Resort

“Every story tells of a ghost. At the end, the centre of a story is a Black Hole, but it isn’t black, and it isn’t dark. In the best case, it might gleam.”

Judith Hermann, We Would Have Told Each Other Everything 

What I will say is this: spring always comes.

That is not what I meant to say, but I thought I had better say something. Everybody has something to say.

I cannot tell stories.

I do not know how to write a story.

I will say this: last night I had a dream that I was shouting at my mother and I was eating olives. I was shouting at her, saying “look what you’ve done! You’ve created a set of people so unhappy! Every day they are so unhappy!” My dreams are blunt instruments, they are not stories.

I myself do not have a story yet. I am too cross, and I am too contrived. I give a certain look, who is it for? Nobody is looking.

My desires have no object, my love has no bounds.

I read, much of the night, and go south in winter.

What is it exactly I should be saying? How ugly, how many and how repetitive my mistakes? The same one over and over again, wearing a slightly different disguise each time?

Do you really want to hear how, when the police came to our house looking for my mum, they looked in the cupboards, in the wardrobe?

We laughed about it, under the bathroom sink, is she there?

We didn’t stay laughing for long.

What do I say here, what do I put here?

I don’t want to talk about my mum right now, how she died, how I haven’t been right since, because things weren’t going too great to begin with, let’s be honest.

I had so much to say today, I had so much to say.

I wasn’t sure whether to tell my therapist how I dreamed about her for the first time and in the dream she was killed, her body hidden, and I had to go looking in underground corridors for her. The thought of this man, who was someone I knew and wasn’t, holding her like a doll and dancing with her, her head turned away at every possible moment. What was she trying not to see? What was she trying to keep?

What do I want to keep, and what do I want to throw away? It seems like I’ve pretty much made the choice to go on living, and it can’t all come with me.

I fucked it, I’m sorry, and I want to try again.

I made choices in bad moments and now look, look where I am now.

Is this helping? Are we having fun yet?

If it’s not helping and we’re not having fun, is it rude if I ask what it is we’re doing here exactly?

What happened is that I got a job in marketing and a cheap room to live in, and at the time what really mattered was that I had enough people to get drunk with on the weekend and somewhere to do it.

I’m not sure what matters now but it isn’t that, because getting drunk every weekend was going to make me stagnant at best, and dead at worst. It never fails to surprise me when I decide to treat somewhere as a nuclear testing site and it blows up in my stupid face.

No, now I’m reading Helene Cixous and choosing this over a bottle of wine. Not sure if I’ve set myself up with a sanctuary or a torture chamber. Realising as I write that it is neither, it’s just a desk and a laptop, some pens and paper. I’m here to see what happens, I’m just here to see if there’s anyone there. I’m trying to see if this is somewhere I could live, I’m trying to see if I can live with myself. I am not sure sometimes but in a very real sense I actually do not have much of a choice. It’s not a matter of letting go or holding on, I think sometimes, but a secret third thing. Do you just sit with it, let it be? What would happen if I were really left to my own devices, what would that look like? If there was no internet, no chance of a book, no possibility of an audience? Would I chew this up and swallow it? Would I make something for the sake of making it, would I have the option of sticking it up on my wall?

It’s that I’ve got to get through the worst of it to get to something better, is that it?

Oh, do you know what just forget it, I say, knowing full well I have not forgotten a thing and what I mean by that is that I have somehow forgotten everything.

I get what Raymond Carver is trying to say in that poem, I really do. It reminds me of it’s a wonderful life, it makes me see the beauty of busting back in. I get it, I think I get it, but I don’t get it, do you get me? What was that dream trying to show me, it can’t just be ghosts every time. Aren’t ghosts supposed to have something to say?