he leaves he looks quiet and thoughtful.
3
How can he communicate what had happened to him?
To the extent that he has any idea. Even entertaining the question is a blow from which he recoils.
What had happened to him ….
Things weren’t meant to happen to him.
He wasn’t a passive pawn in the face of life’s vagaries.
Was that what he had become?
He was meant to shape and control his own life-course.
As he had always tried to do. As he is still exhausting himself in attempting. And which, considering what he is up against, he has gone some way towards achieving.
He had been a good sportsman. And a good businessman. Still has his own small company, the maintenance of which requires effort he is now unable to summon.
Every goal a personal challenge. And many of them attained.
Except, it now seems, those that really matter.
To feel connection. To know and be known.
Why should things so basic be elusive to him?
When he has accomplished what many would regard as much more difficult?
If it was a matter of energy, ability, willpower – those capacities had always been strong in him. Given what he’d experienced, he probably couldn’t have survived without them.
Although at this point, alarmingly, even survival seems ambitious.
What he wants, needs, covets- and the more he wants it the less accessible it seems – is a sense of internal solidity.
Some kind of self-acceptance.
Some kind of (he almost laughs aloud at the word, but without humour) some kind of peace.
Rather than withdrawing from contact (meaningful contact, not the vocabulary of commerce) he wants the affirmation of acceptance.
Acceptance from at least some others. And - the prerequisite, he knows, to experiencing that- from his own beleaguered self. Instead his life is a navigation course, littered with obstacles (minefields, bloody IEDs) which only he can see.
He isn’t the invisible man. Others are aware of his presence. And he can be assertive at times. But it is a presence that seems to have little to do with him.
I don’t identify with that guy.
The can-do operator who can fix everything but himself.
The more I `achieve’, the less real I become.
It’s as if I’m trying to override with `success’ a reality that is impervious to that method. I’m running faster, throwing further, jumping higher. But I’m not moving within myself.
It’s as if my `real’ self – whatever that is, was, or could be – has petrified. Like a bronze cast, riveted to the spot, while some kind of imposter forges ahead.
How can I communicate that?
And how can I put words to the experience I suspect – fear – has given rise to it?
A steady leaking of energy.
My pilot light is going out.
I need to do something about this while I still can. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
Escalating panic attacks at the side of the road until implosion.
The bronze cast finally melted; a puddle on the street.
He needs sustenance. But is midway through ordering when he remembers the coffee here isn’t good.
Continues with the order anyway. Because he tries not to go to the pub before one, doesn’t do hard drugs anymore, and urgently needs some kind of stimulant.
It also seems rude to renege on the order half-way. But he regrets not doing so. And to the drip of desperation the familiar twist of self-reproach is added.
The pressure inside him is mounting.
I am a gasket starting to blow.
But the coffee tastes different this time. More pungent and bitter.
And as he tosses it back (like vodka, it is imperative it is consumed quickly) he feels that it matches his inner state.
Unexpectedly, there is satisfaction in that. The first satisfaction he has experienced all week. His own physiology must have worked the effect; converting the insufficiently hot liquid into the mildly restorative potion it has seemed to become.
And realizes how far he has fallen when miniscule unconscious influence over something so trivial seems to connote some kind of victory.
Laney would not have been critical. She had been generously receptive to him as he had never been to her.
Or perhaps to anyone for that matter.
Hey we might as well have the full self-indictment.
Rather than regarding them as defensive, Laney had seen all such comments as appealing self-deprecation. As evidence of his ability to laugh at himself.
Where is Laney now when he needs her? She’d slipped his hold.
Or had he driven her away?
The possibility is one he doesn’t want to ponder. But there is little on which he wants to reflect on this cold winter morning of failure, with congealed dregs of coffee in front of him and a future which seems as unappetizing.
Always receptive to distraction from the unpalatable (so I don’t, after all, lack receptivity) he scrutinizes the other patrons of the café. Checks out other accomplices in the pretensions this place has to being a decent coffee house.
For those are the words emblazoned across the window- `Joe’s Coffee House’.
An indolent scrawl, a hopeful suggestion. An aspiration perhaps.
Maybe Joe, whoever he is, is having a tough time of it as well. Had envisaged, in his younger years (is he, too, middle-aged?) a profession more compelling than purveyor of indifferent coffee in premises at best banal and at worst sleazy. Maybe he had missed opportunities, fumbled the ball. And is now, in a different way like himself, not so much settling for less as valiantly holding on.
Maybe the ability to hold on in the face of crumbling expectations is the most exacting skill of all.
At the age of forty two, I have yet to master it.
He
