Category Archives: Writing

You who’ve watched me all my life. My double, my enemy. You, standing on the other bank, watching. I imagined you tut-tutting at me, accusing me by your very presence. I called you a coward, but you followed me. You live on. You make me cryptic, turn me against myself.

When I awoke this morning everything had been cleaned by the rain. The colours had returned and I found I was clinging to an ugly little totem of the night before. I drew aside the curtain and let the sun flood my room. The things in my room stretched on their toes and looked around like a clutter of cats — alive.

Night came into my room in the middle of the day as I was reading. It peered through the door and when I was off guard slid in over me like a dark fog. I fell asleep and dreamt that a black rain was pattering on my eyelids. I couldn’t move. When the moon found me everything in my room was the same colour — inert.

She knew there was someone out there for her, someone just like her, and that she would find that someone eventually. But they told her that to find him she would have to go out and do things, make friends, maybe even travel. And she thought that if she went out and did these things, she might be taken out of herself, become a different person, and then she wouldn’t know what kind of someone she wanted because she wouldn’t know who she herself was. She would be a different person, and if then she met him how would she know it was him? If she met him now, if he came to her door, or if he picked up her keys when she dropped them on the street, today, on the bridge, she would know, they would both know instantly, they would recognize it in each other’s eyes, that thing that made them different from the others, the thing the others couldn’t understand. That’s how they would know each other, they would recognize themselves in each others’ eyes instantly, wordlessly. But if she went out and did all those things to find the one who was meant for her, she might become like them, and then he would fade away and multiply and become an anyone rather than that someone. But, she thought, I’ve stayed here for so long alone, and if I remain here will I continue to be myself? Will I even know who I am? Will I be able to respond when someone calls my secret name? Why do I long to meet him if not to find myself in him, to be completed in his eyes? Can I continue to live like this without losing so much of myself that I won’t recognize myself in him if I see him? Maybe he’s living the same way, thinking these thoughts at this moment, somewhere in this city, the one among millions, and maybe he too feels it’s getting late, that if he doesn’t find me soon it will be too late, he’ll have lost so much of himself that he won’t be able to recognize himself in me if he sees me. Then maybe if we do meet we’ll think one another just another of the millions, just one of the others, and he’ll hand me my keys without looking at me and I’ll mumble thanks and we’ll go on our way in opposite directions across the bridge over the dirty water, thinking the same thoughts as each other. Then we’ll both have to choose between going out or dying inside, we’ll be forced to give up on the idea of each other, on our idea of ourselves in each other, on our idea of ourselves. We’ll finally have to become like the others, we’ll lose the only beautiful thing in the world and disperse into the others, become dirty water, become fish, multiple, and all will be lost.

I took a trip to conquer my boredom, but I still woke up bored every day. Torpor descended on me. I passed through hot countries. I saw nothing but sand and dust and restaurants. Like the dust boredom was everywhere: it covered me if I didn’t keep moving. But there was nothing to escape from or to. There was nothing to do but force the hands of time by drinking. I told the hours by the number of bottles I drank. No one talked to me in the bars, and why should they? Did I want them to? I walked through churches, playing the tourist. Sitting in the pews reading brochures I thought that heaven itself must be deathly dull. I thought the gods themselves must be bored half to death by having to exist for all eternity — so bored that they prod us into action when we start to remind them of themselves.

Today, after finally finishing a long and boring project, bringing the deck chair, a bottle of beer and a book out into the sunshine I’ve squinted at from my office for two weeks, and settling down to relax and bake for a good few hours, I was immediately pelted by a small army of ugly flying insects. I looked behind me and, seeing a shimmering swarm on the ground, in the plants, on the wall, mingling with the ants that were pouring up from the cracks between the paving stones (were they killing the ants?), I was suddenly transported to an afternoon around the same time last year, when we were confronted by the exact same sight after returning from the market, and, simultaneously, another summer afternoon two years ago, when, having been to London for the weekend, we came home to find a neat line of ants from the front door to the kitchen, where a mango lay sweetly oozing in a bowl on the counter, alive with rapturous black emmets. I got up, found the insect spray, and went to work drenching them in toxic mist and smearing them across the flagstones with my sandals while flicking them off my shoulders, arms and legs. After several minutes of this, having decimated their ranks (though more were still flying into the courtyard, choosing, like last year, a precise spot beside our front door, directly behind me, where the ants have built their underground network), I sat back down and continued reading, despite the lingering smell of insect spray. Soon the last living ants finally succumbed to the toxins (twitching among the remains of their comrades), the few clouds in the sky cleared, and I sighed and sat back to enjoy the rest of the afternoon in peace. But then, when another bug landed on my arm and I looked at one of these creatures properly for the first time, I realised that the flying and the earthbound insects must of course be one and the same species – that the airborne ones had not come from outside, as foreign invaders, but from within the ant colony itself – and I remembered learning in school that ants grow wings in the summer before the young queens are fertilised and fly off to start their own nests. I had been pelted by young winged ants on their nuptial flight. When I later learned, after looking it up, that female ants can continue to lay eggs for up to fifteen years, I felt rather bad about having massacred these amazing creatures thinking them disgusting, short-lived parasites.