Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: loneliness

Ghanaity

Had to change trains twice to get home and I was reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, great, familiar, female, underrated. On the second train I glanced up when somebody laughed and saw a short, beautiful African man gazing longingly at me.

It was so startling. I hurried back to Cranford, the village where the old ladies are not nearly so old as they were in Miss Matty’s own youth. At the next station I looked up, focussing between the heads of people sitting back to back all down the left side of the cabin, and saw that he was still looking at me. His eyes were soft and fond as though I were terribly familiar. We smiled. I went back to my book.

Someone got off, occasioning the usual genteel German shuffling whereby everybody shifts their knees to one side saying, Bitte, Danke, Entschuldigung. All of a sudden the man who had been gazing plumped into the vacated seat opposite, he slung his bag down on the floor and had altogether an air of decision.

So I looked up and said, How are you? Good, he said, and you? Good, I said. Thank you. Then we all travelled along in a kind of noisy trainside silence for a while.

What are you learning?

O, it’s not really study, just rereading a book I have read so many times before. I turned the cover to show him.

You have a very nice face, I told him, and he smiled. You, too. Thank you, I said. In fact he was beautiful, with a pointed cat like chin and slanting eyes and in the middle of his forehead he had an asterisk-shaped scar as though someone had shattered him with a mallet and then put him back together again.

The moon, upstairs, was rounding white and only slightly eroded down one side like an aspirin in water. I hadn’t seen it yet but later it led me right home. The man said, My name is Maxwell. And so I stuck out my hand and said, Cathoel. We shook hands and I said, Are you new in Berlin?

Three months. Ah, I said, welcome. He had lived four years in Italy. So I speak Italian. But no Dutch.

Ah, I said, again. And then he began talking to me about Jesus. Jesus knows how many hairs you have on your head. He took hold of a lock of his hair and tugged it.

Well, I said, that must be very comforting. I am getting off here. Good luck in Berlin!

But as I was standing on the platform he appeared beside me, standing too close. Are you married? No, I said. Why not? It’s not my way. I stepped away a half pace and he stepped up close to me again, in my shadow. Can I ask you a question, I am not a bad man.

Thanks, I said: I don’t want to marry you.

Ok, he said. But can I give you my phone number, friends? Friends. I am lonely and it’s good to have a friend in Berlin. Berlin is big.

The train pulled in and he said, ingeniously, I can get on the train with you. I can always ride back again after I give you my number. Oh, well, I said. Okay then. But I am going to be reading my book.

We sat opposite a lady with a fiery head of hair and a warm wrinkled smile. She was holding up a magnifying glass on its stalk to read some tiny photostatted text closed printed across an A4 page. She listened to our conversation, smiling at me over the man’s head, and when he got off, as promised, at the next station and I folded his phone number and put it in my pocket I said, in German, He wanted to talk because he is lonely, I think.

Her smile grew warmer. She reached into her pocket and handed me a card, much creased, printed in black and white. This is a church where people get together, she said, plenty of African people go there, he can make friends.

It was evident neither of us were native speakers. Oh, I said, then I am glad. I will pass it on. I got out at my own stop and walked up the stairs into the night and the incomplete moon made me gasp. If you are Ghanaian and you come here over Italy, you cannot access refugee services because you have Italian papers. The trees on either side of my road have bloomed and lost their bloom and though the forbidding Germanic cold has now returned still it seemed to me something warmer, something Springlike was afoot, a pussyfoot, an affair of the filigree trees, afar.

May 9, 2017
the indivisible splendour

Thinking of love today and how it has such deep transformative power in our lives. I so long longed for people who would understand me and be willing to be understood. Those friends and those loving acquaintances are everything to me, the topsoil on the earth’s surface or maybe the oceans which caress its journey, ‘the dance in its lonely walk.’

This body is pining in me for its home
that seats its hollow floor with ships, swinging and sighing,
surging and sighing
like birds with weighted wings
that seeds its lonely untended beds
with salt, to raise the precious produce of the sea
I look back, and long to dissolve myself
back home into the indivisible splendour of the water
that sheathes the burning earth
the dance in its lonely walk

~ from Adrift, published in Going for the Eggs in the Middle of the Night 1999

November 14, 2015
backbone

Over breakfast my partner announced he is falling in love with another woman. I said, “What?” The omelettes had turned out so well. It was a cool, greyish day. I had asked why he kept heaving huge sighs. For a long time I could say just nothing. Then I asked a question, how can this be the first I am hearing of this. Because it is very new, he said. Also she’s married and has kids so it’s complicated.

I think I said, Oh, how dramatic. I felt filled with pain and contempt, and the pain of contempt. I got up and took my breakfast into the other room, shutting the two doors between us. I couldn’t eat. Naturally after a while I went back and had to ask some more questions. He met her two weeks ago, at a friend’s. A friend’s of mine, as well. They talked for ages. The two of them really understood each other. They’ve been ‘texting’ a lot. I was outraged. How could you get to the point of asking a woman for her phone number – without saying anything to me? Oh no, he said, as though that made a difference: we talk online. I said, Why didn’t you just come home and say to me, after that first night, I met a woman last night and we had this amazing conversation, I feel very attracted to her. Everything might have had the chance to turn out different. It might have been the beginning of a new closeness for us. Or is it just that for some reason you wanted out – you don’t wanna live in Australia, you wanna stay in Berlin – and you lack sufficient emotional self-awareness to break up our relationship without using this lever.

His emotional honesty and his courage were the qualities I most cherished in this man. Now those were gone, I felt nothing but a bitter disdain. The dry, unflinching, writerly part of my brain was saying, What a convenient trap. I cannot say or do anything. If I howl and cry I will be making myself more unappealing while this stranger, this mother and wife, remains mysterious and alluring because blah honeymoon. If I say, I’m so angry I feel like I could crack a dinner plate over your head, then I’m a monster and he can take refuge with her and be relieved to get away and thus basically whatever I do, I am making myself easier to leave, easier to get over. The cold tight tiny childhood feeling in the pits of me which whispers: didn’t we always know this, you are unlovable. How old is she? Young. What do you talk about in your endless emails, do you talk about how the two of you are falling in love and how you want to be together? “No, not really, we can talk about everything! Everything!” Oh, how divine. I could feel the grief and fury in me congealing over with a self-preservative lard of dry humour. Underneath this cold gel, the endless pain lurked dark and wild. I thought, well if he is prepared to jettison a three-year love affair, and to leave me in the middle of Europe alone; and if she is prepared to leave her husband and two (or three?) presumably quite young children – they must be made for one another. I just couldn’t get over my feeling of disgust. I said, I’ve never respected you less.

The whole conversation took less than half an hour. He burst out at one stage, But I love you, Cathoel, I really do! Yes, I said, sourly… I can see that. He said, I honour and respect you so much. That cannot be true. For then how could you treat me so poorly? How can you have been so close with me the last two weeks while this was going on, and never even mentioned it? I said, Can I see your emails? “No,” he said, almost primly. “Those are ours, that is our private communication, and I protect that.”

That hurt more, in the instant, than the rest of everything all put together. My wounded child soul was roaring, Wait! What? Help! No! Help! Isn’t it… our privacy that you should be protecting? We are so interwoven into one another’s lives. I thought we were. I threw him out. I went out, too, after he’d gone and walked in sunglasses through the dim afternoon along the green-shaded river. Berlin, so much pain. I passed the spot where in August of 2012 I had sat down on a park bench and cried, overcome by the dismaying enormity of what I had done: locked my house door in Melbourne behind me, and come to Berlin for a week, on a whim, on an instinct, and stayed on and stayed. Homesickness choked me and I did not love the swans. The man, who until this morning seemed so darling, so honest, so filled with love, went off into the greenery and scuffled. People were walking past smoking joints and wheeling their bicycles, I was busy crying as quietly as I could. Moments later he reappeared, holding out a sweet handful of fresh soft summer leaves, heart-shaped they were, I did not know the tree. He said, “Brush your nose,” which was the way he’d learned to say “blow.” In spite of everything I’m sure I must have giggled. He had graded the leaves, choosing only the softest, from smallest at the top of the pile to palm-sized below, so that I could ‘have a good blow’ as Gran used to say and reassemble myself. I thought, all my life I have never been loved like this. And I was right. And also, I was wrong. It is painful to love a weak person, it hurts. And it seems there are only two choices here, as to what might happen. 1: in a few weeks he comes over crying and saying, I’m so sorry I hurt you, I will never hurt you again. Gee… that’s attractive. Or 2. He really is falling in love – ugh, that phrase, in this context, it just fills me with contempt – and this is the end of the nicest, kindest, wisest love affair I have ever been a part of. Thus it is not only over but was partly imaginary. Aye… there’s the raw.

June 20, 2015
belovedly

Oh, Germany. Sometimes I am just so grateful to you! I came three years ago, for a week, with a suitcase of summer clothes. Stayed on and stayed. Met a man. Made some friends. Found a Kiez, a barrio, a neighbourhood. Now I am back and the dense sweet piercing chill of this supposedly Spring evening has lifted and carried me when I most needed the lifting, I needed the carry.

Here’s what happened to me today. I kept running aground. Couldn’t work out why and there were things I was itching to do. Eventually I figured out: it was because I was in pain. This happens irregularly, more often than you’d like. It’s character building. I rang the osteopath, who is in the next street, and she was available within hours. So I just went to bed to wait. Reading my book. Third book this week, not a bad one. I like this osteo and she treats me, after three or four visits, familiarly, friendshippy: Lass dich mal wieder sehen, she sang out a month ago when I last left. Let yourself be seen, come back again. She reminds me of the Melbourne friend of my mother and I thought of her as motherly, underwinging, kind.

This time seemed to bring earlier events up to a clearer pitch. She wanted me to lie on my back shirtless, was reluctant to hand over a towel. She let her hands dig into my shoulders and then brought her face rather close to mine, breathing deeply in. For long moments we lay and stood like this and naked high in the sky as the blue faded to black I let my mind wash off into its meditative dream: life is deep and long, worlds are a forest, there is nothing I can change here but I bring my attention to bear on this shipwrecked beach, breathing. I surpassed it all with calm. When I got home I felt wrung out and bleakly alone. It is difficult working out how to say in German, you are too near, I want to be covered.

When I say home, I mean my hotel room. Two months ago my honey and I had a fight, it was 4am and we simply couldn’t bear it any more, and since then I have been living in an hotel and we find ourselves gradually so much more comfy and at ease. The reason for our fight was: two of us, plus one medium-sized dog, living in one room for months on end wore us down. We are both loners and creative types, used to the silence. We tried alternating headphones, I tried writing on the floor of the tiny bathroom and in cafes. It was snowing outside and no one could simply go out for a walk and lose themselves in the greenery. What greenery. Anyway I came home to my hotel, which is quiet and sedate and very old-fashioned; they let me stay here for cheap because they like writers. I was hungry; it was midnight; surely everything would be closed. I wrapped myself again and set out across the square. This bar I like was open, glowing with the hum. Serious German conversation at all tables. The one table in the window, where the cat sleeps, empty for me. I ordered onion soup from the menu open “til one hour early”, which means, til one o’clock in the morning. I ordered a beer. I let the stumbling crank and rumble of benign Germanness wash me all round. I watched the bar cat, sleeping in the hammock of herself. Her name is Zappa. Two gentlemen next to me had the chess board out, but it took them a long while to get down to playing. Something they were discussing took up all of their attention the way a paper towel blots milk. I love listening to German men talking over beers with their friends. There’s so little machismo. Their voices are often deep but they are excited by the ideas, by the shared experience, they converse. The cook, who has biker boots and a long skinny plait, came out carrying my onion soup and a basket of four different kinds of bread. I took my book out and just stared at it. The words printed on the pages were stars and I let them carry me, they were carpets, dancing on the orange horizon where one never meets oneself, where everything is wild, where languages are ribbons not unlike long-eared underwater plants writhing in the salt and combing themselves back and back and back, illustrious, clean. I sat there until the detritus of my day had sanded out of my bathers and then the warm oil of it lit me all the way home and I will carry this into my sleep, a moreish story.

April 14, 2015
feast of increments

Christmas can be excruciating. All this talk of love and family throws heartache, loss and loneliness into relief. A woman I used to know killed herself this week, from sheer isolation it seems. In German it’s called self-murder.

It happens sometimes that the people we love are not within reach, or they have died, or we are separated by sheer human awfulness. Sometimes you just haven’t met them yet and can’t be sure they are real. This year I feel bloody lucky to be living in a brimming household, spending the holiday with people I love and where trust is rebuilding. Other times I’ve been separated from my family for geographical and also more graphic reasons and there was one Christmas I spent alone entirely, in a deep sharp almost unendurable pain. You know that special holiday feeling: that you are shut out from some cosy universal nesting time all framed in glowing windows, everyone else has a family to come home to, a loved one to choose for, trusted friends to cook for and visit and call. I wish there was a sure way of dispelling this treacherous fantasy. I wish I had a way of reaching those who suffer this season, including my former self, to ask them to hold on, to try to let the joy emerge again.

Because it will. I remember seasons in my life when I asked myself, can you die of loneliness, and heard the answer in my heart: yes – yes, you can. I’m so grateful I survived the unsurvivable times. I feel exhausted but I want to embrace life, its torment and its sweet. The perpetual leisure and the frenzy of modernity, these new tools that can take us further into life or distance us from each other. Maybe as a race we are learning in tiny, clunking, incremental steps to please stop injuring each other, to stop neglecting and ignoring, to welcome one another to the day and to embrace the golden joys of solitude. I hope we all keep on quietly learning one another’s languages. Like shade on a hot day I long for peace. In myself, and the quivering peace of many hearts. All of our hearts have struggled and been tormented. Yet here we all are. Merry Christmas to all our strange golden stained souls. And I wish for a wonderful year. A turning point. A gateway to a liveable, lovable future. A freshness that learns from old wisdoms, particularly the still-most-human communities in remnant rainforests and on deserts who have most to teach. Between the future and the past: a door.

December 26, 2013
picked it up & have kept it

Walking along a quiet street feeling grumpy I heard a loud, juicy burst of fat laughter. Coming towards me was a man on his phone, shortish, gleaming, African, with laughter rolling through him, like a wisp of weed rolling in the sandy sea. Further down the street I saw a dog waiting in the laundromat, wistful with big eyes turned to the door, and passed a middle-aged punk whose hair had almost entirely balded away. But he had worked the few strands growing over his forehead into a messy quiff, stiffened with product but still with his own native old man’s/little boy’s curls escaping, as though he were saying to Death “You’ll never take me alive.” Coming back to the house I found a small square of white paper stuck to the cobblestones, entirely blank on both sides, and I picked it up and have kept it.

September 19, 2013
whiskey sour

Dear God, if there is a god. Save my soul, if I have a soul. Today grew miserable and I cannot say why. It was silly really. Guy in a cafe was rude. So rude! We grew happy again. The way bean stalks grow beans. Who cares about him. Anyway I set out on some work I have put off a long long time. Perusing old photographs for a publishing project. It took ages. Was frustrating. How unhappy I was, way back then. Finally I took off my computer and turned to my host and one-room housemate, who is also the man I like, and we had a blazing dark anchor lightbulb row. It didn’t make any sense. I hated him for being him he hated me for being me. God, we were furious. I felt like hurling things. I wanted to hurt someone. Not injure them but hurt them. I stormed out, fuck you. He had thrown my suitcase ineinander and stowed it by the door, Get Out~! I found a bar a few doors down. Ich was the only customer. Leaving, three hours later, I hugged across the bar the keep and told him, I was so unhappy when I came in here! Yeah, he said. I know. Anyway at first I asked him could he make me something strong, some kind of cocktail. Maybe something old-fashioned. Maybe a whiskey sour, he said. Sure, I said. I had three of those, then four, then five, Kai (the barkeep) showed me the postcards of his uncanny, dreamlike horse portraits, he used to sing in a band but now more photography is the dream. In his bar the lights were low-low and the music song by song. I think of you Brisbane. I think of you all the stupid men I have loved. Evolution, evolution. A third person came in, a “Handwerker” in heating whose name was Robert. I asked, was this the kind of song you like was that. How was it when the Wall came down. God, it’s ridiculous, we loved each other. Then I spilled out onto the street, I paid with all my hackneyed coins some of which are from Denmark and some Swiss and the rest, we promised we would look up one another’s blogs – cos we are modern – and I came home so enlightened with drunkenness that I just embraced my daft would you agh! lovely loving roommate and all is well, a well of wells, we are one Leute and I am here in Berlin the city which almost killed me and das Kiez, the neighbourhood, that saved my life.

June 9, 2013
a bush tissue

Almost a year ago I left Brisbane, on three days’ notice, to come to Berlin. I had looked up the weather map and packed a small suitcase and figured I would stay about a week. A very dear friend was in town and we wanted to meet up before he set off on his bicycling tour across Europe.

That came and went and the strange, metallic, leafy feeling of being back in Europe set upon me like moss. I decided to stay on and see what became of me. I met a gorgeous guy with a beautiful heart. Some weeks later the intrepidity or foolishness of what I had done came over me one afternoon in a storm of tears, and I just started crying and couldn’t stop.

We were sitting on a bench not far from here, under the trees, overlooking the murky canal. Swans then and now. My companion was alarmed by all this emotion but he was super-generous and sweet. It waxed into a burbling froth of mucus and salt water and he offered wouldn’t I like to blow my nose between his pinched fingers. Well, no: certainly not. I covered my face with one hand and kept crying, as quietly as I could. Sometimes it takes a man some time to notice that I laugh as easily as I cry and I guess this was one of the things on my mind as I sat there and people walked past smoking pot. Several benches down an Italian guy was playing guitar and crooning, three girls with long hair sat around him like groupies from the Sixties. One was perched on the back of the bench like a sweet bird. I looked up and there was my friend with a little wad of leaves in his hand. He had picked for me the softest, greenest, most tissue-like leaves, heart-shaped from a tree I don’t know, and had stacked them from biggest to smallest so I could mop myself up in stages. I remember the softness of the leaves on my skin and I wish now that I could remember the song that Italian bench star was playing.

May 28, 2013
coffee breathe

I was in a strange city recently, got lost, felt overwhelmed momentarily, & needed comfort. Ducked inside a Guitar Shop to touch all the guitars. You pluck one string and wait for it slowly to come into stillness. At the back a man in a fisherman’s cap was playing a song of his own, I think, for the politely-smiling Guitar Shop man… they sat on matching, facing stools and one leaned in and one leaned back. Leaving the shop I felt just that bit more tuned in to sounds and to music, the traffic seemed rhythmic and spare, I kept hearing in the street the repeated curve-notes of a wolf whistle from somewhere high, or far away. Five times, six times, seven times, eight: was it a nerdy, somewhat serious guy who having gotten up the courage to catcall was now determined the object of his passing affection would not walk by without learning how beautiful he found her? Actually it was two college girls, leaning out of a fifth-storey window wolf-whistling their friend who was unlocking her bike oblivious in a stand of bikes downstairs, her hair wrapping itself around her in the wind. Wit-wheel! Wit-wheel! is how my ex used to spell it (and say it): Wit-wheel!

I went into a crowded little food boutique that had a whole wall of small-brew beers. They had beautiful, grotesque, weird, colourful labels. They were honey-coloured, molasses-coloured, golden, greenish, dark. I bought a chocolate wrapped in sardine-printed foil for a friend who is overcoming a phobia of fish. I went to the back of the store and picked up the brown-paper packages of whole coffee beans and held them to my face and breathed in.

May 20, 2013
riverside grave

A melancholy day. We visited the grave of my friend’s husband. The room where I am sleeping is filled with his things, fishing trophies he won and a fearsomely engraved pewter hard hat with his name on it and, from underneath as I gaze up at the glass shelf, a space where his mind once was.

The graveyard is peaceful and small. It’s by the river. Big gates are closed but not locked. I asked did she want to be alone but no, this was a maintenance visit. Side by side we crouched down and plucked all the dead heads off the hyacinths growing over him. In another part of the graveyard an elderly man was drifting, carrying a candle in his hands. My friend looked surprised when he greeted her and told me afterwards, he had grown so thin she wouldn’t have known him.

May 3, 2013