Dream.

They took you into hospital and slit you at the neck like an animal - this was your introduction to the house of the sick and the dead after 28 years.

I swore my love for you before you went in, and prayed to gods unknown and invented for your safe return. I set myself challenges which, if passed, would mean you'd come out alive.

There is, then, a deep and yet invisible seam of devotion which is never seen and seldom spoken of - I think this is only the second time I've ever mentioned it. Nobody knows the extent to which I exhaust myself in your name.

Like an expectant father, I sat by Facebook for hours waiting for news, and at something after 5:30 in the morning, it came - she's over the worst of it, and I could relax. Facebook, the modern telegram which screams: she lives!

They'd dug deep into you with their instruments, distorting your surface, but making no indentation into your loveliness. It (whatever 'loveliness' comprises - it's a poor word, but I seek to express myself beyond 'beauty') remained, undiminished when you'd been glued back together again - even the sharpest scalpel runs aground against a woman's soul.

When you woke up from the operation, I think you woke up from our dream as well. Rubbing your eyes in amazement, I'd become a pillar of salt, a gargoyle - you, however, were still the caryatid that prevented me falling out of the sky.

You woke up from our dream, and I've never been able to get you back to sleep. As in a fairytale, I search through my vocabulary for the magic word that will put you under again, but I am yet to find it. I am all out of spells, out of invocations.

I had always been scared of what would happen if you should stir abruptly and disturb the narrative we put together. Now I know - I have been found guilty of being a man, a mere man who fails to shave and can't cook and glumly holds down a job. When the hospital opened your neck, they opened your eyes too, and what they see is no longer worth being in love with.

Truth.

Without the ability to write, I recede into the distance - it's long been apparent I am only capable of one form of communication, and this is it.

When I become aware of myself, I speak as little as possible, because I cannot abide the sound of my own voice. It disgusted me when I recorded myself reading at the age of eight and played it back. I think that was the moment when I first cowered back into the shadow of my own being, away from the light of others.

A person cannot be sustained on shadows alone - no man is an island, after all - so I make sorties out, but they are increasingly rare. Voice communication with others, outside of my job, is virtually nil.

The voice; my hostile, unshaven face staring back at me through the mirror; sitting on the toilet and filling the pan with shit, deep in thought. These attributes of the self are more often than not ungraspable - they slide away from view like different parts of the anatomy of a brightly-coloured fish: there the tail, there the fin, but seldom do we apprehend the whole, living entity. When we do, this is self-awareness: an idiot's voice propagating through a rotting carcass.

Without writing, then - committing the approximation of thoughts to paper within the limits imposed by the alphabet - I am nothing. Yet writing is difficult, and more so than usual in the last few weeks, few months. Yet I struggle on because the alternative is to be dumb, and ever-more reliant on my own insignificant mental apparatus.

Without writing, I am nothing, but I can't write because my head is full of irrelevant distractions spewed forth by the great God of the internet: newspaper articles, games, message boards, Lene Marlin; they eat my time, and force me to break the promises I make to myself. After fruitless hours reading the views of religious polemicists who haven't moved the opposite camp's viewpoint even a millimetre in their direction, I go to bed full of rage and disappointment, saying under my breath that tomorrow will be different.

Tomorrow I'll actually sit down and write, at least 700 or 800 words, without succumbing to the flashy, captivating websites that enthrall me so much. After ten years or more, tomorrow has still to arrive, and I poke listlessly through the cold embers of what I once called my ambition.

Affliction.

I was brought up to understand that loneliness is akin to a disease - it is an affliction of the self which weakens, marginalises and undermines the pursuit of life's goals.

Similarly, I was brought up to believe that diseases are afflictions which we should attempt to cure, except when the problem resides in the heads of those who injure or those who kill; they should be put to death because their deeds (which are a consequence of their illnesses) are too great for society ever to efface.

Of the two statements above, I no longer believe either of them. That is, I opine that criminals are ill, and should be given medicine instead of the death penalty and, since sitting up into the small hours of this morning thinking about the question, I no longer believe that loneliness is a disease. (The set of things I took as gospel when I was a child which I now ridicule are myriad. The things that remain, and the reasons for them remaining, are probably worth another blog post. I think there is something to be said for this 'chain-writing,' lighting up the next idea with the dregs of the previous one. It compensates somewhat for an inability to invent convincing characters, or even for the inability to put together more than a few hundred words at a time.)

When I think of the word 'disease,' I associate it (and Milan Badelj teaches me why I'm an associative learner) with such terms as 'debilitating,' or 'effacing' or 'sad.' Thus, up until now, when I think of loneliness (and lament the fact that I am lonely) I draw the conclusion that I have left myself somehow incomplete.

I feel that such negativity is no more than a mindset, and can be altered with patience and effort - loneliness is then perceived as a gift, a knack for tuning out the universe; the confidence to, alone, make lightning bolts and send them towards difficult targets; to atomise the self whilst surrounded by ways to connect, ways to augment the self.

Should I declare that what I see in the mirror is repellent, I'd be told firmly to accept what I have, because it is immutable. As for physical states, as for states of mind and being - this is loneliness, it is mine, and far from being an affliction, I see it as a gift.

Outside.

I didn't want to go outside on Wednesday night, but the prospect of having nothing to drink other than tap water for the rest of the evening forced my hand.

I want to leave the house less and less - it's better to stay here, stewing, thinking, circling my own limits lap after lap after lap, than interact with anybody else. There was nothing else for it, though.

So I set off walking to the little shop about six or seven minutes from here, noting glumly that I'd need to be careful because I'd misplaced my glasses. Without them, my sight borders on the pathetic, and I'm an accident waiting to happen.

Roads were crossed with caution, coiling my body for the big push from one side to the other, only to pull back at the last second because I couldn't see around a stationary vehicle, or because I'd detected the motion of traffic just as I was about to make my move.

As I walked along, I noticed two men pulling an object on wheels through the gate of a property, a few yards ahead of me. I'm hardly what could be described as assertive, so I slowed my pace down and let them stay in front of me.

Soon, though, I got sick of how slow they were pushing their trolley-like vehicle - it was full of rollers, paint and long pieces of wood, and the bumpy ground did not make for a smooth journey. Every few seconds they were forced to stop and re-arrange the trolley's constituents.

So I walked along the very edge of the pavement, trying to appropriately time a move to pass them and get on with my errand. Any other person would have asked them to just let him past, and never thought about it again. I couldn't get the words out, though, so I continued to tiptoe along the kerb, and it was then that I felt myself falling.

I was toppling, sideways, into the road, and I had to make some quick re-adjustments of my body to prevent it from actually happening. I stood a few inches back from the kerb, unhurt, and a red car sped past me, travelling at some 50mph, I'd estimate. In other words, I'd not have had a chance of survival if I had actually fallen - I'd have been done for, without hope of respite, at the age of 31.

There was no shock or sickness or horror at such a near-miss. I stood there, with my hands on my head, but it was a reaction intended to convey to the world a shock and sickness and horror that I didn't feel. I was within inches of death, and yet remained unstirred. Six or seven hours later, I can write about it with the nonchalant ease of a bystander, or someone who has passed caring.

Self.

The self bobs on a sea of events; longing to be independent of it, and yet utterly bereft without it.

Roiling, the sea exerts an upward pressure and deforms the self.

The self pushes back in the hope of cancelling out the deformity, and thus exists in a sea of perpetual tension.

Events partially sum to create that which we call identity - I am what I am because I remember Hungary, and losing my first girlfriend, and being a sick child, and meeting Bluefish. Without those things, I am not nothing, but I am critically diminished.

In times of great joy, or great sadness, the equalising force of homeostasis works ever-harder to force the self back to normality - and the outcome is exhaustion.

It stands to reason, then, that the force of homeostasis can only exert itself against change for so long. Once spent, change takes place, with nothing to resist it. That assertion, then, answers the question which has been bothering me for hours: at what point must we accept that a temporary change of state should be regarded as permanent?

When a state characterised by inertia, or loss of interest, or ennui, persists for so long, the only conclusion to draw is that this is the dawning of the new self, changed in a semi-permanent sense. Nothing matters now; there is nothing more to be said, and the wonders of the universe are but a flat, perfect emptiness, with not a ripple or a flaw to stir the flesh.

Continuum.

Any number of leading European football clubs are apparently trying to sign Dinamo Zagreb midfielder Milan Badelj - I read as much in the Press, and on the internet.

Badelj is a Croatian, so it's understandable if English people are unfamiliar with his talents. The media, though, assess his capabilities in a succinct way: he is the new Zvonimir Boban.

Boban was the captain of Croatia's most successful national side, and spent the majority of his career playing for a great AC Milan team. He is also famous (or infamous, depending on your taste) for kicking a Serbian policeman in the head in one of the events which led up to the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990s.

Milan Badelj, then, has a lot to live up to! Why should he not shrug his shoulders and declare that being Zvonimir Boban's replacement is too much - is it not sufficient that he is the only Milan Badelj? He, of course, can do exactly that, but the genie is already out of the bottle, and he'll be forever known, in some circles, as the new Zvonimir Boban.

Away from sports journalism, we see the media do this a lot - people and events which have long since gone nevertheless bleed into the present: some of David Cameron's policies are 'Thatcherite,' a new band insufflate listeners with the ghost of The Beatles. In our own lives, we do it too - when someone lets us down, the assumption is that the same will happen again before much longer. There is an expectancy that new friends, new lovers, are condemned to repeat the same mistakes of the past.

It seems, then, that our lives are governed by associative learning. A quick, handy way of summing up the world is to say something resembles or is like something else. Milan Badelj is just like Zvonimir Boban (but he is not.) You're just like my old girlfriend (but you're not.) In adopting this viewpoint, we are able to satisfy ourselves with rapid summaries, but so much information is lost.

What exists now is a simulacrum of what went before. In 10 years, when memories of Zvonimir Boban have begun to fade from even hardened football followers, there will be a young Croatian male weighted down with the label of 'the new Milan Badelj.' We look for that which is highest, most insurpassable, and compare everything else to it.

Would that we could - that I could - start with emptiness, and assess everything on its own merits. Would that I were not weighed down by a history of 'x being like y' and always straining to reach particular apogees that are a) not able to be compared and b) sweetened by an over-sentimental mind.

Paradox.

A seeming paradox that I realised whilst lying in bed contemplating the nature of love (it seems to be the dominant thought of the week - perhaps assessing why is, in itself, worthy of another blog post.)

Society places a lot of emphasis, or so I feel, on the primacy of the individual. Without even thinking about it, I buy into this sense of individuality over community - and consequently I live alone in a house which is too big for me by half, and wave my hands in front of my face in horror if it's ever suggested that I share it with somebody.

Consumerism ensures that this primacy is re-inforced - I buy non-essential objects in order to placate the great mirrory eye of society, for I cannot bear to see its disgust reflected back at me. I read about the golden ratio, and, realising that I am out of proportion, seek to redress the balance lest a less-than-favourable judgement be cast.

This is how things are, until a person begins to think for himself. Even so, it takes an outstanding individual to absolve himself of all guilt for not managing to live up to the airbrushed, muscular perfection of popular culture. Popular culture leaks through the cracks of one's psyche - I have little interest in television, or films, or music, and yet those Platonic ideals are lodged in my brain like a bullet. 'Self-improvement' means to edge closer to those ideals, until I can overcome it, when the imperative becomes: be true to the self.

Then we have love. The most enduring quality of love is that it requires a person to relinquish his sense of individuality, and throw his lot into something shared and democratic. That it does not come easy should hardly be surprising in the light of what is written above - we are expected to turn away from arguably the most enduring, deep-seated lesson of a western upbringing, and adapt seamlessly to its opposite.

Is it any wonder that relationships fail? Is it any wonder that being with another person can cause sadness and desperation? If nothing else, I feel that the awareness of the trap which has been unintentionally set can help avoid being caught up in it in the future, and avoid making decisions which are selfish and damaging. First, though, comes realisation - and that doesn't come with practice, or even with effort; it instead cleaves consciousness at the most inopportune moments.

Notes.

• love is knowing that, on occasion, it is impossible to help look for one who has lost herself - though I never entirely call off the search
• love asserts that for as long as you are lost, I too shall remain unaccounted for
• the equation of love is almost Newtonian - for every action, there is an exactly equal reaction - when one is lost, two are lost
• love permits the draining away of countless hours contemplating the object of one's obsession, declaring that no better use of time is possible
• love asserts that two people can form a bridge between England and Australia, and cross it during their dreams
• love asserts that what is contained in the other is more numerous, heavier and more serious than the constituents of the remainder of the universe taken together
• hence all human joys and pain, triumphs and defeat, overcoming and going under, are contained therein
• the idea of love is an attempt to explain the workings of love itself - it tries to rationalise why lying down in a public park in Cambridge, running for a flight in Budapest in a coat worthy of a homeless man, and the frustration of being unable to find a hotel in Blackpool as the sun baked us will be memories that are selected for recollection as my life comes to an end
• that is: love is greater than the mind is capable of grasping. What I call love, others would call God. So we deal in approximations - a series of staccato mental pictures or short films, which summarise it
• it is the final expression of Communism - owned by neither, but tended to religiously by both
• I try to paint it in words, and come up with stick-figures, but its reality shall elude me until the unfound re-discovers herself, and is duly returned to the dream-like state which is unparalleled.