Trip Diary - Six: Time
“I can’t remember all the times I tried to tell myself to hold onto these moments as they pass.”
We don’t say much on the drive to LAX. The words are there, though. As I watch the California scenery race by, it’s almost as though I can feel them hanging in the air behind me, every moment of silence lending them more weight. In just a few hours time, I’ll be on a plane back to England and the emptiness of the Darkened Room.
That feeling of secrets and hidden connections looms large in my dry mouth and unsettled stomach. The previous evening, we’d arrived home to find Oliver Stone’s Nixon on TV. It was this, more than anything, that inspired us to finally make a visit to the Nixon Library And Birthplace, just a short drive from Jenn’s place. I hadn’t felt anything while we were there, just amusement at the amount of spelling and grammar mistakes and vague disgust at the way history was blatantly rewritten to paint a disgraced ex-president as some kind of saint.
Even standing over the graves of Dick and his wife Pat, I had no great sense that this was a moment to be remembered. Quite the opposite. I’d turned to Jenn and said: “I wonder if we’d get thrown out if I jumped the fence and danced a little.”
It’s no longer about coincidence and connection, about drawing lines between apparently isolated events in order to create some new picture. It’s about time and how it’s getting away from us, slipping through our fingers like the metaphorical sand. At least one part of my mind is already ruminating on jetlag again, reflecting on the irony of timezones making it a three hour journey here and a seventeen hour journey back, as though the reluctance of my departure could somehow stretch that time like elastic, willing it to snap so that life wouldn’t have to go on, so that I could just stay.
“I don’t want you to go,” Jenn says.
“I don’t want to go,” I reply.
It isn’t a fear of the words now. These short sentences are like the titles of stories that don’t need to be told. They are plots and characters and feelings we know all too well. A week is not a long time by any stretch of the imagination, but in all honesty I knew on that first morning, when I woke up and found my head filled with past relationships and my fears about commitment. Those thoughts may not have been as familiar as the more mundane defences I’ve built up over the course of my life, but they were defences all the same, a sort of mental assuming of the crash position in the knowledge that a wave of emotion was coming.
I wanted it. I want it. Of course I want it. I crave it. But at the same time, I’m always aware that I’ve invested a lot of time and effort in not getting close to people, in crafting a persona that could be warm without ever really being intimate, without opening doors slammed shut when I was a child. I don’t feel sorry for myself, not anymore, but I’m afraid of trust and of letting people get close.
Understand that dealing in words has become, for me, the greatest defence of them all. I’ve spent years weaving this tapestry, twisting fiction around truth and dream around reality. The more I write, the more practised that talent becomes. It’s a skill born of a blunt and childish desire to hide, a skill I’ve sharpened to a savage point. I’ve always said that writing is about translating and communicating, but it’s also about deflecting and obscuring. If I’m focussing your attention on one wound, you can be sure it’s because I’m concealing another that I’d rather you didn’t see. For me at least, that’s the true joy of being able to play with language and its many meanings. The most obvious paragraph in the world can simultaneously be the writer’s most intricate puzzle. I was drawn to this form because I wanted to be able to articulate a scream, to give it shape and definition. But I didn’t fall in love until the day I realised that screams are built of breaths and whispers, and that what the writer looks for isn’t a muse so much as a reader, somebody that hears and sees it all. I wanted to be published for validation, for vindication. But I wanted to be read because it was the only way I could show myself. I need control. Without it, my first instinct is to turn and run. I’m afraid of being hurt, but I’ve been hurt before and I’m still here. What really frightens me is being seen – really seen – and understood.
Listen. Like a lot of people, I’ve had a fucked up existence that has brought with it all manner of hang-ups and secrets and fears. For the last decade, I’ve been close to no-one. Things happened to me when I was a kid that left me looking at my family and my friends and finding them shallow and ridiculous. Finding maturity, for me, was about finding a way to exist in a world I rejected unconditionally. Over time, I’ve been able to chip away at the detachment and the hate. I’ve been able to set foot out there without laughing or crying or running away. Having found my own peculiar path and beliefs, I’ve let people back in to the extent that they’ve been able to show me how foolish I was being in some respects. None of that has changed the fact that the Darkened Room is my favourite place and my preferred company is my own. I’ve built a life around that, around the basic concept that there is me and then there is everybody else. Sometimes I think I’m special, but mostly I think I’m alone.
A feeling that I was understood, that there was someone in the world that complemented and partnered me, would destroy that. As much as I lament this existence sometimes, it’s all I have. I made it that way because I wanted to be somebody special and different and all the rest of it. To put it in the blunt and childish language that started me on this road in the first place, I wanted to be a star. When I was twelve years old, I thought that nobody loved me because nobody had ever told me they did. Of course, I know now that that wasn’t and isn’t true. But the feeling, the I-am-special-I-am-different-I’m-going-to-be-a-star feeling, has never really gone away. I’ve grown up with it all tied in to my Darkened Room and my writing and the way I look at the world. What truly terrifies me, when I break my heart up and look at the component parts, is losing that feeling of adversity. I might think I’m special and different and a star, but actually being those things isn’t a part of the equation. I’ve always aimed for the sky, but I’ve discovered it’s the journey that motivates me, not the destination.
Which is why, despite the fact that I am human and want more than anything in the world to be in love, I resist it and hide from it and keep the door of the Darkened Room very firmly closed at all times.
I think all of these things on the drive to LAX. Not in that kind of detail, but the salient points are all present and accounted for. We talk, Jenn and I, but what we say doesn’t really stay in my mind. It’s a silent movie, my eyes as camera on the scenery, on my first sighting of planes and runways, on the sea of passengers and cars. We find my terminal and a place to park, make our way toward the Virgin check-in desk. On the way, we’re left stranded on the wrong side of the road while we wait for a light to change. I find Jennifer’s hand and it’s an effort to look at her, to kiss her. These practical tasks – the finding of parking spaces and check-in desks, the showing of passports and papers – are what makes it feel like goodbye.
“Can I see your tickets please?” a woman in a red uniform asks. “Where are you flying to?”
“Heathrow,” I say. “Just me.”
Just me.
We leave the check-in area and I have maybe an hour before I need to make my way through to the departure lounge. We take a long walk to another terminal where we find a bar and Jenn buys the drinks. We make empty small talk and laugh at an English couple ordering drinks and struggling with the same cultural contrasts that had defeated me when I’d first arrived. We fake it, and it almost works.
Life isn’t like the movies. We’re not doing a dramatic goodbye at the gates while the airline staff wave frantically. We’re just sitting in a bar having a farewell drink and talking about anything but what’s actually happening. When I look up from my drink and see that she’s crying, goodbye becomes overwhelming, becomes everything. Time is being called on the young lovers, and looking the other way is no longer an option.
We walk back to Terminal 2, to the sliding doors and the lonely world beyond. Our mutual last request is a cigarette, and we stand smoking and watching the passengers go by. In a fitting piece of symmetry, the last thing that happens before I finally have to go is that we’re accosted by a bald man who admires my hair before admitting he’s a monk and that he wants to give us literature.
“No thanks,” I say, because I’ve been here a week now and I’m practically a veteran. “That really isn’t my thing.”
We hold onto each other for as long as we can. I manage to say at least some of the things I want to. We promise this isn’t the end. Jennifer finally leaves my embrace and we go our separate ways. I step into the terminal, promising myself I won’t look back, that I’ll show my ticket and go straight up the stairs to customs.
One, two, three, four steps, flash boarding pass, break promise. At the foot of the stairs, I turn and scan the window behind me, right to left, gaze flitting past the uniforms and the passengers and the grey background, finally alighting on a tall, slim girl, all white skin and black clothes, walking with her head down, just concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other.
Jennifer, I think. My Maybe Girl. And then: No. My girl.
When she’s out of sight, I make my way up the stairs, my feet heavy and numb, my stomach hollow. I swallow. I blink rapidly. I stop walking and take a deep breath, raising my head to look at the security checkpoint, to focus on routine and practicality and all the mundane details of travel.
In a movie, I would have turned around. I’d have looked at what was ahead, thought about what I was leaving behind, and made the obvious decision. Of course, movies don’t concern themselves with debts and visas and the minutiae of real life. Movies are like dreams, stories we run through our heads when we need to remind ourselves that someday we’ll be better people in a better place. The irony of that thought isn’t lost on me when, some twenty minutes later, I find myself doing a double-take outside the coffee shop in the departure lounge, where American actor Billy Zane and his girlfriend, British model Kelly Brook, are smiling at each other over cappuccinos.
Sometimes I wonder if I haven’t lost some of the feelings I had growing up; the uncomplicated happiness of childhood; the pure sadness and anger of puberty; the sense of injustice that dominated my late teens. In a way, that’s what makes the surge of bright and powerful hate that clenches my fists in that moment so pleasing. I got to California and I got to Jennifer, and despite all my insecurities and fears, it was worth it. Kelly and Billy have money and status and all the things that make a transatlantic relationship little more than a slight inconvenience, a matter of buying tickets and taking flights. Jennifer and I don’t live in that world, but I’m somehow sure that we’ll be around long after Kelly and Billy have ceased to make the celebrity pages in the tabloids back home.
And as I feel the first stirrings of a grin at the corners of my mouth, I finish that thought with relish: Our story, Billy, will be bigger and better and more meaningful than any film you’ll ever be in, you hammy, talentless bastard. Fuck you.
In my mind, I extend that ‘fuck you’ to the entire airport, to the country, to the world. Making a mental note to relate this story to Jenn the next time we speak, I shoulder my bag and make my way to the plane.
We don’t say much on the drive to LAX. The words are there, though. As I watch the California scenery race by, it’s almost as though I can feel them hanging in the air behind me, every moment of silence lending them more weight. In just a few hours time, I’ll be on a plane back to England and the emptiness of the Darkened Room.
That feeling of secrets and hidden connections looms large in my dry mouth and unsettled stomach. The previous evening, we’d arrived home to find Oliver Stone’s Nixon on TV. It was this, more than anything, that inspired us to finally make a visit to the Nixon Library And Birthplace, just a short drive from Jenn’s place. I hadn’t felt anything while we were there, just amusement at the amount of spelling and grammar mistakes and vague disgust at the way history was blatantly rewritten to paint a disgraced ex-president as some kind of saint.
Even standing over the graves of Dick and his wife Pat, I had no great sense that this was a moment to be remembered. Quite the opposite. I’d turned to Jenn and said: “I wonder if we’d get thrown out if I jumped the fence and danced a little.”
It’s no longer about coincidence and connection, about drawing lines between apparently isolated events in order to create some new picture. It’s about time and how it’s getting away from us, slipping through our fingers like the metaphorical sand. At least one part of my mind is already ruminating on jetlag again, reflecting on the irony of timezones making it a three hour journey here and a seventeen hour journey back, as though the reluctance of my departure could somehow stretch that time like elastic, willing it to snap so that life wouldn’t have to go on, so that I could just stay.
“I don’t want you to go,” Jenn says.
“I don’t want to go,” I reply.
It isn’t a fear of the words now. These short sentences are like the titles of stories that don’t need to be told. They are plots and characters and feelings we know all too well. A week is not a long time by any stretch of the imagination, but in all honesty I knew on that first morning, when I woke up and found my head filled with past relationships and my fears about commitment. Those thoughts may not have been as familiar as the more mundane defences I’ve built up over the course of my life, but they were defences all the same, a sort of mental assuming of the crash position in the knowledge that a wave of emotion was coming.
I wanted it. I want it. Of course I want it. I crave it. But at the same time, I’m always aware that I’ve invested a lot of time and effort in not getting close to people, in crafting a persona that could be warm without ever really being intimate, without opening doors slammed shut when I was a child. I don’t feel sorry for myself, not anymore, but I’m afraid of trust and of letting people get close.
Understand that dealing in words has become, for me, the greatest defence of them all. I’ve spent years weaving this tapestry, twisting fiction around truth and dream around reality. The more I write, the more practised that talent becomes. It’s a skill born of a blunt and childish desire to hide, a skill I’ve sharpened to a savage point. I’ve always said that writing is about translating and communicating, but it’s also about deflecting and obscuring. If I’m focussing your attention on one wound, you can be sure it’s because I’m concealing another that I’d rather you didn’t see. For me at least, that’s the true joy of being able to play with language and its many meanings. The most obvious paragraph in the world can simultaneously be the writer’s most intricate puzzle. I was drawn to this form because I wanted to be able to articulate a scream, to give it shape and definition. But I didn’t fall in love until the day I realised that screams are built of breaths and whispers, and that what the writer looks for isn’t a muse so much as a reader, somebody that hears and sees it all. I wanted to be published for validation, for vindication. But I wanted to be read because it was the only way I could show myself. I need control. Without it, my first instinct is to turn and run. I’m afraid of being hurt, but I’ve been hurt before and I’m still here. What really frightens me is being seen – really seen – and understood.
Listen. Like a lot of people, I’ve had a fucked up existence that has brought with it all manner of hang-ups and secrets and fears. For the last decade, I’ve been close to no-one. Things happened to me when I was a kid that left me looking at my family and my friends and finding them shallow and ridiculous. Finding maturity, for me, was about finding a way to exist in a world I rejected unconditionally. Over time, I’ve been able to chip away at the detachment and the hate. I’ve been able to set foot out there without laughing or crying or running away. Having found my own peculiar path and beliefs, I’ve let people back in to the extent that they’ve been able to show me how foolish I was being in some respects. None of that has changed the fact that the Darkened Room is my favourite place and my preferred company is my own. I’ve built a life around that, around the basic concept that there is me and then there is everybody else. Sometimes I think I’m special, but mostly I think I’m alone.
A feeling that I was understood, that there was someone in the world that complemented and partnered me, would destroy that. As much as I lament this existence sometimes, it’s all I have. I made it that way because I wanted to be somebody special and different and all the rest of it. To put it in the blunt and childish language that started me on this road in the first place, I wanted to be a star. When I was twelve years old, I thought that nobody loved me because nobody had ever told me they did. Of course, I know now that that wasn’t and isn’t true. But the feeling, the I-am-special-I-am-different-I’m-going-to-be-a-star feeling, has never really gone away. I’ve grown up with it all tied in to my Darkened Room and my writing and the way I look at the world. What truly terrifies me, when I break my heart up and look at the component parts, is losing that feeling of adversity. I might think I’m special and different and a star, but actually being those things isn’t a part of the equation. I’ve always aimed for the sky, but I’ve discovered it’s the journey that motivates me, not the destination.
Which is why, despite the fact that I am human and want more than anything in the world to be in love, I resist it and hide from it and keep the door of the Darkened Room very firmly closed at all times.
I think all of these things on the drive to LAX. Not in that kind of detail, but the salient points are all present and accounted for. We talk, Jenn and I, but what we say doesn’t really stay in my mind. It’s a silent movie, my eyes as camera on the scenery, on my first sighting of planes and runways, on the sea of passengers and cars. We find my terminal and a place to park, make our way toward the Virgin check-in desk. On the way, we’re left stranded on the wrong side of the road while we wait for a light to change. I find Jennifer’s hand and it’s an effort to look at her, to kiss her. These practical tasks – the finding of parking spaces and check-in desks, the showing of passports and papers – are what makes it feel like goodbye.
“Can I see your tickets please?” a woman in a red uniform asks. “Where are you flying to?”
“Heathrow,” I say. “Just me.”
Just me.
We leave the check-in area and I have maybe an hour before I need to make my way through to the departure lounge. We take a long walk to another terminal where we find a bar and Jenn buys the drinks. We make empty small talk and laugh at an English couple ordering drinks and struggling with the same cultural contrasts that had defeated me when I’d first arrived. We fake it, and it almost works.
Life isn’t like the movies. We’re not doing a dramatic goodbye at the gates while the airline staff wave frantically. We’re just sitting in a bar having a farewell drink and talking about anything but what’s actually happening. When I look up from my drink and see that she’s crying, goodbye becomes overwhelming, becomes everything. Time is being called on the young lovers, and looking the other way is no longer an option.
We walk back to Terminal 2, to the sliding doors and the lonely world beyond. Our mutual last request is a cigarette, and we stand smoking and watching the passengers go by. In a fitting piece of symmetry, the last thing that happens before I finally have to go is that we’re accosted by a bald man who admires my hair before admitting he’s a monk and that he wants to give us literature.
“No thanks,” I say, because I’ve been here a week now and I’m practically a veteran. “That really isn’t my thing.”
We hold onto each other for as long as we can. I manage to say at least some of the things I want to. We promise this isn’t the end. Jennifer finally leaves my embrace and we go our separate ways. I step into the terminal, promising myself I won’t look back, that I’ll show my ticket and go straight up the stairs to customs.
One, two, three, four steps, flash boarding pass, break promise. At the foot of the stairs, I turn and scan the window behind me, right to left, gaze flitting past the uniforms and the passengers and the grey background, finally alighting on a tall, slim girl, all white skin and black clothes, walking with her head down, just concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other.
Jennifer, I think. My Maybe Girl. And then: No. My girl.
When she’s out of sight, I make my way up the stairs, my feet heavy and numb, my stomach hollow. I swallow. I blink rapidly. I stop walking and take a deep breath, raising my head to look at the security checkpoint, to focus on routine and practicality and all the mundane details of travel.
In a movie, I would have turned around. I’d have looked at what was ahead, thought about what I was leaving behind, and made the obvious decision. Of course, movies don’t concern themselves with debts and visas and the minutiae of real life. Movies are like dreams, stories we run through our heads when we need to remind ourselves that someday we’ll be better people in a better place. The irony of that thought isn’t lost on me when, some twenty minutes later, I find myself doing a double-take outside the coffee shop in the departure lounge, where American actor Billy Zane and his girlfriend, British model Kelly Brook, are smiling at each other over cappuccinos.
Sometimes I wonder if I haven’t lost some of the feelings I had growing up; the uncomplicated happiness of childhood; the pure sadness and anger of puberty; the sense of injustice that dominated my late teens. In a way, that’s what makes the surge of bright and powerful hate that clenches my fists in that moment so pleasing. I got to California and I got to Jennifer, and despite all my insecurities and fears, it was worth it. Kelly and Billy have money and status and all the things that make a transatlantic relationship little more than a slight inconvenience, a matter of buying tickets and taking flights. Jennifer and I don’t live in that world, but I’m somehow sure that we’ll be around long after Kelly and Billy have ceased to make the celebrity pages in the tabloids back home.
And as I feel the first stirrings of a grin at the corners of my mouth, I finish that thought with relish: Our story, Billy, will be bigger and better and more meaningful than any film you’ll ever be in, you hammy, talentless bastard. Fuck you.
In my mind, I extend that ‘fuck you’ to the entire airport, to the country, to the world. Making a mental note to relate this story to Jenn the next time we speak, I shoulder my bag and make my way to the plane.
posted by Michael at 9:14 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home