i haven't written anything more serious than an email in 3 weeks. i'm not even sure i can string a sentence together now, but i'm in a train with a power point and 2 hours to kill so i swear i'm going to try. when the emails started coming in asking if i had writers block i knew i had a problem. when my phone started to ring i knew it was serious. for the last 3 weeks i've been looking for answers, mind spiralling through the outer reaches of sanity while i desperately try to keep it together and keep putting one foot in front of another, utterly lacking in direction, going with the flow of the current, anything to avoid feeling like i'm standing still. i'm blind and mapless, internal compass in freespin like i'm standing at the magnetic pole and everywhere from here is south, blank and devoid of landmarks to give me a sign and when every direction looks equally unpalatable all i've been able to do is wander around in circles with a dumb look on my face while i wait for something to pop out of the snow and say "this way".
i got back from Egypt, glad to see London again and get some time to sort myself out. 3 days of work materialised out of nowhere which kept me commuting back and forth from Heathrow again for the remainder of the week. by the end of that week louise and i weren't talking again and we've spent the fortnight hence in stony silence and narky staccato conversation, quietly tearing chunks out of each other in a decaying orbit of mutually assured destruction. i wasn't in any state to sit there and deal with it so less than a week after getting back to London i was heading out of it again - a hire car booked on the spur of the moment, a route worked out on the way, a destination picked out because it was somewhere i'd be forced to turn around again and submit to the gravitiational pull of the capital.
over 2 days i drove 712 miles through the English countryside, hitting Land's End and coming back again. i kept the 5" tall map of the UK donated to the cause by Shadow's folks on the passenger seat, folded up so the last 6 inches of useful page were visible and more or less navigated by which town sounded nice, or which road looked most interesting. from London to Bournemouth to Dorcester to Exeter to Plymouth i explored the English countryside, driving past rolling hills and pretty villages, stopping every once in a while to take a photo. the countryside was lush and gentle, hedgerows stitching the pastures together and i remember standing there alongside some lonely road wishing i could spread myself thin over the countryside and be absorbed into the green. i found a cozy little B&B in Plymouth and spent the evening drinking with the locals measuring carefully from the £30 i had to my name and finding vast entertainment regardless. back on the road at 9 the next morning i headed down a tasty-looking A-road which led in the vague direction of Penzance and was a joy to drive, stopping when i saw a sign for the Eden Project which i'd heard about but hadn't expected to actually find. after walking the gardens and the biodomes i was back in the car to Lizard Point (the southern-most point of the mainland) to Penzance to Land's End where i saw a while and ate the pasty i'd picked up in the last town. this was part of the vague notion i'd had when i set out - get to Devon and have Devonshire Tea, get to Cornwall and have a Cornish Pasty. i had my cream tea sitting at the quayside in Exeter. i had my pasty on the rocks over the cliffs of Land's End (from a shop recommended by a hitchhiker i picked up a few miles out of Penzance). back in the car and it was back through Penzance to Newquay where i'd intended on staying the night, but by the time i found somewhere to park and i was wasn't feeling it so i moved on, picking Launceston more or less randomly because it was in the right direction, i'd never been and it has the same name as a place in Australia.
the first place i found to park was right next door to Launceston Castle which i decided to at least go and look at (it was 6PM by this point, still bright thanks to Daylight Savings) and wound up lying around on the soft grass overlooking the rolling green hills and village in the valley beyond for the best part of an hour while i tried to work out what the fuck i was going to do from here. eventually i realised that i'd seen enough of the english countryside and that from here on in what i really needed to do was drive. just drive and drive and drive, set the cruise to the speed limit and go until i ran out of road, fell asleep at the wheel or got back to London, which is why i wound up driving down some of the now-familiar streets of Mayfair and Westminster at midnight, through Knightsbridge past Harrods, all lit up like a Vegas casino, down Piccadilly and through Piccadilly Circus, around Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall to Westminster where i did a U-turn and went back, cruising down The Strand and Fleet St, dropping right at Monument so that i could drive across London Bridge, through Elephant & Castle and off down Kennington Park Rd and back to basecamp.
2 days of driving, the best part of 18 hours behind the wheel with my PSD (Personal Sanity Device) strapped to my head, occasionally listening to BBC2, alone and with nothing to distract me from the chaos in my head, i had a lot of time to think and get my head straight. it didn't work... not entirely. by the end of it i still couldn't make a decision about what i was going to do with myself long-term and when i walked back into basecamp my calm evaporated like petrol, leaving an oily, explosive fume which has coiled in the air ever since.
i've been completely incapable of making any real decisions for a while now, so many of them i've offloaded onto other people who are more than happy to make them for me. the support i've had from around the globe has been unbelievable. i've got Shadow working to replace the rusted ruin that used to be a spine and replace it with a fresh rod of steel. Rapunzel makes the decisions i'm too indecisive for or simply don't want to make. i've got Sandra to keep me smiling and my eyes forward, SpeedFox and Daywalker who've fed me beers and listened to my ranting, always good for distraction. SiJ has filled in the cracks with movies and pleasant conversation and pushed me to cruise the meetup groups, which is why i've wound up meeting firedancers in Green Park for the last 2 weekends.
my poi hadn't had a whole lot of use until a couple of weeks ago. i've played around here and there, got a bit of my skillz back, then pulled them out when i could in my wanderings, usually so that i could say i'd spun them in interesting places (seriously, there has to be someone else who's spun poi on top of Mt Sinai at dawn, but i challenge you to find them). suddenly i'm in a park in the middle of town with a dozen other circus-types and i've been flinging staff or poi or juggling balls or devil sticks around for 4 and a half hours. the buzz from that day took half a week to fade, and by wednesday i was dying for sunday to come again, just for the like-minded company and the joy of spin. louise accused me of only doing it to show off, but for the first time in longer than i could remember i actually felt happy and energised. i hadn't realised how much i missed hanging with a bunch of people who all want to play and learn and have no agenda past meeting up every once in a while and doing something fun, where drinks in the pub are an afterthought not the main event, where you have a common interest past being bored.
the best thing is that while i've had a chance to just go off in the park, i've also met some hugely interesting people. 2 night ago i went to a play written by one of the guys from the park which was actually really good - you take a bit of a risk with these things when some guy you meet in the park begs you to come see the play he wrote. this once, i got lucky. afterwards he grabbed me and asked if i was coming to the pub and how could i say no? 2 hours later i'm heading off with a tentative invitation to head back to Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the thought rattling around my head of wait... what exactly did he mean when he said "perform"???
it's the people who make life worth living. i've been remembering that more and more. every time i've started feeling fucked and abandoned i hop on Facebook and wind up having an hours-long conversation which leaves me smiling and helps get me through the day. one of them ended with the following, after which she promptly went offline so i couldn't reply:
"remember this , one of you most endearing qualities that you have it that you want to be better and stronger than you were and you are always striving to be happy...... you are better than you believe yourself to be, you just have to look at yourself in the mirror and see what the rest of us see"
the strangest thing is the patterns that are emerging. in the last fortnight i've had 5 different people use the phrase "Remember who you are," and 3 who've sagely whispered in my ear "I think the universe is trying to tell you something." two is a coincidence. 5??? 5 separate people in 3 cities. the problem is that they're right. life in London has ground me down. a couple of days before leaving for Egypt i was on the bus back to base from doing some shopping and i overheard a conversation between a middle-aged black guy and a Russian teenager on tour:
"Have you lived in London before?"
"No"
"Well you should! It'll make a hard man out of you. You learn to suffer in London..."
and i couldn't help but grin and think i'm blogging this...
it's true though. you know how you always hurt the ones you love? well it works both ways (thankyou Fight Club), and i have been loving London. the other problem is that i've been on the receiving end of an avalanche of derisive, demeaning bullshit and i've made the mistake of listening to it. somewhere along the way i've been blessed with a horde of irreplaceable friends but i've managed to lose sight of the knowledge that i'm well loved amongst them. it's a shame to see a friendship spanning years come to dust and blow away on the wind, but there comes a time when enough's enough. it's been a long, long time since i've had to write off a good friend, but i've finally run out of cope and the pen's in my hand. the only person who should be allowed to make me miserable is me godsdammit. i'm not entirely the victim here - human interraction is a 2-way street, but i'm sick of feeling like i'm standing in the middle of the road with my hand out-stretched.
i hate having to write off a friend but if the wisdom of crowds is anything to go by, too many people in two different countries seem to think i should have done it a long time ago and since i patently can't make a decision of my own at the moment, who am i to second-guess? if there are still people who look up to me, even in my reduced and demolished state, shouldn't i at least try to hold my head up high and make it worth their while? when the screaming majority keep saying you have worth, won't even the most self-deprecating eventually stop, listen and maybe even start to believe?
enough of this shit. life's too short and i have forward to worry about rather than back. it's taken me 3 weeks to sift through the entrails and work out in which direction they point. as the days go by the range of choices gets shorter and shorter, and what i want becomes gradually clearer. the lighter i get the easier movement becomes so we'll have to see how the world looks when i'm free of the last of the deadweight.
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