Often people post on facebook, ‘Anyone wanna come and spoon?’. Or they’ll post a status saying how lonely they are. I’m put in mind of ‘Notes on a Scandal’ –
“People like Sheba think that they know what it’s like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don’t know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor’s hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
Please don’t have me down as someone who immediately reads something which they had thought was their own demented and mangled feelings and suddenly realise I’m Not Alone! Everyone has this! Though you could be forgiven for feeling that.
Like a lot of people I’m very lonely. Unlike a lot of people I’m desperately, desperately lonely. My mother and her mother like to gossip about people. They do it often. The elder will talk about her sister who has ‘gone funny’. The poor woman doesn’t remember anyone, and talks about people long dead as if they were coming round. In some ways that is kinder, it’s not that sort of funny. They are blissful in their ignorance. I’m woeful in my knowledge.
I’m not numb like a depressive. I don’t think I’m depressed, the outdoor-me is far too happy. I’m not in a bell jar, the rest of the world is, and that’s the problem. I can’t get in, I physically can’t. Do the ‘spooners’ and ‘loners’ know what it is like to not be able to leave your bed or bedroom? The terror about having to walk the three steps to the Wheelie Bins outside? Do they know that you cannot tell anyone? (Certainly not post statuses on facebook about how depressed you are). I doubt it.
My position is on the precipice, only just in with everyone else. I haven’t been out the house this weekend. Nor any other weekend for past 5 years just about. I’ve never had more than one friend round, and then not for more than a few hours. All my brothers and sisters have. And often, but I just can’t.
Us and them; I can’t be outside. People are outside and I’m in here. People who will stare at me. And I’ll think it’s because of my hair or my looks. But I like school. It’s a situation so absurd to the introverted house-me that I become manic. What else can I do. It’s a battlefield, the brain switches off and devotes everything it can to survival.
Other people want someone with whom they can spoon. I think I get that in theory, and it sounds a lovely activity, not that anyone would do it with me. It’s not that I want someone to hold. It would just be nice to be relaxed around someone. Some around whom I don’t have to act and fizzle and smile all the time and be really nice. Someone around whom I don’t have to camp and whine and be interested in everything, and gossip and bullshit and lie to impress and show off and make sure everyone knows I’m the most erudite and clever person around. Someone around whom I don’t have to be polite and butt in every other word with a laboured anecdote thinking I’m Gore Vidal. It just gets boring, and it alienates what few friends I have. It would just be nice to be around someone with whom I can be unrelentingly and irrevocably me.
But it can’t be like that.
You might think I’m saying this to gain sympathy, but I know you our reaction. You may think, ‘what a baby’ or ‘grow up’ or (to quote, which is the only thing I pretty much can do, Frasier) ‘Copernicus called, turns out you’re not the centre of the universe’. Others might say the most painful thing, ‘Get A Life’. I know this, because it’s what outdoors-me would say. I’m afraid however, it’s just something that I cannot do. I could never let anyone in my house let alone my head. It’s my job to go to their places, and learn about them, just to make sure I’m doing this life correctly. Thats the problem, it’s why Firefox tells me I’ve visited Facebook 60,942 times.
Maybe there could be someone who may one day enter the life of one who cannot leave their own head. But that’s impossible. The house-me is too unstable, too sadistic, too manic, too immature, too desperate, too clingy and too scared.
Auden reliably informs me we’re all children alone in the wood scared. Not sure I buy that.
The point of this long and arduous thing, is the hope that I may find someone who feels the crushing lonliness I’ve described. I hope I could provide the solace, that we are here. We two exist in a lifetime of chaos or nothingness. Suspended across space. Here I am, talking to you. Perhaps this will give me a reason to get up, and go outside, and talk and maybe help someone. Give me a purpose. But in the mean time, thank you.
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours” - Alan Bennett
