Menston and leaving

Well I guess I’m glad I didn’t go off on one in the way I had planned yesterday – some long bizarre imagined conversation and rant between me and my ex where everything was laid on the table – and instead cut it short (yep, 6000 words was short) and went about my business in the real world. Walked up to football instead of biking – 45 minutes rather than 9 – figuring I had loads of time and why not spend it strolling instead of squandering and then madly rushing right at the end, and it was on the way there that she texted back and said something like, “that sounds poo, thing with T is over, want to meet up later for noodles?”

Better to have those conversations in the reality. And to be emotionally reacting (and overreacting) to things that actually exist. She wasn’t with him Saturday night (instead of me, as I’d lodged in my brain), she was catching up on sleep, the sweetheart.

So the situation was updated.

And so was I.

I was on my walk and suddenly I was entered into a fresh panic. Crap: I’d been getting so worked up about the whole thing, so desirous of being her number one, whatever the hell that meant – well, did that now mean I was going to have to pursue that to its logical conclusion and get back with her?

Not sure that’s what I wanted. Not sure how it could really work either.

Thank God I still had my get out clause: but you lied to me so you could spend the night with another man. Not sure how I can get beyond that. Trust. Honesty. All those things.

Sure, we can continue sleeping together – but as for anything more…

Any straw I can grasp to avoid commitment. It’s flippin’ horrible the way my brain works. I kind of like to think everyone does that but that they dress all their selfish and lustful motives in love and romance and other things. Certainly, nobody wants someone more than the crazed mad jealous lover – the one who would rather kill his belovéd than see her in the arms of another man – and he hasn’t a problem calling it love. He loves her that much. That’s real love, huh?

So am I just the one who has seen beyond the reality of the wanting and the longing and the sheer magnitude of the feeling, but lacks the ability to pretend it’s something more than it is?

Or is there maybe something wrong with my head and my intentions? Just another devious, lustful, pants-driven man doing everything he can to get his end away, to feel wanted (avoid painful feelings of insecurity) and ward off all the hurt that comes with loneliness and rejection and letting someone go?

Frick, I’m a complex individual! You wants to stay away from me…

We noodled. I was feeling a wee bit emotional and I really wanted to reach over and tenderly put my hands upon her cheeks and kiss her deeply and powerfully right there over the table. She looked pretty. Nice. A good person and a person I’m connected with. I kept wanting to ask her what happened with the other guy – but a part of me was scared too, because beneath that question are all the other dumbass questions a man is wont to ask: “who’s better?” and all that nonsense. “Who’s better?” is surely only a thing that very young people wonder about; when you’re a bit older you realise that they’re all awesome. Certainly that’s the only way I could answer it.

Anyways, I didn’t ask it, didn’t feel a need to. I asked the first one and the answer was honest and straightforward and I was once more amazed at how easy the conversation was. Where had I developed the idea that these things would be difficult? Probably with some past lover, when it was. But with her, everything of this nature is easy.

“It wasn’t what I wanted,” she said, “he was a fun person to do stuff with – climbing and that – but I guess I wanted something deeper, someone who was interested in life and talking about it. It was kind of refreshing, someone who’s pretty content with everything the way it is and just gets on with it, but…”

Yeah, he’s a simple guy who drinks his pint and doesn’t think there’s anything weird about the concrete Morrison’s world we live in.

And refreshing – I hear that. After Sophie and all her emotional ups and downs to be with the bright light that was Perlilly, just giggling and not thinking too much. But eventually it gets a bit vacuous. We are, after all, souls on pretty mad spirit journeys.

She ditched him. He was upset, she said. She’s in my arms while we’re talking and I know the attraction she has for me, has had all the while they would have been together.

I’m open and feeling and listening and gentle. Everything’s fine in that regard and I’m a good modern man. But the vain and shallow male in me is also glad to know all that she’s said and it makes me feel like the winner.

Later she tells me how she was telling her friend she’d never had such a powerful physical connection with anyone as she does with me. And shallow male brain puffs up once more.

Oh, what it is to be this mixture of thoughtful and loving and sensitive and kind and constantly growing and maturing aware man – and to also have that part of me that rejoices in shallow victories.

But I is what I is. And there’s so many mes inside. And even though it’s difficult to relate it – it’s really a complexity beyond words – here I am once again, typing, as I’m ever compelled to do.

We’re standing on Menston train station having been out that way to look at a van she wants to buy. The train is forty minutes away and so we hold each other against the cold and talk quietly on the deserted dark station far from the bustle of Leeds.

It’s a wonderful time. I could stay all night on that station, in the peace, everything of the world so far away and nowhere to go, nothing pressing except to be in that moment and to be so close to a gorgeous human being.

One of my biggest fears – my girl with another man – but once I get it out of my head and into the reality of our conversation, talk about it, hear what she has to say, it’s easy and not a big deal at all. None of it matters. Just as I at some level believed it wouldn’t. The whole thing’s over, really, in a matter of a few sentences.

“Was it difficult having two men on the go?” I venture.

And she says the same things I’ve thought, about how you get it in your head, all New Agey with ideas of non-attachment and freedom and give it a try – but the reality’s not so great.

“I felt bad about it,” she says.

“It’s okay,” I say.

And then we get on to talking about other things. Expression of the difficult things releases them and you move on. Keeping them inside is what hurts. Saying them, in that calm and loving atmosphere, is freedom. I don’t even think of them once they’re out. It’s a lovely evening. It ends with gentle kisses as we say goodbye outside the front of the train station in Leeds. Once again, my poor head is soothed, saved from having to think about her and the secret things she’s maybe up to. In this world of phones and texts and the inevitable questions, “what you doing? what you get up to last night?” – usually so innocently asked! – how painful it becomes to know that one can never ask them of one’s previously closest friend and lover again, for fear and knowledge of what the answer might be.

It’s a constant process, this. Even when a relationship is over, it never ends.

…

It’s evening now and the landlord has just been around with the new tenant to sign her contract. She’s due to move in on the 21st and that’s when I’m due to move out. I guess this makes it real. I want to say I feel a little bit sad about the whole thing – but truth is I felt sad before that anyway, despite having just played (and won) a game of squash.

Funny thing about emotions, how they come and go. Before that I was down in town getting a sexual health check-up and that filled me with glee. Love anything to do with hospitals and needles and answering questions. It’s the attention, I guess.

Don’t know why those places are always stocked with hot women – my doctor was an awfully cute Chinese revealing ample bosom.

All that followed a rather mad writing session attempting to further the Discovering Beautiful sequel. Either I’m some sort of genius or I’m the most incoherent writer who ever lived – and I’m tending towards the latter. There’s nothing in my brain that wants to make it make sense to anyone. I just splurge and splurge and…well, you get the idea; you’re here now so you know what I’m about.

I find myself bewildering at times.

I find life pretty bewildering at times these days too. I think of God, and think of how I once lived for that, how I tell myself it was the best thing I ever did, the only thing that mattered – and then I say, but wait, was that even real? Like it was one of those niggling dreams where I’ve been levitating and for a split waking second think it actually happened.

The power of the concrete has done its job well, I guess. And now I’m leaving home and my tear ducts start to quiver and shake as the fear and befuddlement takes hold. Just why am I doing this? Why give up something safe and consistent, even if mostly rotten?

I must be mad, I say. I have a home and in a little over two weeks I won’t have. I’ll be on the road, trudging from place to place, vagabonding once more.

The thought of it makes me want to run back into my shell. But some other memory, I guess, keeps me moving on.

There must be something better out there, that part of me feels.

There’s magic and wonder, and, yes, even God.

I shrink back further and then the voice tries another tack; says, well go ahead then, stay where you are, that’s okay too. But just have a think and see where that will lead you.

Oh yes. Lonely days in a dark cold flat. Living out my years killing time in between supermarket visits and crazy mad typings and sport. Being friendless and strange in a city I otherwise love.

Being in a city. Surrounded by concrete. The memory of nature and how peaceful and beautiful the world can be fading all the time.

Ex says she’s moving to Ireland. Shows me pictures from the week she just had there. Lakes and trees and hills. Not much sign of man. Looks lovely and quiet, the kind of place your soul could breathe. I think of that time I came back to South Elmsall after a week glamping up near York and how harsh the concrete and roads and shops seemed after seven solid days in which my eyes had alighted on naught but trees. It’s all looking at screens. This screen presently contains an image of my kitchen and a rug and this computer and my door. The screen I look upon when I walk in the city is filled with cars and billboards and thousands of bodies belonging to people whose names I know not.

But in nature the screen is gentle and vibrant and green, and the mind rejoices in what it sees, is bathed and soothed and cleansed.

I guess I’ll be needing a bit of that at some point down the line.

Anyways, probably in a minute I’ll go back to the book-in-progress and peek tentatively into what I typed today – and, hopefully, probably, as I usually do, breathe a sigh of relief when I realise it’s actually quite good. I always do that: all these mad blog entries I deposit cringing and ashamed – but when a couple of months passes and I’m brave enough to have a gander, I love what I read.

I’m cuckoo, sure. But it’s kind of fun being me.

And, in any case, I guess something will arise. I may be afraid of the unknown future right here in this moment, childlike and wishing that I had someone to share this frightfully confusing life with – but then, at the same time, I know I wouldn’t have it any other way. Sure, it could work just as well – or even better – to be one of those people that arranges things beforehand and doesn’t just land in towns jobless and homeless swinging their head around looking for signs like I do – but at least it keeps life interesting, and it generally leads me to some pretty cool things.

All I have to do is remember. Remember that little Christmas jaunt down near Birmingham. Remember that penniless hitch across Belize. Remember leaving Oxfordjust before New Years. And remember rocking up at Mother Meera’s in 2011, or 2001, and remind myself of how that went, with bursaries to Leeds and unexpected life-altering trips to Canada.

Mother Meera. She’s in London on the 21st. And I’ll be moving out of here that morning. It’s kind of perfect, I suppose, to leave one’s home and everything one has known for the past year and a half and just a few hours later be empty and expectant in the presence of this strange lady. Something’ll come, I’m sure of it – even if it is sending me back up here. But it’s time for a bit of freedom, a bit of random living. The dice. The I Ching. The coin and the signs and some surrender to The Bigger Picture.

“Don’t leave the country,” that woman had said. I was thinking about that today, when I was contemplating this strange uprooting from Leeds and wondering if I wasn’t getting it completely wrong.

Thing is, if she was accidentally channelling some message, she could just have easily have said, “don’t leave town.”

I mean, imagine what that would have done to me!

But, fact is, she didn’t, and so even though I’m letting those words relax my desires for Canada or Greece, I see no reason for them to keep me here.

Devon, maybe. Somewhere down there. Always fancied the West Country. Supposed to be the best of England, proud Yorkshireman though I am.

Exeter’s supposed to be nice. Totnes could be interesting.

There’s football and refereeing and squash wherever you go.

The NHS too: one very good and big reason to stay amongst these shores.

And what if my dad does eventually peg it? I’ll suddenly have guitar shop and 2-bed flat responsibilities.

Anyways, we shall see. The vision of K still stays with me. Those dreams of Canada and this long-desired sneak into the States. But in the meantime I write my sequel and who knows where that will leave me, emotionally, once it’s done? I mean: what an insane time I’ve lived! If only this typing could make some sense of it and free me from that tangled mess once and for all. My head is full and I need a release. I can’t stop thinking back. But Discovering Beautiful freed me from the years 1996-2000 – and if the sequel could do the same for the decade or so that followed…wow, I’d be in dreamland.

It would be so nice to be here and in the present, rather than forever harking to the past. To weird times. To women and friends long gone. To lands I’m not even allowed to visit. And to a thousand, million versions of me who no longer exist.