afterwards climb happy into my tent on the golf course, and all night long it rains and rains and I barely sleep a wink. Now everything is wet. I'm exhausted. My belongings are scattered and hid in university rooms and dusty guitar shop attics and all because I wanted to save a bit of cash and thought I needed to be free...
But what thoughts of Canada now? Why even go? Despite all the research I've done on breaking into America...has there ever been a more dumb idea than that?
Friday 15th I'm back at computer sorting things out and drying my sleeping bag and tent and wondering what to do. Invite arrives to go visit friends in Kent, go down to London. Somewhere to go, at least. And good friends. 11.30am I suddenly discover you can now buy a megabus ticket for same-day travel and there's a bus in an hour and it's only nine quid. I buy it. I rocket down to London. I hate London the hour that I'm there - slowly crawling across it - feeling sick at the stop-start - staring incredulous and horrified at the squirming mass of humanity - going out of my mind at the length of the queues at Victoria - and I can't believe I actually lived there. Leeds, oh Leeds - the good old safe and cosy sane North - how I immediately want to crawl back to thee.
Letting out the flat was a mistake. But it doesn't mean I have to leave Leeds. Already the plans bubble in the head for the subletter to become a sublettee. Loads of empty rooms - nothing as good as my cosy cave but...
Kent. Four nights. Build a chicken coop for my friends. Watch football. Have some nice times. Feel weird again among the middle class. Miss the North. Realise how content I am there. Develop urges to put myself back there and never, ever leave. Have to return for Thursday the 21st and ask a student friend if I can rent his room till the end of the month and at least I have a roof, a bed, somewhere to lay my stinky squash clothes, and a place to get a good night's sleep. My friends in Kent have kids and the mornings are early. I like being on my own and working to my own schedule. The realisation that I'm not cut out for life among others - in relationship, even - grows and grows and there's a happiness in that and an acceptance and it all makes perfect sense. Some people are cut out and some people aren't. It's hard living with me: I feel too complete, perhaps, to generate a feeling of need for another - and people like to feel needed. But no romance with a man like me. No love, as the world understands it...
Now I'm in Norfolk, right back where I was ten years ago when I worked as a postman and slept in a cemetery 'cos I longed for freedom and didn't know how to live in a house. I'm still fucking up but I guess I've come some ways. I hitched up here yesterday and the hitching was good: not too old for that just yet. Bagged a ride all the way from Herne Bay to Peterborough and then met a band from Idaho and also had an adventure finding a lost fancy phone and getting it back to its owner. I had thought I would be in London and having adventures of a different sort but Holy Road God had other ideas - and no doubt better ideas too.
What a strange passage in life. And where it goes from here is anybody's guess. A summer of bumming around? A trip to Canada and maybe the US after all? Or just sitting content in Leeds doing my reffing thing and waiting patiently for my flat, my home to come back to me and then falling grateful into my own bed and simultaneously laughing for my folly and weeping for the missed days swinging in my garden hammock looking at the girlfriend-planted plants and supping my endless pots of tea. Not to mention having a twelve-thousand word assignment to write to complete my masters - the doing of which seems rather far-fetched given how distant writing is from my mind, and that I have literally NO IDEAS, and that I'm not even bothered anyways. I've moved on. Probably I moved on a long time ago. I've been saying for ages that coming to uni wasn't about the masters, my writing, it was about getting into sports and this job that's come up literally feels like my dream. So it's fingers crossed for that, and all the hope and fear and wondering and...
Do you understand all that, Eve? 'Cos I reckon you're my only reader now: maybe we should just email like normal people. ;-)
