Monthly Archives: September 2011

Your anxieties, when did they start? No prize for guessing: when I turned up. But they seemed to have a life of their own, didn’t they? Didn’t they creep into your life despite me, despite you, almost as if they were there before us, as if they had no regard for us? Nothing we did could stop them because we did nothing in unison. It was almost admirable how they crept up on you, wasn’t it, how they undermined you better than any enemy could have done: how they got to you before me. Or was it my arrival itself that brought them into being? From the most primitive fears – I can’t leave my room, not while there are still voices in the hall – to the delicate sensation of the marrow in your bones turning into cold metal rods, quivering ever so slightly.

When did it happen? When did you lose your name? Wasn’t it when I came on the scene and was forced to try to control you, to impose your name upon you on their behalf? And you could do nothing but hurry back to your new room and lock your door, hoping they hadn’t seen you… Didn’t you lose your name at the very moment you were supposed to gain it, when you shook hands with your father and walked down that grey path between the thistle bushes? Whose fault is it, mine or yours? For there was no one else, was there? Weren’t they all pulled out from under you in those moments? Strange trick. Oh it wasn’t so tragic, the high heavens didn’t fall, but we were instantly relegated to our lifelong roles, though we had no idea what they were.

What we couldn’t have achieved if we hadn’t been hindered by each other, if we’d slid into each other without noticing, if we’d grown into one! We’d have slid right into the world, with all its worldly pains and joys. What did you ever want but to feel those pains and joys? Didn’t they seem like child’s play compared to having me around, compared to being you?

It’s as if the thread of our potential life were always running under our life. A life that I would have overseen if things hadn’t gone so wrong. A proper life in which you hadn’t dragged me down, in which we could have cooperated and merged into someone real, someone with continuity, solidity, influence. And at the same time it’s as if we both deny this potential life, deny it as something as dubious and unreal as ourselves. Oh, things are grim, we agree. But it’s not just that. It’s as though if we were to start all over again it would all turn out the same, and this same potential life would still run beneath beside or beyond us, taunting us.

Things are bad, we agree, truly grim. Oh, but it’s worse, we agree, much worse than even we imagine. At least we’re not homeless, not yet. At least they haven’t shot us, not yet. But the logic will soon be quite clear, we agree, and there’ll be no other option, they’ll have to march us and our ilk into a stadium and shoot us, and they’ll have made us willing, they’ll have made us agree we’re a symptom of all that’s wrong and that it’s for the best.