malachite cursive

darkgreenink @ 2005-07-25T17:39:00

2005-07-25T16:39:26Z

I am posting this to all the new people I have added over the past week or so. Since the inception of this journal I have been trying to add people who interest me, but have been handicapped by a lack of internet access. As I have had no choice but to get a temporary job for the summer I've been spending much of the day wandering about the internet researching potential livejournal acquaintances. if I have added you it is because I like your journal, or we have unusual interests in common, or a really good combination of cross-interests or all of these. If you want to ask me why I added you or read my journal before you decide if we should be friends please do so. I would ask that if you do decide that you don't want me as a friend you let me know and I will take you off immediately. Thanks.

darkgreenink @ 2005-06-28T13:00:00

2005-06-28T12:52:26Z

Adam visited last weekend. Friday evening I walked down to the station to meet him. It was stormy and the sky sagged under its own weight. Under the Victorian awning of the station, the paint flaking away, yellow-cream over maroon, I waited for his late train. Everything glistened and it was darker, at six, than it had been at eleven the previous night. Almost an hour after it was due, Adam's train pulled in and a few smudged people stepped off, putting their palms out, turning their faces to the sky, opening umbrellas, putting up hoods. Adam wasn't among them, and momentary anxiety convulsed through me. I heard a shout from behind, my name, he was there, hair in straggles plastered to his face by rain, a wine bottle and a book in either hand, he grinned, he looked terrible. "Where's your bag?" was my bathetic opening gambit, all I could think of to say as he stood soaking in front of me, the last people from the train skirting round us. He sipped from the bottle and offered it to me. I took it but didn't drink. "Don't need one." he said bluntly, "Shall we go?". I grabbed his wrist and pulled the hand with the book towards me, "What are you reading?", it was 'She Came to Stay' by Simone de Beauvoir and a trickle of embarrasment melded with the discomfort of the situation; I didn't even know that she had written novels. "Oh, trash!" Adam yelled, suddenly animated and pitched the paperback hard at the window of the train, causing a dozen pairs of eyes to turn our way. I steered Adam out of the station and under my umbrella which blustered and gusseted in the wind and rain. He snatched back the wine and began walking quicker and quicker, wouldn't talk.

At home he collapsed onto my bed and was asleep within the first ten minutes of 'Heart of Glass' which I had rented on his recommendation. He woke up just before the end and fixed me with condescending eyes, a little more lucid now, and nasty, "Are you enjoying yourself?" he said, "What do you make of the, er, stylization?" the last word he pronounced syllable by syllable, dwelling over it, making it deliberate and crisp despite his slurs. And then fell asleep again. He woke the next day remembering little, nothing of the cruel outburst that kept me up virtually all night, only dimly aware that he had gotten an earlier train, drank too much on the way, tried to find my place but couldn't and so returned to the station where, fortunately, I was waiting. We spent the rest of the day in quiet chatter, I don't think he noticed my guardedness. He left Sunday evening around eight, the sky was blissful and cloudless, it could have been midday. As I was walking out of the little station, a concerned looking elderly man in uniform approached me, "Is this yours?" he said, proffering a book. For a moment I couldn't think of the appropriate response to the situation, I didn't recognise what he was giving me and in my panic believed that he was offering me some sort of gift. "Um, did you drop this here on Friday?" he filled the gap in the awkwardness of our silence and I looked at the book more closely. It was Simon's de Beauvoir, the pages water damaged, like it had been dropped in the bath.

I don't know how to talk to him or to rationalise to myself the problem he currently has with drinking. Admitting it to myself has been hard enough, but I have seen this situation worsen over the past few months. Being at home depresses him terribly, he is alone and argues a great deal with his parents. I can't write about this either. So far, in the few entries I've made, this journal has been a strange kind of therapy, I appreciate that I have been prettifying events, fixing them to narrative structures at times, this helps me I think, though I realise the limitations of that help, it's transience. I can't do that with this situation, I don't know how to confront it. What scares me is that I don't think I am enough of a friend to him to be able to talk about it, I don't think our friendship is intimate enough - and I know that partly this is my own fears and yearnings for attention - but what really worries me is that I don't think he has anybody intimate enough with him to confront this problem. My methods are too close to his own, writing about the incident above, I can't help consider the writing of it, the structure. He is the same, he romanticizes his self-destruction, it's a hero story, it's literature. It's a dangerous delusion. At the same time, for those who want to help him, like me, a more dangerous delusion is thinking, as I am prone to do, that it is his romanticism, rather than the drink, that is the real problem.

darkgreenink @ 2005-06-20T15:42:00

2005-06-20T14:43:14Z

Everyone has left town. The streets around the university are empty, the heat haze comes off them making the distance, the walk in front of me, look woozy. I wander round like the zombie heroine in a Bella Lugosi film, the libraries, the computer clusters, the streets, the shops. There's nobody here. All the people I see wander around by themselves like survivors in a bombed city, they eye me suspectly. I talk to nobody but shop attendants, librarians, occasional homeless. Everyone has a wide stare in their eyes, they are as scared and as lost as I am in this town. A few days ago I walked down past through the woods, down the embankment and out, further still, to where the town ends, dissected by motorway. I sat down on the scrub with an old beat-up tape of Duke Ellington numbers that lurched and screeched in the haze left behind by trucks and cars and vans. Their rumble swished in and out of the piano's glassy, fuzzy drops of chords.

As much as anything, I felt alone again. The people in the cars moving too fast to glance round and see anything meaninful of me. I was a blur to them, as evanescent as a sheep or cow bleating in the unheard distance. All those destinations and all I had to go back to where the green walls of my empty room. Unable to go home, too bored to stay, I am locked in the between-places gaze of those others, solemn, alone, who pass me in the drunken streets, palms clammy with sweat, on tired legs that struggle up the black and white hills, sun over us, white, burning, and buzzing like a broken strip-light.