the D word
She thinks about things she's done she wishes had gone differently. She's at that stage of her life where she can think in decades as well as years or groups of years. It frightens her sometimes, how little affinity she feels for those 20 years younger. How did she get so disconnected? When did she start to stop being the person she thought she was?
All those sad, drunken encounters, with or without shouting. It was all about Having A Good Time (tm), but the good time rarely bothered to come to the party, and it was all hangovers and bitter regrets without it.
You'd think that after a few or a dozen of these experiences a person would learn, would see that it was pointless, a waste of time, money and energy, but she persevered, perhaps not always as strenuously, or not as frequently, but she kept it up for a good 15 years before finally accepting that the good time wasn't going to find her, and she should just go home and deal with it.
For a long time she didn't like going home because she might just miss the good time. She liked to go out because something nice might happen while she was out. She didn't like going home because it meant admitting defeat: the world had beaten her yet again.
As she got older, going home meant taking responsibility. She got worse at that. Most people got better, but she got worse. She started out being sensible and practical and good at looking after things, and gradually devolved, until one day she realised she was back at the stage of a 12 or 13yo child - wanting to run their own lives but not understanding the ramifications of responsibility, the consequences of action. (She does understand, she just prefers not to think about it.)
She goes home, loses momentum, sits, listless or restless, it doesn't make much difference. The few tasks she's supposed to perform get left and left and left. "It gets done when it gets done," she says, hopefully not too loudly, and pokes desultorily at this or that pile of whatever she's neglecting today.
Sneaking around at the edge of her awareness is the D word. Or a few of them, in a little train, like baby elephants in a kiddy's board book. Denial, that's one. Depression. Death. Devious, deceitful, droning (on and on).
She likes it quiet and dark, but not too dark. She can't sleep in full dark. There's always a light on somewhere, a little glow under this door or that. Door has to be closed when she's in the room, otherwise she doesn't feel safe.
She thinks sometimes about the last time she slept in her own bed. It was late summer or early autumn, and she'd actually brought her boyfriend home instead of going to his (being brave, for a change). He'd managed to shed a whole lot of dry skin in the bed and after he'd gone, she'd lain there looking out the window, pleasantly dozing, until she felt something crawling up her leg: a large brown roach. It had come to feed on the skin flakes. She shrieked, leapt up, ran from the room. She felt unable to sleep in the bed again in case the bug came back. So she didn't. She slept on the sofa or on the floor, whatever she could get away with at the time. She came to view sleeping in bed as a real treat. She was okay sleeping in other people's beds, just not her own. Somehow she had convinced herself, over time, that she didn't deserve a bed.
She was like this once before, after a bad experience in her mid-20s, when she didn't feel safe in her bed because it could be seen from the window, so she started sleeping on the floor behind the bed. She wanted to sleep in the bed, but couldn't, because she felt exposed, and nobody else in the house cared what she thought, so she was alone.
She reflects on being alone. In her teens, being left alone at home was good because she could get on with things (usually reading). Being left alone at school was okay as long as the teachers didn't start thinking she was a Problem Child. Having friends was nice, but there were so many demands and it always seemed she had to bow to the wishes of others and they weren't reciprocably tolerant of hers. A great expenditure of effort for not a lot of return (just like family, really).
When she turned 18, the compulsion for Having A Good Time (tm) descended upon her in earnest. She had to have a good time, no matter what it took. She was so misguided and lost, but it was all good material in the end, if she could remember it.
Boyfriends were handy. Boyfriends knew other people and places to go. Widened her horizons.
Workmates were next to useless. She was bottom of the ladder in most respects, and didn't get invited out to birthday lunches.
Flatmates were people she tried to get on with for the sake of a stable home life. If you were lucky they would be nice to you back. If you were really lucky they might fall in love with you and you didn't find them totally repulsive.
When she looks back she wishes she hadn't spent so much of her teens looking for "the perfect boyfriend". It amazes her now, that she could have been so dedicated to one cause and to have nothing to show for it. She still hasn't found him. Template was too rigid, yes, yes. Silly TV-influenced template. Throw it away.
She thought she'd found the love of her life at 21, but he didn't know she existed. Same old same old. A few years later he "came to his senses", but it was never quite right - he had all the power and she ended up feeling like a kitty toy on a string. On again, off again, three bags full.
Eventually she met someone she got on with very well, and there was a nice bit of mutual lust, but they lived in different countries (oh, where would we be without teh interwebs?). She feels this is unfinished business, and it gnaws away at her. She daydreams about being able to afford to fly over to see him, thinks about seducing him for the first time, thinks about being happy.