Today I rediscovered an old school friend, soul-mate and frenemy for the first time in three years.
My collection of language books when I was 18: it has since doubled or tripled.
We met when I was 16. We went to the same secondary school: a co-ed Catholic-Protestant religious sports and academic focused grammar school in the North West of Northern Ireland. We were on the winning team of the Northern Irish French Debating competition (oh, the prestige!) and we both watched ridiculous Spanish cinema. It was beautiful.
Like me, he loves languages, with a passion that is hard to control. He loves words. He loves the feeling of forming a past perfect tense of a clunky Dutch verb ('Ja, ik heb het opgegeten!) full of endearing phlegm (or, voiceless velar fricatives, if we are to be technical). He loves the rush of Slavic constructions twisting his tongue in ways he never could have imagined. He loves that exhilarating feeling when finally - finally!- you can COMMUNICATE. He loves to move to a different country and just feel that tingle when the people around him actually seem to understand and speak the weird code of vocal vibrations that constitutes a foreign tongue. He loves to talk about Ukrainians. Lots of Ukrainians. And Armenians, apparently.
But I digress.
We used to talk on the internet until 3am as teenagers, night, after night, after night. Under the now obsolete green charm of MSN. We dreamt, in typed phrases on early morning keyboards, about what we would do when we left school, what boys we would grow to love, what experiences we could have. And complaining naturally, complaining about being born in a corner of the world (North-West Northern Ireland), that is just... bizarre. It can be the most beautiful place. When the sky is setting over Mussenden Temple; when your mother smiles at you in a way you don't quite understand, but you feel all the love rushing out of a heart that can still be pure; and vulnerable (vulnerability and openness never age); when you say something in your home speak ("Awk, she was fer goin' 90 down yon motorway, Gave me a wee heart attack tay be honest, hi.") or when you tell your friend to meet you at the 'Polish' section (assuming all supermarkets must be stocked in pickled gherkins and highly-processed orange juice) and he spends ages looking around the shoe polish aisle. (These are just a few random thoughts).
I grew up here, I actually grew up here!
But it can also be one of the strangest, most suffocating corners of the earth: I don't know whether that is just because it is 'home', or whether it's because it rains every day, or because the people still have some scars of a conflict, puritanism, IRA bombings under their skin, and good oul Ulster Presbyterianism shoved up their behind. Most likely both.
He moved to London when I was in my last year of school, and, like I told him to his face, he became a bit of a dickhead. A bit of a lot of a dickhead. He used to write me e-mails just to tell me he was SO, SO, SO, SO busy, that he really ought to be living his hopelessly bohemian life. Which, I appreciate as the complete truth (I've gone to uni now and like, all in-denial hipsters I love blogs, hummus and weird Middle Eastern Music), but at the time, I would have appreciated waiting a longer time for one of his messages and then receiving a deep intellectual 3am rant, like we used to have. My insecure, but growing 18 year old self found him quite patronizing about how, like, yeah, London, will just, like, yeah, like totally, like, open up your mind, because like you, can like, meet Colombian-Germans and like, have sex in Soho, and like, wear tweed, and like, yeah. Thus, in the back of my mind, I started to think he was a frenemy. I didn't like his online persona, but I was weirdly, weirdly, weirdly (I still am) attracted to his mind, what he is and what he could (and should!) become: something beautiful.
Haven't you heard? Being a dickhead's cool!
"We're having new-aged fun with a vintage feel"
"Say I work in media, I'm really on the dole"
"I organize a vegan crack night!
In any case, today he returned. The dickishness had evaporated and been replaced by a more tolerant, world open, forgiving and loving view. (Although, probably, if we had spent more time together, we would have got into a heated argument. But, I guess, now, we would have been able to appreciate it, move it aside and look at the sunset. I would have liked him to stay until the sunset, but he had to rush.)
A hopelessly beautiful sunset at Churchill College, Cambridge
But, the point of this blog, at this point, was to share the main emotion he raised in me: a memory of who I was when I was 18. Confused, ready to leave for university, not sure of who I could be, always self-critical and always, always, always writing. I miss that person. The naïvety (oh, you wouldn't like me calling you naïve, dear 18 year old alter-ego, would you?). The simple open heart.
And those moments, when I first felt that extreme euphoric intellectual-spiritual-new-age HOLY-SACRED-GLORIOUS feeling of being connected to everything around you, of being so heavily in love for the first time (not with my friend, but with a poet. Oh, my stereotypical youth!) that you are part of everything around you on a tiny improbable planet in the middle of a very odd universe, loving your part in the incomprehensible system of all the linked-connected things around you, wanting everything to just fall into your mouth, and your body to just melt away and become everything around you.
A moment of extreme, beautiful mindfulness.
And, I started to read some of my old work. And I decided to share a description that my 18 year old, madly in love with a poet, self, wrote about this feeling.
HOLINESS, an extract from a text from when I was 18:
He threw a lopsided smile
which made him look ridiculous; and I laughed until his fingers shook and my
stomach felt as if it would eat itself from within.
He was a man so clumsy and
so true to himself that he thought he could begin his romanticising of his
thoroughly homosexual lover whilst simultaneously making references to female
genitalia. It was bizarrely endearing, and, three hours later as I travelled
home after the conference, suspended in time and rushing down a roadwork-infested
motorway in that ginger revolutionary socialist activist’s thick black car, I could not prevent myself
from temporarily forgetting the implications of my lies, and instead laughing
under my breath at the memory of Adam’s words.
The next morning after the
conference, as dawn streamed into my room, I remembered those words once more
and I felt overwhelmed by my admiration for Adam’s glorious frame, his sharp
wit and his political agility which stretched past Stonewall and St. Petersburg
all the way to the conference halls of Ireland.
Then; it came....
The transitory feeling which
he gave me of supernatural brilliance and dizzy falling.
I remember rushing-running
past bliss blue candlelit gravestones. I didn’t know what I was doing, but the
edge of the horizon was falling below me, the dawn was suspending all in a
beautiful blue and the wind was shaking into my ears. Virginities were
crashing, men were losing control of their disobedient wives, bankers were
speculating with metallic fictional number streams, and I was running, with no
cause or reason, sucking in the delicious smells of midnight toast and Adam
which were still present on my fingers and across my neck.
It was just a Thursday
morning, and that was just a sun rising.
But it was special, and I
was falling, insanity-bliss into a single moment and a single desire.
I had awoken alone from a
mad sweating stream of consciousness, body still not engaged and practical, but
somehow free to movements and dizzied of thought. Hands rising to my white
bedroom roof, I had felt free and whored and delicious and possible against
those sheets. Mad in the spontaneity of a random morning awakening and a warm
desire to move and change the world in a single second.
I had taken my body,
unwashed and unwatched from the cold dawning bed and spontaneously walked bare-chested
wearing only sandals and long-johns across the early morning town towards the
only meadow and grass I could find. It was a silent rabbit-filled cemetery
where I had taught myself to cycle years before. It was peaceful and beautiful
and full. Full of life, full of madness, full of circumstances and mountain
facades: bliss blue sky, bliss blue mountains, bliss blue silk of a paper
horizon.
The sun stretched and warmed
my neck from behind.
I was falling beautifully,
and a ticklish charm rose in my stomach, upwards and beyond.
Just a moment, just a
thought, just a euphoria touch on my bare chest.
But it was human in that moment. It was
desire. It was nature. It was
simple and pure and chemical and free. It was life without deadlines and
obligations. Life with no system of governance. Life with no sexuality and
restraint. Life undetermined by time and place. Life with no predilections and
compasses pointing to Jerusalem. Life
with natural edges. Life licking itself free of wounds and chains and
adult-slavery.
Life: just there, just then,
just perfect-imperfect, existing, becoming-life!
I felt connected in that
moment.
I felt that I was becoming
the rabbits, becoming the trees, becoming the blue, becoming the gravestones,
becoming the mountains, becoming my own hands, becoming my own body, becoming
love, becoming death, becoming happiness and melancholy and tears, becoming
Trotsky, becoming Marx, becoming Slovenia, becoming an anus, becoming a flower,
becoming grass-stalks below my feet, becoming it, becoming then, becoming a
chain of being, and a soup of being, and a soup of life’s deity, and a soup of
moving glittered streams.
I was made of dust, and I
would return to dust. Once, then, I would return, after this brief interval of
human life. But before, I was lifted through imagination and left dreaming of
the amazing possibilities of this wonderful thing we breed between our eyes:
drifting magical fantasy past borders, past mountains, past seas, past hopes,
past fears, past taxes, past communist rainbows, past contented sleep, past
sweated tropics, past the blind cafe in Old Berlin, past Marlene Dietrich and
Böll and Brecht, past Katharina’s lost honour, past womanism and purple, past
Russia, past the Nile, past Egyptian revolts, past Homebase spanners, past
fez-toting lovers, past striking French train drivers, past Irish conference
rooms, past discontented Libyans, past cacophony, past distance, past time,
past it, past over.... past gone, just present.
Just that cemetery I needed.
A holy moment served to my
eyes and my ears, once more kept, now a shining surface in my memory.
A holy moment where I saw
all that was beyond my understanding but not beyond my loving.
Holy moments of now-feeling;
sometimes Adam gave me those.
They depended on him.
They came from him.
But those moments would
always sink, and realism would always return. I couldn’t feel connected
forever. Life couldn’t be beautiful forever.
That was my last day of complete and
utter admiration for Adam and the last day before the cracks began.
That was a holy moment that could
not be repeated; which you cannot repeat.
Before my consciousness could
comprehend the change, my chest was already cold and my neck itchy, stones were
between my toes, and I was walking home to fall asleep once more in my bed as
if that moment, as if that falling, that becoming and that recognition of self
had been just another banal circumstance in the chain of normal life.
It had been one month since
I had first kissed Adam.
One month when we met almost
daily and spoke until four o’clock in the morning over internet interfaces,
until my eyes were heavy and my days in school were senseless.
There would be one month
more before the end.
One month more to build on
my obsession which had been born almost immediately on the day I first saw Adam
and Egypt together, synthesised and in unison.
Love or obsession.
I still don’t know.
But they were born of the
same womb.
Born of childhood
desperation for love and yearning to be kissed for the first time in three
years.
Born of family fears which
left me desperate for another strand of life.
Born of self-hate and exterior fears at once.
