Janis Joplin: Summertime

I'm not very good at being left. I'm even worse at telling the difference between being left and being abandoned. Most of the time it doesn't even occur to me that there is a difference, that there are ways of people walking away which don't involve them not looking back over their shoulder. Right now, my best friend is leaving to live in Ireland- somewhere on the coast of the sticky out bit on the bottom left, if you're iinterested. He probably told me the name, but I was probably drunk. Predictably, I'm not dealing with it very well. Thus I find myself hiding in my spare room at two on a tuesday afternoon wearing pink moon boots and an enormous red fluffy cardigan. They clash terribly but I don't care, which itself is a sign of the depth of my malaise. I've made a den of pillows and blankets. Leaving it, even to go downstairs to take a piss or make another cup of coffee makes me feel exposed and in danger. Although, come to think of it, if I made fewer cups of coffee I wouldn't need to piss so often; I could probably halve the number of times I need to leave the security of my little hovel just by doing that, and also if my caffine intake was lower my left leg wouldn't be twitching quuite so much. Hell yes. Logic as the tool of the mad.

I don't deal well with being left. I find it hard to believe that people will come back. I find it hard not to think a tad apocalyptically- my life is empty, there is no one left (despite the obvious untruth of this), no one will ever love me, no one will ever stay. I find it hard to accept the truth- that people do leave, and then they return. Or they don't return. Either way it's not my fault, and I, like Celine Dion, will go on. Although, like Celine Dion, I probably shouldn't. Or so it seems from here.

I don't deal well with being left. I slip quickly into the worst possible form of shadow life. I can't face anything. I can't talk to peopl and I don't want anyone near me. Touch seems to burn. I can't summon the energy or the will for simple tasks. About ten years ago I saw a drawing by Blake of the corner of a room, done in pencil. In my mind, that is what this place looks like- blank and empty. Safe, though, in its annonymity. I don't particularly want to leave. I sit in the corner with the wall at my back, and I just keep on sitting. I stare without interest from the window or immerse myself in DVDs of american TV series'- the televisual equivalent of smack- sweet, addictive, an eater of days, but ultimately resulting in your brain rotting and dribbling out of all the holes in your face.

I don't expect this to sound like anything other than self-indulgence, but it isn't that, quite. It's what happens when your brain shuts off any sort of emotion. The brain isn't too good at filtering out one type of feeling from another. It can't really tell the difference between pain and sadness and anger and cheerfullness and irritation. So if, like mine, your brain has the learned response to overwhelming emotion of simply blocking whatever emotion it is which is doing the overwhelming, then it doesn't discriminate. It blocks out everything. All those emotions you hardly ever notice which get you up in the morning- interest, excitement, anger, duty, whatever floats you- go too. What is left is a big hole which manifests itself as a sort of boredom- the eternal ennui of the long distance soul, or something. I've tried to fill out my diary card for therapy every day this week. I'm supposed to tick boxes to describe how I've been feeling. I can't think of anything to tick. The whole week is left blank. Which is what it's like.

I know I should stand up. I know that this sort of behaviour can only make things worse. I've known this since sunday, when I ran away from a one day festival in Hyde Park and walked around London for hours with the only person I know whose presence I can tolerate at times like these. We window shopped for houses and I dreamed of a future in which I live on my own in peace and isolation and sing for a living. I came home and sat up till five in the morning, doing nothing in particular.

Here's the funny thing though. I've been here before, more times than I can remember. When a boy doesn't call me back. When an email isn't answered. When my ex has a new partner. When I row with a friend. When my therapist cancels a session. Everything from my mother's death to the man in the fucking corner shop not returning my smile induces this numbness. Every time it's the same- I hole myself up in my house for a week like a wounded animal and refuse to answer the phone. Eventually, the numbness wears off, I start feeling things again, the boredom stops and I can muster up enough interest in the world to do the washing up and have a shower and go out. What it feels like to be sitting here, though. That's different from the times before. I haven't once in the last three days contemplated suicide. I say this matter of factly because it's a simple matter of fact- suicidal ideation has always been a symptom of this before; it goes together like shopp-de-fucking-whatever. In it's place there is something different; something like resignation, or endurance. This week is just something to be lived through, like I've lived through it before.

There used to be a poem which would come to my head on days like these. It's by Berryman, and the lines which come to mind are: "I don't feel this will change. / I don't want any thing / or person, familiar or strange. / I don't think I will sing / any more just now; / or ever..." Today, something else is stuck in my head- Summertime, in the voice of Janis Joplin. You need to hear the words in this voice, raw and true, to understand why this isn't as wholly fucking corney as it sounds. The song isn't so much like a lullaby when it's sung by a blues-harsh smack addict. Unsuprisingly. It sounds like a promise of protection offered by someone powerless to protect, and the only thing that rings positive is the line which sticks in my head, switched in my mind from third person to first- "One of these mornings, I'm gonna rise up singing". Hell, it sounds corney awhatever voice it's in and my attempt at cultural reference distraction wont change that, but I hold onto that line with all the fervour of the convert. I'm sitting dressed like a sartorially misguided extra from Fame on a pile of rags surrounded entrely by mess, and the only time I have ventured further than the corner shop in the last few days I felt like I was in Blade Runner adn had to run away, ignominiously. I'm allowed to hold onto any line I damn well like if I think it might help.

I'm not very good at being left. Maybe I never will be. My best friend, who has held my hand through all the crap even when I was being irritating as only an overeducated borderline with a penchant for razorblades can be irritating, and who is one of the few people I have ever trusted, is moving over the sea to write a novel, like the big damn cliche he is, and I am not dealing with it very well. I am dealing with it though. And I find that I understand the difference between being left and being abandoned. People who leave come back; or they don't. Either way, they don't stop looking back, adn they don't find it so easy, and they stop to say goodbye. People who abandon you walk away without a glance. Obviously this brings up the matter of Orpheus and, you know, the underworld and shit, and the whole looking back and losing Euridice but we'll just put that down as the exception that proves my somewhat sentimental, ill-thought out rule. Besides, Orpheus was given due warning that the usual rules didn't apply, and if there's one thing that classical mythology should have taught us it's that if the gods tell you to do something then you should probably, you know, just do it.

This post has no substance particularly. I'm not in my right mind, you know. Someone is leaving, and I'm not dealing with it well. I have found comfort, though. In American TV, mainly. If the worst comes to the worst and you have to leave on a plane with some other guy, and I have to walk away with the funny-faced dimiutive policeman, and if life comes between us as life has a tendency to do, and the problems of three little people don't add up to a hill of beans in my crazy head, then at least we'll always have bittorrent.