Weight.

Not for the first time, L realised that we don't feel the same about each other, and such was the fresh shock that she went away to be sick in the bathroom.

As is the only way possible, she deduced this from my own words and actions, and concluded that I didn't match the picture which she holds in her mind (or, worse still, that she doesn't match the picture in mine.) In any case, she was temporarily overwhelmed.

I am now aware, then, that L and I each stand in one pan of a set of weighing scales, and the requirement is that we must balance all the time. To tip slightly one way or the other is to induce sea-sickness.

What mindset is it that demands that the scales never move, even slightly? I ask not in order to criticise L, because my own thoughts are similar ones, but to reason about why I, she, innumerable people, presumably, look for this constancy with their partner.

I am confident enough here to make the generalisation that in all countries whose first language is English (perhaps all nations we describe as western), it is considered the ultimate purpose of human life to give and receive love. The alternative way of expressing this is that a human life lacks is devalued if and when it is not engaged in loving and being loved.

From an early age we imagine, and search for, that duality, and all our aims are sublimated in that direction. I contend that it is an outstanding individual indeed who can direct their attention elsewhere.

Part of what is imagined is a perfect equilibrium. It is blue bleeding into red and producing a third colour which is precisely 50 per cent red and 50 per cent blue. It is being exactly as important in the other person's estimation as they are in your own, no more and no less. Whatever is given is taken back to the demand of the nth decimal place.

'We don't feel the same' means, then, that we are a decimal place out - on this occasion, red repudiates blue, or the other way around. It isn't a case of an overwhelming amount of love poisoning the water and killing both fish with its toxins; but a few milligrams extra of red tipping the balance slightly - and so sensitive are we to the taste, and how it differs from the expected taste, that it causes us to vomit.

Bump.

I fell out of the tail end of January, and I've landed without a parachute in the receding days of March.

I knew that I'd come down eventually, but I didn't expect the landing to be so quick and hard; an acceleration fast enough to bruise my soul and my brain.

Snorting, head down, body taut, I ascended into the new year, blasphemous and arrogant. January was spent in suspension high over the insignificant dot of the earth, even my vast eye unable to resolve its puny inhabitants no bigger than atoms.

It always had to come to an end. I couldn't survive up there indefinitely in that frictionless expanse where thoughts collided with each other, synthesising new ones; at the fast and dangerous mouth of the river of symbols; close to the invisible scar which binds the two halves of the universe.

Every morning, I wondered if today would be the one where the flow of words which had bled from me for a month would stop. As with partners, when I pose the question, silently, upon waking, whether today is to be the day when she'll unstick herself from me and become only a shadow, a ghost, a memory. At what point will I similarly scab over and feel the torrent of ideas slow to a trickle before healing up altogether?

I used to know what it meant to write; to observe and to feel and to measure words appropriately before committing them to expression. Not any more - I can't even connect two thoughts together, and lack the vocabulary to arouse, to move.

The fall has been severe, and there was nothing with which to break it. Back on the ground, I am aghast at the difficulty of teasing apart meaning, of using the mind to penetrate beyond the superficial. All the significance and irrelevance of the universe is inverted, and I can no longer isolate that which is important from that which holds no meaning.

It was ever thus - dragging myself frustratedly through the outer edges of concepts, never able to put my head on its heartbeat that I might regulate it, for once understand what makes it alive. Now no abstract thing at all lives - I buried them all, in unmarked graves to which there is no return.

Untitled.

Fourteen years of frustration with the world had taken me to a point of almost perfection, and then I stopped trying.

Every negative experience had been channelled into a particular aim; not the screwing-up and throwing away of thoughts and emotions, but the careful rolling-up and pushing through the machinery of the mind in order that it re-emerges transformed but still recognisable.

At 14, I spoke French better than anyone my age, and I had convinced myself that my future was a secure one: I would be an interpreter, and was prepared to splinter the bones of anything which dared to get in the way.

The formative years of squinting through the patch which covered my bastard, difficult left eye; the ache of having to explain to people who should have known better; the disconnection which had no regard for age (I recoiled from strangers both old and young) had been leading up to the moment when I would conquer, inevitably, the French language.

The paradox of complete confidence and disabling ineptitude which I demonstrated then is something which persists to this day. I could demand of a teacher whom I'd met twice in my life that he take more notice of me when I put my hand up in his class to answer questions, and yet preferred the pretence of dispensing cups of tea from a brick wall instead of addressing someone the same age as I. I mastered the pluperfect tense in a foreign language, but could not express feelings for particular females in my first one.

I was very nearly perfect, writing little stories in French for the (male) teacher whom I obsessed over, and retreating into the soft, easy world of concepts which I grasped without even having to think. Yet everything else turned to shit - I could no more understand equations, or play rugby, or feign an interest in geography, than I could speak to a stranger.

Now, at the age of 30, I am starting again. I've had to track back across the last decade-and-a-half of existence, to pull out the language-capable, shy teenager as I attempt to re-learn not French, but Spanish. The old feeling of unsheathed, raw excitement that would take me over whenever I opened a textbook is still there; no longer to the extent that I can sense my heart rising through my mouth like a helium balloon, but it is nevertheless there.

The confidence, the sense of inferiority, the ambition, the silence, the nerves. I am slowly becoming 14 again.

Denial.

What, then, for the despisers of the human race when the realisation blooms, like a pathetic flower, that they are trapped?

Those of us who have long turned our backs on our species, stepping around them expertly like slalom flags, avoiding their stink and flat voices, we remain nevertheless reliant. No man is an island.

Even the acquisition of the most basic provisions which would be required to exist in isolation are beyond me - medicines, food and clothing - never mind sufficient higher-level wishes such as somewhere to direct my ambition, the alleviation of boredom, the persistence of the illusion that there is a structure of reason and purpose behind the bare fact of my existence.

And if (as if) those difficulties could be overcome, there is the psychological difficulty of surviving without the paraphernalia of communication tools which wrap themselves around me: the internet connection, the mobile phone - adhering me to the lives of others whom I have little interest in, and yet find impossible to unstick; the labour-saving devices, the pointless trinkets.

To be born human is to be privileged, so the thinking goes. As far as anybody knows, we are the only creatures who are aware of the inevitability of our own deaths; the only ones who can contemplate a universe devoid of the self. For your author, the constellation of machinery referred to above is sufficient protection from boredom, and thus from thinking about our certain demise.

It is almost amusing - the human who turns away from humans, yet is terrified of eventually leaving their number. Trapped in their midst, and full of frustration for all that, but utterly incapable of transcending the mediocrity of gossip, petty division, and drudgery. The human who hates being human is recursive, slavishly coming back on himself, and his loathing, time after tedious time, until it ceases to shock.

I keep my mind fiercely active - reading, writing, playing dull video games. To turn its heat on anything other than the task immediately at hand is to contemplate a roomful, a houseful, of death, even when none is apparent.

In years to come, humans will treat the prospect of their own lights being switched off as we now regard earache or a splinter in the finger - unpleasant enough at the time, but no great setback. And at that point, the persistence of the illusion that there was ever anything to live for in the first place will be extinguished, unmourned and quickly forgotten.

It.

The last time it happened I drank a whole bottle of whisky in one night, and my friend compared it to watching someone else's mother dying.

Unconcerned police officers observed me drawing on the container of dark liquid as I waited for the train to arrive. I wanted to balance the fresh misery with the whisky's anaesthetic in order that I might feel nothing at all. It's one of the few times I've ever needed to drink in order to get drunk.

I got to the train station, and dialled the number of the blonde woman whom I knew would always comfort me at times of petits crises: it was 13 April 2002, and Barnsley had just been relegated to the third division. Over-ambition and ineptitude had led us to the precipice, and we duly fell over the edge in an inert, resigned afternoon, losing 2-0 at home to Norwich City.

I'd been preparing for it since August, but the inevitable coup de grace still caused my soul to wobble. I reflected on this as I queued inside the green-liveried supermarket for the bottle which would obliterate me; joking with the woman serving me that I was gathering supplies for my relegation party.

It had been obvious for months: a horrible capitulation away to Sheffield Wednesday in October which led my friend to pass his 'someone else's mother' comment. He felt he'd intruded on a private grief and was embarrassed to stare at the wan, stinking creature I'd taken him to see. I woke up late the next day knowing full well that my phone would be full of messages saying: the manager's gone! and so it proved. There might have been eight, or 10.

By then, it was too late - the rot had set in. No amount of remedial work could undo the damage. I was destined to be catapulted headlong into the blonde woman's arms, and into a hangover which suspended reality somewhere beyond my grasp and caused my temples thump like a drum.

I fear that history is about to repeat itself. I intend to eschew either alcohol or blondes this time around; blondes who pull the car up in the middle of God knows where and press themselves against me, pinning me down on the back seat as I thrash my limbs and wail angrily like an animal to the slaughter.

I fear that history is about to repeat itself. The important things in the world - wars, religion, banks, politicians, climate change, corruption, bravery, love, books, freedom, expression - all reduce to a dot in the background because the waters will soon close over Barnsley again. We are condemned to this repetition, bouncing between the second and third divisions, and relegation or elevation should surprise nobody. Yet it never fails to surprise me.

Even if it's not this year, it'll be next year or the one after. The steamroller which flattens me, the disappointment I feel when I see something along these lines (unashamedly derived from the BBC's website) never fails to manifest itself fully, though:

It's there in bald, unambiguous text - news organisations don't usually deal with facts in such an unmedicated way. Princess Diana 0-1 Tunnel (Princess Diana killed); Real IRA 1-0 Peace (two soldiers relegated); Israel 0-0 Palestine (replay on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday....); Barnsley 1-3 Wolves (Nogomet throwing up into a bucket with dead eyes).

Reality.

The old woman in her wheelchair, leaning so far forward that she very nearly spilled herself onto the floor: I want to go over there, pointing at the set of low drawers not four feet away, reaching out to them and almost capsizing herself again.

Mother (nearly always 'mother' but sometimes 'mam') for God's sake, how many times have I told you not try to get out of chair? The man a tense picture of pent-up frustration as he pushed her across the carpet and towards the drawers she'd been stretching for as though they were a distant star. Directed there with the deliberate precision of a bowler aiming at the jack.

Ancient hands rifling through the contents and producing, in triumph, a small white envelope. Well, mother, what's so special about it? It's a five-pound note, David, that's what it is. Taking in breath: yes, I know that, and it was alright where it were, in the drawer. Well, there's no need to get bloody nasty, is there? I wa only telling you.

Dragged back across the carpet towards the door, until two seconds thereafter: I want to go back again. The whole cycle of raised voices, angst and sighs repeated, the unsteady woman engaging for a second time in the lucky dip: look, David, some chocolate brazil nuts.

Moments later, in the middle of the room - you need to tek me downstairs because they're coming. They? Who's they? Didn't I tell you? I'm bloody sure I told you. I had my photograph in the thing, in the thing, in the paper, and they're coming to give me a prize.

Oh, no, mother, not again! I've told you before - I really don't think there's a prize. You're either dreaming it or somebody's puttin' ideas in your head. There is no prize. Well, we need to go downstairs soon, because they're coming. Quarter-of-an-hour later, the silence only broken by the exceptionally loud soundtrack of an early Sunday evening film: I-told-you-there-weren't-no-prize!

Are you going to go nar, then? I don't know why you do this, tryna get rid on us as soon as we arrive. I do me best to see yer....

The two of them descending the lift with their low, mumbled conversation, then the man and I navigating the maze of dark-carpeted corridors, looking for the one door that would let the cold seep into our eyes and throats and bones. Leaving the woman behind, half-present and half-absent; more at ease with the chatter caused by her Alzheimer's and the orbiting molecules of drugs than with anything another person could say.

A head moving with horizontal motion. I don't know what up with thi gran sometimes, son. I know I shun't say that. She can't help it....

Fiction.

For all anyone knows, I may have postulated the existence of L as a convenient literary device: the muse whose sweet voice ebbs and flows internally, a voice which is later translated into the blog entries you read here.

L, then, might be a work of fiction - the aggregation of my own experience cleaned of imperfections, filtered through an emotional male mind, and carefully laid down in words I sometimes stare for minutes trying to select.

The woman to whom I was engaged and the few slivers worth remembering from that exhausting and pointless journey; the sun which blew the lid off my reasoning in South Africa and made me swear to commit my life to someone who had lived so many times before that my single strand of existence could never tether her to me; the whirlwind who scorched my retina once and then disappeared; the distant pit into which I vanished when I was still a teenager.

All these could well be distilled into a composite form called L, the bones of love upon which I work to add flesh and incident. I carefully revise, edit, monitor, control, and eventually pull off the veil and present to you one person's account of what it means to feel.

Yet L does exist - she is not a sanitised media product, or a figment of the imagination. There is an element of fiction, though, to our relationship. Without thinking, without knowing it, I turn myself into something revised, edited, monitored, controlled. I become a convention, a list of characteristics which are chosen at the expense of others, one side of the omnidecahedron that represents me. I am my own modulator, my own prism, and L and I converge in the production of symbols and soubriquets.

To become a media product is to be reduced and simplified. In the same way that the dream-work is the fusion of symbols and the carrying out of revisions, the 'media-work' is the accentuation of particular characteristics, the rejection of others, and the shoehorning of the accentuated, accepted ones into a convention.

In recent days, L has commented upon a particular piece of clothing I have which she finds attractive: a grey jumper which I happened to be wearing one time when I switched on my webcam. The media-work, then, states that I am to some extent reduced to this simplicity. L is likewise reduced to the image of her hand with a wedding ring upon it.

Like the famous photograph of Tony Blair's sweat-soaked shirt at the Labour Party conference, we are trapped in one moment, in a single image which defines a person, an era. Like a computer model of climate-change which predicts severe global warming lies 50 years in the future, only for it to then have to be revised because the variables we deliberately omitted - or whose existence we never knew of - cause reality to spiral out of control in a classic case of chaos theory, demonstrated.

I, however, do not expect to meet Tony Blair anytime soon, so the mental image I have of him doesn't matter in the slightest. Similarly, I'm not the scientist who staked his career on the climate-change model being accurate to with a particular error bar. I wonder, though, how the boiled-down worldview which L and I share will affect our long-term, real-life relationship? When I am more than fiction, when the grey jumper breathes with life and insecurity and frustration - as well as happiness, wit, and statements which can't be retracted?

Vows.

I, Nogomet Redfish, today catch you, L. Bluefish, in my red net. From this day onwards, as long as we both shall swim, we will exist in a unity of blueness and redness.

Under the solemn eye of Eben, the Master Fisherman, in this, his sacred Boat, I declare that the two channels in which we separately swim are henceforth intersected, opening into a limitless river.

Eben, the severe, has weighed the beauty and love and commitment inherent in each of us, and judges them to be exactly equal. It is with a heart light with joy and heavy with seriouness that I therefore take you as my wife, labelling our synthesis 'purple.'

I promise to eternally act as a corrective fish: to guide you into waters calm and pure when the current threatens to overwhelm you; to steer you away from predators; to dedicate all that I do to the preservation of your blue tint, and our grand purple dream.

I promise to look away from all other bluefish, who would mix their colour with mine, and swim back to you every day. I vow to approximate the sentiment originated in the mind of Eben as best I can, at all times.

I now release you from my red net to direct your course, and to be likewise directed: three colours in two colours in one colour are we, and this ceremony signifies the tripartite, bipartisan singularity that upholds us in perpetuity.

Jealousy.

To suffer from jealousy is to experience the feeling of eternal regress or, alternatively, to see the set of all possible thoughts and actions as manifests of the single thing that one least wants to think about.

I realise this when I consider L, in tenderness and in love; and yet often terminate with the thought that one day I shall lose her. This has always been the definition of relationships in my mind - 'to be prepared to eventually relinquish.'

Jealousy is the enumeration of the ways that such a loss might be brought about, and it malfunctions internally - the irritating buzzing and flickering of a dying lightbulb; the loop of a simple computer program, folding back on itself forever; a parasite sucking the colour out of a flower as though through a straw.

To suffer from jealousy is to demand the impossible of L: don't let anyone ever think of you, or you are damned. Do not permit an autonomous other to catch your eye, or the accusations shall rain forth. It requires no infraction from L herself.

In my everyday life, I often declare my antipathy for the British state's love of curtailing civil liberties. A bite here, a mouthful there, all done in view of a supine electorate. Yet where L is concerned, I'd happily uncouple the wishes of every human and forensically examine them.

Jealousy demands the impossibility of anti-proof: demonstrate to me that he hasn't been thinking about you! Show me that the needle is not in the haystack. It is nonsensical, reducing every person, living or dead to the status of a potential threat. I recognise this, but dousing such an illogical flame is exhausting.

Yet staunch it I must, and quickly.