Notes from a Room

After all things could come together, it sometimes happened. There was some interplay between what you did and what happened to you. Currents could gather under the froth of your failure. Or a strange synchronicity would reveal itself, as when random numbers start to form a pattern. It wasn’t that you made your life (only an idiot would believe that) or that life made you: but sometimes acts and events coalesced, pulling you into the world and the world into you, hiding you in the world’s inner space.

‘I couldn’t read, I could hardly think properly, it was as if I were being dismantled from within. I didn’t know which direction to go, as if my will had been taken away. A hole was how I described it to myself, like dropping into a hole and not being able to look up.’

‘One day I drew a line that meant stop and a line that meant start and stepped from line to line. I’d move the starting line every day and step across it. It was a simple question of life and death, a simple question for once! Going forward would mean to renew the ties to life, going back would be to feel the pull of death. As usual the voice was close, opening its mouth to tell me to listen, to tell me I didn’t even know how to listen.’

‘I took walks and train rides, scouting for ways and places to do it, toying with it. I narrowed it down to a train. I’d get off at a rural station, walk across the rolling fields with an eye on my watch, find a suitable place by a cluster of trees and wait. I’d have what they’d need in my bag, which I’d leave by the tracks. Sweet dream… What was I playing at? Whose will was this? It came down to a simple question of death or life… You’ve run out of options, said the voice, what’s holding you back but your own cowardice? You can’t live and you can’t die, you’re beyond useless. You couldn’t make it work and you can’t even make this work. You’d get that floating feeling of terror and aloneness and you’d cling to your useless life and go home to your regrets with your tail between your legs. You’ve got nothing left but me but you can’t even listen to me. How will this end for you, have you ever thought about that? Are you even capable of thinking about it? No, you’re not, that’s why you need me. Are you starting to see? But you can’t even listen to me, you can’t even do that right. Yet your whole useless life has come down to this and will continue to come down to this, and you know it. I know you know and you know I know you know. There’s nothing for it, it said, you know you’ve run out of options. You didn’t have a lot to start with, and those you had you squandered and now you’ve run out. And the longer you live the stronger I’ll grow. Listen to me… I took walks and train rides, scouting for ways and places to do it, toying with it. I narrowed it down to a train. I’d get off at a rural station, walk across the rolling fields with an eye on my watch, find a suitable place by a cluster of trees and wait. I’d have what they’d need in my bag, which I’d leave by the tracks. Sweet dream…’

‘I remember a couple of days when I was pulled right out of the hole, it felt like for good. (Everything felt like for good in those days.) The voice silent, blissful respite. No need but to exist and calm with whatever came. For a day or two, for a day, for a few moments I saw how things could be, should be.’

‘I remember being pulled out of the hole some days after. Out of dead time. From time to time it would happen. Somehow I’d silence the voice that told me I wasn’t listening and wouldn’t understand if I did. I’m trying to remember what was out there. Unfamiliar territory, dangerous in its own way. Pregnant with possibility and risk. Easier to step back in the shadows and start listening again: you think you’re free, you think wrong, listen to me.’

‘I’d lie in bed all morning daydreaming of a sudden fatal accident. A crash, a fall, a meteor. Something that would take me at a stroke, since I was too weak to give myself over either to death or life. In daydreams everything was possible if unsatisfactory. But it seemed less unsatisfactory to dream of dying than living. Almost comforting.’