(6)

THE SORROW OF LONELINESS

First days, then weeks – then months go by.  They slip away from me, fade, vanish, disappear.  Where have they gone?  Time becomes an interminable Now.  Summer rolls away in a wave of broiling heat.  Money evaporates like dew.

"How can you want to live like that?" my mother asks me.  We're sitting at the wooden table where, just an hour ago, we'd been having dinner.  That had gone peacefully enough.  Now the shit's suddenly hit the fan.  "I cannot believe you want to live like that," she says.  She is breathless with anger, her voice as shrill as breaking glass.  "No job – no job.  And you act like you don't even care!  How are you managing to pay your bills?"

I want to tell her:  "It's none of your fucking business."  I want to tell her:  "Get off my fucking back."  I want to tell her:  "Your fear is crushing me."  I want to tell her:  "It's my life, not yours."  But I say none of these things.  I simply shrug.

She hates this simple, quiet shrug of mine – and I know it too.  She thinks I do it just to spite her.  But the truth is, I simply have nothing more to say.  I have nothing to offer her.  No explanations.  No apologies.  It's this that makes her so contemptuous.

"My unemployment benefits have run out," I tell her at last.  "I'm living off credit cards now."

She has no idea how to respond to that – words simply fail her.  To go into debt so wantonly!  Or so she thinks.  She turns away from me, mouth shaped to form a sound of utter disgust.

As he drives me back home again, my father says to me, in a low, slow voice:  "I don't understand you, Simon."  He says this again and again:  "I don't understand you.  I just don't understand you."  I say nothing.  I stare out the window of the car into darkness.

"Why you ever left college . . ." he mutters, shaking his head – and this remark truly does stun me.  It has been so many years now since I left school, I thought it had long ago been forgotten.  Been accepted.  I never knew that there had been, all this time, such misunderstanding between us.  I never knew that for all these years behind his facade of cheerful indifference there existed this gulf of dissatisfaction.

When I wake in the mornings now the feeling I have is that I am like an animal huddled at the back of a cage.  The cage is my life.  "How did it ever come to this?" I wonder as I lie there.  So many years gone by.  "How has my life turned into this?"  No friends, no money, no hope.  Out of time.  Out of luck.

Now life is not my dream.  Now it is I who am dreamed.  I am the dream of all that I see, of all the world spinning round and round me.  Within that world, the world which dreams me, I might do anything:  I might go crazy, mad, nuts.  I might become violent, do myself harm; or harm others.  Anything is possible.  I am me – but also I am not me.  I can do whatever I choose.  I am free.  I must be.  I must be free because the only meaning I have left now is what others dream me to be.