I spent a while a few nights ago not booking a ticket to and an hotel in Paris. For a couple of days. I'd take in the monumental Basquiat exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Wander round. Go home. But I didn't book the ticket. Airfare and hotel would have been £400-£500. Why would I want to pay that to be aloine in Paris when I could be alone in London for free? Because that's the point: I would be on my own. I haven't been on an "away" holiday - except for a short break to see my friends in Utrecht and a trip to Nice - since I broke up with my last girlfriend. Two years ago.
The emotional truth of my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood was that I was alone, as in lonely. When my parents moved us from Bexleyheath to Teddington in the summer of 1967, the boys and girls in my class got up a collection and bought me a car for my Scalextric. We went ten-pin bowling. I don't know if that makes me popular. I'm not sure I felt as if I belonged at my own leaving do.
I was one of those children who say they don't have any friends. I didn't share anyone's life, see the inside of their homes, meet their parents. Except Geoff Mason, who was another slight misfit at Erith Grammar. We hung out from time to time, but that was it. We didn't go off on any adventures (we were eleven years old: going into central London would have been an adventure). And a guy called Derek Hasted who was into model railways and at Junior School played the descant recorder well enough to get to play the treble recorder (as I did) and later, as I've just discovered through Google+Facebook, became a guitar teacher and runs a number of guitar groups.
You can live a life on your own right up until the day it occurs to you that everyone else has a partner and you're the Old Guy With No Friends Of Their Own. Slightly creepy. I've started seeing myself as a creepy old guy, and if you don't shake that suspicion, you're done for. If someone doesn't validate you by finding you sexually attractive and pronto, you start to want not to be in other people's company. Because when you are you feel creepy. That's how I feel.
If I'm feeling ironic, I'll say that I can remember either what I used to do with attractive women, or why I used to do it, but not both at the same time. Ha ha. I've got so used to not having someone to share my sexual feelings with, I barely let myself have any, lest I remember how nasty the bitterness of sexual disappointment is. How it alters everything I say and do and how it stains everything else I feel. And then there are days when I think I would rather feel that than feel the bland nullity I usually feel. Feeling-good becomes feeling-good-because-you're-not-feeling-bad. Not feeling-good-because-you-got-laid-last-night-and-it-was-fabulous.
I have lost the sense that other people are magic. That they can and will make my life better, enhance it, add to it, and otherwise make getting out of bed a better idea. Lose that and you're left with habit as the only reason for leaving the front door.
This too shall pass, as we say in AA. And the sooner it does the better. But right now, it's where I am. And if I don't share it and name it, it will go on being where I am.
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