What exactly is the occasion we are marking on our birthdays?
Depending on our mood at the time, there could be any number of answers to the above question, but I suspect they fall into two broad categories: either an acknowledgement of the day x years ago when a new life took its first faltering breaths; or the sense that it's a miracle you ever managed to get this far.
When a man with the mindset of your author, such that each backward step (be that caused by error, misfortune, or the natural course of events) results in a
complete obliteration of all self-confidence or esteem, then we can understand why the negotiation of another year is met with a degree of astonishment.
I am now assured that the will to live transcends everything else, and this is what I'll celebrate later today. For much of the year, I've had no interest in survival, and yet I endure.
Since my last birthday - the 31st - I have seen three of the markers by which I locate myself taken away, one after the other, and I have thereafter drifted, alone and uncertain.
First, the idea of a meaningful future was extinguished when Bluefish and I not so much decoupled (such is for trains and implies a deliberate and careful separation) as reached a point of exhaustion akin to having fought an illness for so long that the alternatives were to rid oneself of the complaint, or die of sadness.
Thus I knew I should not be going to Australia, the Martian dust-red point of infinite distance which might well have otherwise become home. This made the remaining ties in this country more important - if I cannot float to the antipodes on the heavy, drug-like fug of emotion that is Bluefish, then nail me down here until further notice.
Two of the nails which fasten me permanently to England were whipped out in quick succession: one in August, one in November, and I have become unfixed, existing now everywhere and nowhere.
There is little to live for, yet, against any form of rational judgement, I am still here, like a dose of the clap, or an unpaid bill.
I lost a lot, but the furrowed and self-loathing absorber of those losses remains, grimly prepared to relinquish whatever is left. That I shall do so, eventually, is inevitable, and yet I feel painfully certain I'll reach 33, with the endless seam of despair that I continue to plunge down never quite bottoming out.
