Letter (I).

Saturday 21 November 2009, 23:23.

Dear Bluefish,

This is what happens, darling, when a man inflates himself to the extent that he becomes arrogant.

Like Icarus nearing the sun, he floats too close to his dream, and the dream is too real for him.

Even in my arrogance, I tend only two modest dreams in your name, the synthesis of which is (for me) love:

• to know not the fluctuations of every current in your heart, but to be able to assert with confidence in which direction the whole is moving
• to be able to ease (not cure) your medical condition

I expend so much energy trying to accomplish the above that I have forgotten everything else: the light reflecting from your eyes into my soul; the smile which simultaneously bolsters and effaces the self.

Yes, I have forgotten everything else, and in doing so I have damaged us, probably irreperably. Where I was once looked upon almost reverentially, I now see only disgust.

As is my crude way of behaving, I tried to derive love according to a specific, precise formula - current plus cure.

In my arrogance, I assumed that this would be the solution to everything. I cannot believe just how terribly badly it has backfired.

When I cried on Thursday, it was partly because I could (can) feel Bluefish slipping away from me, forever, and it was partly because I am required to come up with a response I simply don't possess. I must ditch the formulae at once, open the cage door, and exist alongside and for her, without any fear all.

To fear is to lose, and to plan is to minimise fear. What was a surfeit of hubris then is a crisis of inactivity now. The only structure which is permitted to remain is the one which points the way to the lack of a structure, and the eventual liberation of a summer which seemed endless.

Truth.

"It's just one good idea after another with you!" exclaimed one f my managers after I overheard a colleague's phone conversation, and made a suggestion based upon it.

"I wish!" was my laughing response. "It's more like the odd half-decent idea, followed by a monumental fuck-up!"

Sure enough, within the space of about three hours, I made the error which I had earlier prophesised.

(The technical details of my suggestion, and my fuck-up, are neither here nor there. They serve only to illustrate a point, one which persists even as I approach my 31st birthday.)

A glimpse of something worthwhile, followed by crushing mediocrity, endlessly repeating itself throughout the years. This is not the sorrowful rambling of a former or relapsed depressive. It is demonstrated in every action I carry out. I photosynthesise, absorbing the longed-for light of my Bluefish, and I emit sour, rancid air.

Each time, a paralysis of either mind or body prevents me from intervening to prevent the unfolding of dramas both major and minor. I know the point at which I must act in order to divert an event from reaching an undesirable conclusion, and yet I continue to watch. Then I feel the moment pass, and there is only the inevitable contrition and kicking of oneself to contend with.

On the way to work earlier - before my fuck-up - I cried, the tears aggregating with the rain. I cried because Bluefish requires a response which I am unable to give; both the knowledge of what I must do, and the execution of the action are beyond me.

I am a spectator in my own life, with a trail of destruction swishing behind me like a prehensile tail. It obliterates everything in its path, even the mental and physical connection between two people which, until recently, seemed immutable.

Untitled.

I sometimes wonder what it is that's killing us, and then I remember that you have been, and remain, unwell.

I told you earlier that the recollection of your condition sometimes causes me surprise - to look at you, nobody would ever know that you ailed a thing.

In my clumsiness, I fail to make enough allowances for your other self, the one which squeezes you until you wince. The one which shunts you intermittently over the threshold of darkness.

When I got back into the house tonight, you were silent, and nothing I could do would stir you. Yet you flew forever to get here, back to my ordinariness.

I try to give myself enough margin for error, but my most conservative guesses are hopelessly optimistic. Strained words regarding whether or not every man would find you attractive. I can speak only for myself, love. The evening poisoned.

What is it that's killing us? Your other self is akin to a lover - it seeps into the gaps between your love and mine, and corrodes both. The bluefish and the redfish and the something-else fish. The darkfish.

What a weight you carry, the weight of being sick. What a hopeless excuse of a partner that cannot lift it even a millimetre, watching hopelessly as you are ravaged again - making love to a butcher, with the face of a million different types of pain.

The sickness makes you no less beautiful. I always see your face floating cloud-like on my idle working-day dreams. No less beautiful, but altered - and what alters you changes me alike. Darling, we need a new paradigm - one where I am more aware of events unfolding around us, and one where every day is a short step towards your eventual well-being (it will come) and not this difficult terrain which threatens the very existence of our synthesis.

Punctured.

I seek to understand why a simple, unambiguous statement of fact, expressed to me verbally with either a smile or a laugh, should cause me to hurt in such a profound manner.

In three days, Bluefish returns to the England whose clouds were at her feet back in July, whose limp little summer was but a cold shadow of the ones to which she is accustomed.

It isn't her return which brings about my suffering: no, it is something far less significant - yet, clearly, no less worthy of discussion.

(When I was a child, and later an awkward teenager, I found that it was always the throwaway remarks which delivered the seed around which my misery grew - being told by my father that I had no friends, for example. The remark was not spoken with malice or intent to wound, but that's nevertheless how I processed it.)

The limitations of English, or of the limitations under which I use it, are causing me a problem. Hurt, when it is the description of something done by one person to another, almost always carries with it the idea of guilt and intent:

• stop twisting my arm behind my back! You're hurting me!
• some internet scammers cleaned out your bank account? Ouch, that's gotta hurt!
• [as above in parentheses] the way in which you just addressed me has hurt me
  

The word I seek doesn't exist, or at least I don't know it. I want to define something innocuous and natural that nevertheless punctures. In addition, I wish it to be understood that being punctured does not diminish the sentiment held for the person who made the puncture.

On the contrary, I assert that such a wound is one of the definining characteristics of love. Hence there is no sense of biding one's time before administering forgiveness, for there is nothing to atone for. We are, instead, grateful.

What fact might it have been that Bluefish stated which caused and continues to cause me such anguish?

It was this: I have only ever seen snow once in my lifetime.

All my sentiment came rushing to the surface, akin to a bottle which has been shaken up and then opened, or a tributary rushing towards the roar of the sea.

I am yet to work out quite what caused the puncture wound; I only know that something did - perhaps it is the stark confirmation of our distance, and I marvel all the more about how we can be so close.

Childhood.

To what extent is it possible to leave behind the residue of childhood and emerge from its risk-free cocoon into an adult of some description?

In order to truly escape, it is important to realise that a fundamental biological trait is working against us, and doing its best to strangulate the self with its own past.

(I risk looking foolish here, for I lack the technical descriptions and knowledge of biological principles to express the following argument with the fullness I'd like. I'd rather look foolish, however, than condemn myself to saying nothing at all.)

Everyday experience - I'm no scientist - has shown me that my personal biases are very quickly formed, depending on the outcome of the first occurrence:

I choked on some fish bones when I was a child. Since then, I have never been able to allow that type of fish to pass my lips without wanting to be sick.
A negative conclusion to the brief relationship with my first girlfriend led me to tearfully declare that I'd never go near another woman.*

Like any other creature, then, I demonstrated the capacity to learn things. It is the capacity to un-learn what has already been processed that I am interested in here.

Without the ability to (truly) erase our personal histories, we become fastened to a groove which is more and more deterministic with every passing day, frozen with fear into a routine which takes increasingly more energy and determination to escape from.

'Truly' erasing the past would mean more than the oft-repeated delusion that today is the beginning of the rest of my life, or that this is the point where the stupid mistakes stop, to be replaced by a machine-like precision in everything I put my name to.

It would, in fact, be more likely to be a surgical procedure: something which would go about 'resetting' the brain's infrastructure, and enabling it to start again. Such an operation would increase the probability that I'll bring my life to an end with an act of sheer lunacy, but the trade-off is the freedom to exist without parameters.

In whose interests is it that I continue to survive, a library of past mistakes and their painful consequences?

I am, according to Richard Dawkins, nothing more than a random aggregation of genetic material, and the will to proceed is nothing more than the desire of this cloud of genes not to be obliterated yet.

The sub-microscopic afflicts (is) the judgement and reason of the macroscopic. Without the genetic imperatice to learn, I should have given my being back to the soil and the rocks years ago.

Loosely, then, I conclude that I cannot escape my childhood, for my genetic roots condemn me to self-loathing without limit. I hope that more sleepless nights will convince me otherwise - some spark of insight - but the condition pessimist within makes a compelling case otherwise.

Capitalism.

It's two-thirty in the morning, and the lights in the living room have been extinguished for now.

Outside it is dead: no high heels clumping against the pavement, no shouted drunken invective, no distinctive sound of tyre struggling to turn through a slick of rainwater.

The background noise of our waking hours has been temporarily suspended: there's only my intermittent hammering against the keyboard to break the silence.

Most of my life, I long for these little islands of solitude. The more the tender, discerning ear is enraged by the dissonance of layer upon layer of sound, the more appealing is its opposite.

I spend so much time dreaming of the vacuum which repudiates noise that it becomes an objective in itself. I want to shut out sound in the same way that a curtain curtails the light.

These early hours, then, should be a triumph, a source of ecstasy, for even the birds' conversation has halted. The conditions which I long for are more-or-less visited upon me.

Yet I feel a growing sense of unease. I find myself listening hard for the sound of my own breathing. Suddenly, I want to talk to someone, anyone, about anything.

At the very moment when the wished-for state is attained, it is suddenly no longer desirable. In the case of silence v sound, any sound at all is preferable to the prolonged hush which hangs heavier and heavier. Without knowing it, then, I have completed the most manic calculation of the capitalist thinker: there is nothing more alluring than the exact opposite of what one currently has.

This the methodology which sells skin-whitening cream to dark-skinned people, and skin-darkening cream to light-skinned ones. The bet had been backed, and then the capitalists laid it, winning no matter what.

I, who possess a store of bitterness as deep as the self for the capitalists, I have been caught in their mechanism, and when I am writing I long to do anything but write.