Just to spend time with her, I guess, and have her close.
But do I want that because of some genuinely deeper reason, or is it merely to protect me from hurt, to know that if she’s with me she can’t be with anyone else? Just some weird emotional process I’m going through and all of this will pass? Or maybe a mix of all three, plus a million other things besides?
In any case, I’m suffering a little. Layers of emotion keep revealing themselves to me, going ever deeper in realisation and strength and regret. One layer surfaces and delivers its monologue over and over, like a repeating record, and then eventually it fades and another takes it place. I’m moving through something, that’s for sure, but it’s not pleasant in the moving – nor fast enough for my liking, just a little too repetitive.
I feel like an idiot. Like I should be above this. Understand it better. And it makes me want to cry for the idiot I was. A love ended and one of the layers I’m currently looking at is the one called, “all the ways I failed.” It’s pretty depressing. It’s time I’ll never get back again. It was a chance to do something good and I blew it.
One of the reasons I got with Nicky was because of how great she was at doing stuff. I’d heard about her times in Australia and Mauritius and how she got into surfing and camping and roadtrips and bought a bigass 4x4 and played music and had her own kite-surfing equipment and she seemed so adventurous and get-out-there-and-do-it. I’m adventurous, in spirit, but the actual doing is often a bit beyond me. Got older, I guess. Slumped into habits and learned how to say, “no.” Figured I’d done a lot of things and knew what they were about and was kind of tired of them by now. And always pretty tight with money, on not squandering it and too keen on not working a job I don’t like.
I seem to have shrunk smaller and smaller into this way of thinking every year and it bugs.
So Nicky comes along and I see some salvation and inspiration. We can be good together. Her young and excited spirit can drag me back into a world I know is good for me but which I neglect for reasons already outlined. And she tries, bless her, but after a while she has no choice but to desist. Something in me doesn’t want to join her. Some resentment, perhaps, or…
All these things are only just occurring to me: it seemed quite reasonable at the time. But now, with my eyes suddenly opened, when I look back I feel such shame and remorse. At how she would go running and I never once joined her, despite quite enjoying running, though only with another person. At all her yoga and spiritual practise and investigating different techniques and joining groups. I guess I thought I’d been there, done that, and knew the score pretty well. At her green stuff, her trips to the countryside, her rockclimbing and permaculture and –
I wonder what the hell was wrong with me. I was like a child who had discovered the power of refusal. I’ve done that in relationships before. I want togetherness but something seems to stop me.
We had a fairly major trauma together very early into our relationship. Maybe that’s what it was. Retreating into some safe place of the known. Exercising some measure of control. Or punishing her, perhaps, for imagined damages caused.
Ego stuff, maybe, trying to show who was boss.
Cutting off my nose to spite my face.
I don’t know what it was. I just know that it sucks to look back on it and see what I did wrong and think how life could have been. Yet another chance blown. Another time lived never to be repeated. More and more mistakes and less and less women to make them with. Less years too. Time ticks ever onwards and at some point I’m going to wake up and realise that I’m no longer a young man, despite the looks and demeanour which have thus far preserved the illusion. Thirty-seven isn’t that far off forty. But nearly everything about me – my career, my lovelife, my maturity, my financial position – is retarded.
Maybe I’m having a mid-life crisis?
And yet: there’s not a person in the world I would trade my life with. Not one I know, anyway.
It’s all so very confusing…
…
I wake up and I think of my ex. I walk down the street, I lay myself to sleep…and she’s right there in my head. If I send her a text, waiting for the reply is agony. I talked about the emotional struggle I had with not having a phone – but, truth is, once I got one I only really bothered putting her number on it and that seemed to cure the whole thing.
It’s her I want to contact, to spend time with, to talk to and hold and hear…
But do I want to get back with her? That’s a question I…well, it’s a situation I just can’t envisage. And I guess that’s why things are confusing.
Move on. Find another girl. Try again. Try not to make the same mistakes twice. Try –
I remember when I got with her, though. That song I started to write –
This time, more than any other time
I’m gonna find a way to get it straight
This time I ain’t gonna fool around
Ain’t gonna put you down, no no
This time
Woah, this time
But in my head
I’m just a little bit wrong
It ain’t my fault
It’s the way I was born
I didn’t get no love
From mum or dad
Or anyone
Had to figure it out
All on my own
Like a [something something], yeah
This time…
– and of course that whole John Lennon tune thing I’ve mentioned several times by now and –
Well, yes, she was great. A good and wonderful person. Pretty and positive. Smokin’ hot body and unbelievable in bed. Kind. A great cook. Liked me. And, best of all, the talks we had, the manner of discussion, the calmness and the rationality and the openness and the –
I guess the other thing I’m realising is that we never really saw how far that could go. The relationship ended – but as I wrote last time, it didn’t really end. There are still so many things I want to tell her, places in our conversation that we could go. Words withheld for whatever reasons we had at the time – fears, taught but wrong methods of interactions, thinking it was the right thing when it wasn’t – and the layers go deeper and deeper always. I never had my words accepted so freely. All those things we keep inside…and I guess I’m afraid I won’t find that again.
And it’s about here that the voice pops up – the voice of reason, perhaps? – and reminds me as I’m sure you’ll all have been screaming already, “but it doesn’t have to be over with this girl, if she’s as good and lovely as you’re constantly saying she is. She’s not dead. She’s right there in the same town as you. And what better way to make amends than with the person wronged, rather than merely with yourself, and with the next girlfriend incarnate?”
They’re all good points. I guess it’s maybe habit that keeps me from looking at that option. Something ends and you move away from it, search out someone else to become “your one.” But need it be that way? I –
Listen, let’s not get away from the fact that we had problems, many differences between us, and many reservations on my part. I won’t repeat them here because I’ve gone into them far too much in this journal already, much to my foolish chagrin and regret, since not only did it perhaps make them grow in my own brain, but she one day read some of them and despite us talking about it and seeming to move on, it must have been so bloody hard for her and put something between us that wasn’t good for anyone.
Also, I’m struggling with the fact of her having been with someone else. It’s hypocritical, obviously, but it gets in my head and I haven’t yet gone beyond it. I have no problem loving her in the moment, and being totally honest and open – we’re far more honest and open now than when we were together – nor in the love making, and making it a loving and connected experience – that’s been much better since we broke up too – it’s just that…
Well, she did lie to me so that she could spend the night with another man. And lies and trust and all that malarkey...
It’s possible that’s all just petty small-minded little boys’ stuff. Simply justifications of an insecurity and a jealousy and –
Hurt feelings. I think of how she came here when it was my birthday. Took me out to dinner. Cooked for me around that time right here in the flat we used to share while I was at university nude modelling and when I walked in the door to see her stood there at the stove it was like the whole not living together was just some weird dream. How natural it was to put my arms around her and slip a hand inside her bra. Kiss her and say, “how was your day?” The Moleskein journal she gifted me that I haven’t been able to touch. The birthday card with the words about always being there for me when I needed her that I tore up and threw away. All that just days before the night of the lies and the night I didn’t sleep a wink and the night I was thrown into this turmoil.
So many reminders. So much mental anguish. So many mixed feelings and so little understanding. I’ve been no saint in this regard. And it’s not as though she’s even done any wrong by me – probably more so by the other guy. But that’s all just intellectual rationalisations and they serve me not when it comes to matters of the heart. I guess I feel a need to do something about it – ‘tis the male way – but maybe there is nothing to do but feel this pain, work through these layers, listen to these abominable thoughts, and maybe try and learn to not be such a dick next time. To remember having had this experiment with free love and non-attachment and having come to this place of deciding it’s not for me. To be brave in saying EVERYTHING and holding back nothing that needs release. To saying “yes” to life and your other, and giving things a go rather than retreating into childish unconscious control games. And to a million other things besides.
This whole thing makes me really want to be with someone. Life can be so lonely. A man wants a woman to share his triumphs and despairs with. Maybe God and total internal satisfaction are possible and real – but right now all this boy wants is the soft curve of a woman’s body to curl into and to tell her his heart and to never let go. To treasure her and to stick with it, through thick and thin. I’m tired of chopping and changing. I’m tired of leaving or being left when the going gets tough. Someone’s got to be out there somewhere.
…
I went out for dinner last night with my dad. My bike having received yet another puncture I’d had to walk there from football and had plenty of time to listen to my brain going on and feel the ache in my heart. All ex related stuff. All realisations and regrets, as detailed above.
So, when we sat down and he asked me what was happening with me I decided to have a little experiment and tell him the truth.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said, “all I can think about is Nicky. It’s depressing.”
I left a space there, to see what he would fill it with.
“Not me, son,” he said, “I’m done with women. Can’t be bothered. Like my own company too much these days.” And then to go on a bit about his flat and the shop and guitars – all talk I’d heard many times before – and the subject, I took it, had been well and truly changed. Or, more truthfully, unnoticed and ignored.
It’s not his fault, bless him; it’s not like anyone ever taught him how to listen or how to be there for another person. He does his best and he’s no doubt a damn sight of an improvement on his own dad, which is all you can really hope for in the process of human growth. Evolution happens slowly, doesn’t necessarily conform to our wishes. I look at him and know that, were I to act like that with my own son – or with anyone – I would be failing both myself and them massively. But that’s more a reflection on me, not him, and so there’s no possibility of getting cross with him, of wanting more.
Still, I do sometimes think it must be nice to have had parental units that one could turn to in times of need and receive something more than a blank screen and useless information. Kids that grow up with that don’t know how lucky they are. I guess it’s my job to make sure I pass that on, and break the cycle, having been blessed with realising a thing or two in this life.
A little while ago I was writing about Mother Meera and how I felt the idea I have of her in my head was holding me back from doing what I really want to do. All that stuff she says about staying in one place, living normally with your family, and working a job. So what I thought I would do is look into her books – Answers I and II – and pull out the essence of things she’s said and maybe do a blog entry where I ‘conversed’ with her and argued against the things I didn’t necessarily believe in. Hopefully that would exorcise the control that voice has come to have over me and free me to live more purely from the own heart.
So I read her books and jotted down some of her answers and what I found through reading them was, wow, on the whole I pretty much agree with everything she says and that it doesn’t contradict with the way I want to live my life. Also, despite whatever doubts myself and others have about her alleged divinity, man, those answers are good. So short and snappy. So to the point. And so full of a genuine common sense wisdom.
Anyway, that’s probably a whole other story – whether I have that conversation or not – but what I wanted to get to here was the stuff she says about parents and family, and how it relates to me. Probably a lot of what she says is more relevant to the Eastern model of family – or good ones in the West – and it’s almost impossibly hard to relate it to mine. Still, I thought I’d give it a try.
Mother says: “One should love and serve one’s parents. Do what they want you to do. Forgive them if they’ve mistreated you and go on loving them. Do your duty.”
I read that and I immediately think of my mother. Think of how harsh I’ve been with her, and of how we haven’t spoken for two years, and that it was a further three before that. The animosity between us, and the hurtful things she’d said in her last emails to me. Sure, she wasn’t what I’d call a great mother – not the mother I’d want for my children, nor the mother I’d want to be – but that’s because I’m judging her on my own terms, based on the things I’ve learned that she never had a chance to. She’s no worse as a mother than my dad is as a father – and yet I find it so easy to overlook his faults and failings, and so difficult with her. I guess ‘cos she was actually there when I was growing up and struggling with me throughout all those turbulent teenage years. And because I wanted so much more from her, and never felt I got it. A part of me still wants it. A part of me –
As I type those words I have an image of myself just resting my head in her lap, crying for my woes and being totally and utterly vulnerable in my speech. She accepts it quietly and understands it all. Strokes my hair and listens patiently, gazing down lovingly. And as I speak those words of hurt and anguish the pain is gone and I am cleansed.
It’s a scene I have lived perhaps a few times with girlfriends, when at a low moment and my ego subsides to let the vulnerability flow. I love those moments, and to reveal myself in such a manner. But it’s not often I feel able to do that, to trust the other person enough, to let myself be that weak, even if that’s what I am.
I think of the time after I broke up with Eve and the months of heartache I lived through then. Of being back in Wakefield and standing in my mum’s kitchen and saying something to her about it. And instantly she starts to come out with some rational advice and head stuff which of course makes perfect sense but is totally disconnected from the current emotional situation. I stop her. I say something like, I don’t need that, I’m hurting, just give me a hug. And later I wrote a song about it:
Hold me close now
I am crying
I don’t need advice
I just want love
Just want to feel love
I wish more people could find an awareness of that sort of thing. Those moments when words are no use. When you just need to be held and understood. When you need someone to create a space for you to pour out your heart and let the expression do its work.
I guess that’s why I write this journal. Never found anyone in the real world I could trust as much, who had such a capacity to listen.
Not that I’m saying there should be such a person – ‘cos I sure do blab a lot! But back to what I was saying…
…about reading Mother Meera’s words and thinking about how it could apply to my own family. About rueing the disconnection I have with my own mother and wanting to somehow make it better. About wanting to forgive everything and, ya know, just be friends. And about wishing that I had someone to turn to in times of need, and someone who could, yes, give me good advice when it comes to all this confusion about jobs and relationships and where and how to live.
Oh, to be Indian and to have a (good) arranged marriage and a career decided for you! To know you were going to stick at it and not keep chopping and changing and then one day reach that stage where the wife who came to you a stranger is the love you cannot live without and the job you once struggled with is a struggle no more, but just the thing you do to take away the pain of too much thinking and pay for your home and children and food –
Yup, probably a lot be said for that system of living, done right. But we are here and alone in the West, serial singletons with so much freedom we don’t know what to do with it, beyond moving to a new city and sitting solitary in our rooms and our apartments on facebook, so many friends and so many good times yakking it up down the pub and in the club – but who do we turn to when we need a lap and a heart into which to cry our tears?
I told my dad the other week that I’d been reading about the Indian system of living – didn’t mention the source – and how the father would make a lot of decisions for the son and that I actually thought it quite savvy.
Quite right, he agrees, you should always do what your father tells you to.
Okay then, I says, let’s pretend I’ve come to you and I’m saying, father, what should I do with my life? Who should I marry? What should my job be?
Asking all this sitting there in his shop – in the family business – right there where I started my working life some twenty-three years ago aged but fourteen, and with him knowing of and having met pretty much all my past girlfriends.
What would you expect him to say? I know what I was thinking.
I’d say, bugger off and figure it out for yourself like the rest of us have to, he said – with maybe an expletive or two thrown in for good measure.
Good old dad. You can always rely on him to be useless. My family is different, I guess, and different rules apply. We’re not Indian and we’re not even decent in the English scheme of things. Neither of my parents have ever given a toss what I did, always finding refuge in the grand cover-up of, “we don’t care what you do just so long as you’re happy” – which is just the nice way of saying, “we don’t care.” That may have given me a lot of freedom and allowed me to develop my own way of doing things – perhaps what I wanted and maybe even needed – but sometimes I have to wonder if a little steering in the right direction might not have been a bad idea. Well, this is the system we live in. Neither way is perfect and each has some fairly serious flaws – and probably always will have, as long as societies and parents and human individuals possess serious flaws too. I know there is a middle ground, and that the middle ground could work – but will we ever find it in this topsy-turvy world?
My own situation is complicated by the fact of having two dads. Now which one should I turn to if I were living an Indian-style life and wanted some advice about what job to do or who to marry? Which one should I follow – the man who I’ve spent most time with, and whose business I was once an apprentice in and still know a lot about, or the one whose genes I share, and whose personality is most like my own, yet have rarely seen? And what of my mum, now so estranged, and always so strange?
No wonder I’m all alone and having to find my own way through life. And no wonder I seek mothers in these Indian spiritual ladies and fathers in guys like John Milton. Some older and wiser version of me with the answers when the answers won’t come. And maybe that’s the problem with each of my three actual parents – ‘cos though I know they’re older, and though I know myself to be a fool, I’m pretty sure not a one of them is any wiser than I am and would know what was good for me. So the whole idea of taking something from Mother Meera’s advice to listen to your parents falls flat on its face.
Still, it’s something I’ll try to do for my own kids, should I have them. Yes, it’s what’s inside that counts, and the materialistic, consumerist existence may be pretty shallow and ultimately dissatisfying – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t choose a career, shouldn’t live in a house. Just because much of what current society believes is normal is actually weird and twisted out of shape and doing more harm than good doesn’t mean you have to throw the whole thing in the bin and build it yourself from scratch, as I seem to have done. I’ve tried a good deal and I guess I’ve come up with the answers myself – but the answers I’ve come up with – that a committed, monogamous relationship is the way to go; that work is good; that a physically comfortable life can assist you in being happy – are all answers that were arrived at long ago, established by the general consensus, and were there all around me all along. I guess I just didn’t believe in them – or didn’t believe in them the way they had been presented to me in my upbringing, with marriages littered by divorce and families a nest of hatred and violence; pubs and booze and rank materialism; religion an empty ritual and God absent from His church; hypocrisy and lies and societally-condoned madness at every street corner. All of which may be true – but it doesn’t mean it’s a truth I have to live myself. Which brings me right back around to where we started, and women…
After the curry my dad and I came back to mine for a cup of tea and some strumming of guitars. He talked again about wanting to record together. Reminisced about the old days recording on an Amstrad Studio 100. His old band The Squarefoot Brothers and the Burnley Blues Festival and that time I played with him real drunk that’s on a video somewhere that I’ve never seen. Then somewhere in there he mentions finding a photograph of me and my first girlfriend over at my uncle Ron’s three or four years before he murdered his wife. I remember that photo and remember that night too: it was around Christmas and they were all drunk and my uncle Ron was cajoling me into telling my dad to “bog off” for some nonsense he was saying. It was all pretty lighthearted but I refrained, knowing my dad’s temper and how he could explode at even the gentlest of teasings. But eventually I gave in and uttered those two harmless words – and just as I’d expected and feared, my dad went off on. Started going on about how he hadn’t needed to take my mum on when she was pregnant with me. Drunken anger. Overreaction and stupidity. I caught my girlfriend’s confused expression – she had no idea my dad wasn’t my dad; I was a good five or six years away from sharing that secret with anyone – and I guess I got us to skedaddle out of there, made up some excuse for the weird things he’d been saying.
Anyways, that’s not, of course, what we talk about when we look at that picture. Nor, probably, what he remembers of that night. Nor, indeed, what I wanted to talk about here…
Pictures. Old photos. I’ve never really sat in front of my own laptop with my dad and it’s an excuse to show him what I’ve got on there. That same folder contains other pictures of the two of us, and of his mum (my gran) and also my brother. Pictures from his wedding back in ’92. Pictures of my own first band, with guys he knew quite well. Pictures of the Cluckenbucker guitar we manufactured out of mad old bits and sold for eight pounds and later learned that a guy had actually used the crazy deformed thing on a record, and treasured it still. Another story we can always reminisce on. My dad’s reaching that age now where he has no awareness of having repeated the same story seven times already, his enthusiasm of the memory undimmed by any demands of forever trying to say something new.
Then I come to other times: times from my travels, and photos of me with other former girlfriends. Pictures of me and Sophie. And looking at them with him…the way she stares right through the camera at me…and the shape and memory of her face…
Was she the one? The one I should have stuck with and the one who has ruined me for all future women? Certainly I’ve believed that for a good portion of the last twelve years, even though we’ve now been separated, I can barely believe, for getting on for six. Six years! Christ, I have no comprehension of that and no idea where all the time has gone. Six years is a lifetime when you’re twenty-four. And so much of my head still is twenty-four, hasn’t really progressed, as old journal entries and my circumstances stand testimony to.
There was a girl who I really loved, and felt the togetherness with that subsequent girlfriends have noticed was lacking. I wanted to be with her always. Do everything with. Didn’t say no. Didn’t feel a need to. But again, we blew it…
I wonder if she ever harks back to me the way I do to her. Wonder if she ever thinks about me in her single days and ponders her hand over the phone just to see…to hear my voice…to feel if there’s any spark.
Or probably she’s met a good man by now, and he’s given her the life that she deserves. I regret it, but I tell myself she’s long gone, that there’s no turning back the clock and that all these memories and impulses I have are best interpreted as intentions to do better in the future, with loves and lovers new, rather than as directions to try and patch things up with those from the past.
That’s what I tell myself, in my brain, and I guess it’s right. But in my heart…
No, let’s stick with the rational for a second – for much as I hark back to the past there’s also a sense that each successive partner I’ve had has been better than the last, and that I’ve been somehow better with them. Learned more. Been less angry and small-minded. Had more harmony and closeness and ease. A lot of things weren’t easy with Sophie – but I have no pictures of them. Likewise with Perlilly and Laura and Nicky, even though they got easier every time. So there’s an upward progression here, an evolution. And into each new relationship I take the tools accumulated and mistakes learned from the past and put it to work. Indeed, it is the changes in me that help attract the partners I attract.
Is there any reason to think this upward motion won’t continue? That I’ll never have an opportunity to utilise all the lessons and mistakes outlined above and over the last few months with somebody new, and somebody better, and somebody perhaps more suited to finally getting it on in a long-term stylee? Especially if one of the lessons learned – yes God, please – is that I can’t chop and change any longer, that I want to go through all this thick and thin now with one person, and one person only, and to see where it leads. And then…
But what if Nicky was that one? What if she could still be?
And what if I saw Sophie in the street?
And what if – dream of dreams – I bumped into one day that Coloradan mystery girl? ‘Cos I know I can’t get her out of my heart: my dad says last night, “do you have any regrets? would you have done anything differently?” – he, naturally, wouldn’t change a thing (as we’re all supposed to say) – but I tell him the story (having been writing about it lots in my ongoing sequel project) of Grace and how I wish to high heaven I’d have gotten in her car. I mean, how could anyone not regret a thing like that? Or am I just cursed to have the mind I do?
Yes, I have regrets – and pretty much all of them about women.
I wish I’d done more to sort things out with Sophie in the months before our break-up. To talk about it all and see what came out the other side. To not have said some of the dumbass things I said.
I wish I’d kissed Julia when I was fourteen and sixteen and maybe been her boyfriend.
And I wish I’d gotten in that car.
But – cliché time – wishes are fishes and they swim away. You can’t turn back the clock. And you can’t live in the past – unless infinite universes are real and even as we speak other versions of me are hearing these wishes and giving them a try (or you can be reincarnated as yourself and have another run through the whole darn thing).
Fact is, all of those wishes I could turn into things I have learned and things I can apply in my future. The only problem is the knowledge of the ticking clock, and the thought that I’ll run out of wonderful, attractive women to fall in love with.
That and the nagging sensation that I’ve already met the one I was destined to be with but blew it because of my modern world upbringing confusion which fails to recognise the preciousness of finding someone you want to share your life with and teaches you exactly what I’ve not that long ago professed I believe in: that there’s always someone better around the corner.
But isn’t it only idiots and fictional characters who believe in finding someone perfect, rather than creating something perfect with an unavoidably flawed human being, just as we ourselves are flawed?
Yes, I am that idiot. And for some reason I’ve come to believe more in the teachings of fiction than in what is plainly true about life. Maybe because I had no parental modelling. And maybe because pretty much everyone else does.
But maybe it’s time to stop. Maybe NEXT TIME is the time I’ll get it straight and make use of all the mad and wrong times I’ve lived…
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