-1Go Places

His touch was like the tangible softness of love on my palm. I felt the beauty of breathing and walking and seeing the moon in the bright blue winder sky travel from my right hand to encompass all that was held within my skin.

Before that moment I was sinking into the deep blue carpet, man made fibres would have drowned me and I wouldn’t have been aware until one day I looked around and realised I was in a house, alone with walls and furniture that was not my taste, and I would look at the picture’s framed on the wall and know those people had come from me but had never known me like I had never known them but we were forever bound to one another by blood and obligation. I would have been a righteous and product member of society; happily adding my 2.4 to the population and working till I was 65, all the while paying my taxes and doing my civil duty.

But where did the happiness go? The joy and the passion of unadulterated exhilaration in the selfishness of art and music and the night bus home at 3.30 in the morning after way too much wine and vodka and beer and whatever else took your fancy from those colourful bottles behind the bar?

There was the marriage. Rash and ill informed due to everything he had painted himself to be that had been somehow washed away by the rain 2 years into the life long vows. The irony was that he was not the one taking part in the con, I was. Conning myself into believe it would get better, that the arrival of the first child would help. It wouldn’t. Then the bitter cycle began, arguments, crying, anger, guilt and forgiveness. It couldn’t continue I thought. But it did.

It’s amazing how you can waste a life time pretending to everyone, especially yourself, that it will get better, that it’ll all be ok if you just wait it out. Then you wake up a quarter of a century later and there’s grand kids and an unbreakable routine. By then there’s no more drive, no more energy to change the foundations of life because there’s not much of it left, so it’s just more waiting, this time for death.

Looking into his eyes, dark and bright contradicting one another, I knew this was the moment. This was the second I had to decide. It made me tremble like only he could have.

I have to make clear that this was not easy, his eyes stayed the same until he died. They were as horrifically charming now as they would be at 76. But he would not love me at 40, he would be stuck with me though and resentful. But at 50 he’d be resigned to the fact and it would become simple for us both to keep up the pretence of living. And there would be the good, years of it. There would be the children and the grandchildren, both of whom would bring warmth and happiness in the Disney, surround-sound way.

But were they worth both of our dreams and silly, youthful passions? I wanted to travel, to join some anti capitalist commune or coop house, I wanted to do live a messy, dirty, cosmopolitan life. I wanted to do good for myself and for this failing world. I didn’t want the life of my mother and my grandmother. And I didn’t want something better, only different.

And he deserved a second chance to be happy. To be loved in ways I could never even imagine.

I finish the motion and force the change into his hand and remind him his movie is due back in 2 days. When he glances back to smile I am not there, I am waiting in the back until I hear him leave. And I will not be here when he returns the DVD on Tuesday.