From the Book Bag

Visited the library today.

 

I have a book bag now, exclusive book bag for library books. I like the way it slings over my shoulder and sits perfectly in the small of my back. My small of the back bag book bag.  The library. I’d forgotten; haven’t been a member since, when- my late school years. No, when university began and I moved to the city and started calling everything from home provincial, that’s when I stopped. My adulthood appears to be a considered undoing of everything I have been up until this point. I’ll say the same thing of myself in twenty years, or one, who knows. I find myself in the phase right now where I talk about all the phases I’ve been through.

 

To hold a book in my hands. To read, not to scan. To be here, here in the living of this moment, this one moment outside of windows which can’t be swapped and pop-ups which can’t be blocked. To smell paper, old sheets – which has become a contrived sensory sneak now, made mundane by all the chick lit which has come before, where gentle young women turn pages and take in the tea stain and old print of their books with the cracked spines and dog-eared sense of serendipitous things. My awareness has become such a scathing thing.

 

I treat my books like lovers. Obvious. The only romance afforded gravity must be laced with something sort of dangerous, violent barter; high stakes birth significance. Fiercely loyal to a group of writers and unwilling to try anything else. More interested in the later letters of the alphabet, rather than the early ones, with the supreme exception of Julian Barnes who writes melancholy so well, laced with a consistent awareness of self and hatred of his homeland, his Britain, which I similarly despise. I don’t know what the metaphorical sidetrack is there.  

 

In the bath this morning, I couldn’t reach a part of my back, and I thought of how many films use the washing of backs between lovers as something intense and representative of everything that lives between them. The semiotics of hygiene, I guess. And I imagined a woman who would spend her nights bathing, never able to reach that spot reserved for an imagined lover, and otherwise left untouched as she spends her days alone. Each evening, back to the bath, spot on the back unwashed. I imagined how she would die and be found, and examined, undertaker or surgeon taking note of a little mouldy spot just under her shoulder wing.

 

Then I thought of how kak and melodramatic I tend to become. I am often nostalgic for things not yet found.

 

Never felt so liberated as when I was openly termed ‘depressive’. Delicious, the relief which accompanied doctor’s declaration. I was, “grieving for my existence”, doctor said, which sounded to me suspicious plagiarism of Chekhov’s Masha who lived in mourning for her life and so I begrudged his qualifications as I did his Picasso wall prints; Westville hospital, see for yourself) – I’m not sure which words to choose, but they’re somewhere around the dread of an impending deadline which evaporates when an assignment is suddenly cancelled and you’re – hurrah – on holiday. Life was the assignment and I’d been given the permission to forfeit. It seemed that functionality was effort; I had become lazy and I knew, knew it was that simple and also that oafish; my arts education already teaching me that dark was not necessarily deep and anyway, all things were ultimately redundant. I was, for a short while, put on a type of in-house suicide watch, which comprised my father being too patient and my mother too afraid. The night I swallowed thirty five anti-depressants and half-heartedly nicked my arms, I’d gone dancing and, at the point when my drunken friends whooped along to the climax of some irony-laden indie pop track, I felt my equally drunken self identifying an inherent pointlessness to things, and in that instant, somehow, I equated their dancey, playful writhing as a symbol for everything great and I could find no reason. At the same time, my adult self, from somewhere in my distant future, was living with me and looking back, so that I was at once my present and my hindsight and she could not comfort me and I offered little back. We could not tell each other apart, my immediate and future selves, and we grew sad for each other then.

 

Sometimes, almost always when I brush my teeth, when I give in to my narcissistic tendencies and indulge a mirror-gaze, I feel my soul looking out from behind my eyeballs, clawing for some recognition with the reflection it sees. Some indication that they are the parts of the same whole, that abstract self and solid reflection. I cannot fathom it. They are like strangers wanting to escape an uncomfortable supper.

 

This is not therapy. Only, why I can’t write.

 

After that, the story goes as it goes. We heal and grow. Grow less panicked, less impressed by the hysteria of a painful life and begin to delight in countless strings of little things. Magical, ordinary things. Aircon units humming just so, chance meetings, projected profundities in our tea and biscuits. If we can only outlive our masochism, we grow up.

 

Amongst my regrets in life is, I’d guess, my crossing over that Freudian line when a baby discovers itself as ‘I’ and walks into his or her own ego. Accepts possession. If I could write with absolute omission of me, my ‘I’, there may be something.