Coffins Placed On Pedestals

"Time on your side that will never end; the most beautiful thing you can ever spend. But you work in a shirt with your nametag on it, drifting apart..."

I've been dwelling on that thing I said the other night about writing being a painful process. Not an entirely true statement. It's painful at the moment, but that's mainly because it's all I can do just to sit down and actually type something without it wanting to be some stream-of-consciousness rant at crimes that have no perpetrators. In two weeks time, it'll have been five months since I saw Jenn. She was going to come this month, but we canned the idea because we believed I'd either be there or verging on it and we simply don't have the money for these constant Transatlantic trips. I know at my sensible, logical core (and I am, in the end, an almost insanely rational person) that confirmation of my interview date will be very, very soon. If there were issues with the application, we'd be aware of them by now. So it's a matter of sitting here and waiting for the letter. It will come, probably in the next few days.

But I get to thinking five months, and I get to thinking I have to go to work tomorrow, and I get to looking around a room I haven't tidied since the last time she was here, frowning at my reflection in a dust-coated mirror and trying not to let my gaze fall on any little memories. It's always Jenn's hairclip that gets me, this little black plastic thing that's been attached to the headboard of my bed for nearly a year now, removed in a moment of passion and then forgotten about. It's the first thing I see when I wake up, a memento of times past and times to come. I'd like to think that when I leave this room, when all the posters are down and the things I value packed away, when I turn around to take one last look at this weird little existence, I'll remember to put it in my pocket and take it home.

It's a conscious effort to turn things around like that, to invest them with some kind of future meaning instead of wistful nostalgia. If writing is painful right now, then I need to be looking forward to a point when it won't be, when I'll have time and space and a life empty of these petty crises. Not back, never back...there lies the alcohol and the bitterness and a heart just itching to suck up all the hate and scream it back at the world.

No future there but four walls and a slow fade.

These are the clamouring hands of the addictive personality, the urgent whispers of the bottle and all those heroes with coffins placed on pedestals because they had the balls to really burn out. There's my Messiah Complex right there, my ambition, to give it all back in vitriol, go down in the biggest and brightest ball of flames, leave them in stunned silence. Never die.

Yeah, and one of these days I guess we'll all drown in cliché. You don't choose the things that call out to you, only how you reply. I know that so long as I'm alone there are going to be times when it's really hard for me to hang onto sobriety. I also know that no matter what happens I'm going to spend the rest of my life glancing back over my shoulder at that particular demon. In the end, I still feel lucky. There are people out there with urges far worse than the occasional lapse into Doomed Artist posturing, and very few of them have a beautiful wife and another chance waiting patiently for a piece of paper that says it's okay.