There is nothing quite so empowering as the option of doing something, and denying it. From the same hand, there is nothing quite so painful as being denied a choice in one's matters. Perhaps this is where all the angst you were going through originates?
Naturally, attending a party should only be fun as long as everyone knows how much better you are than the party. There should be a wave of attendance to your presence, a remark of gratefulness, and maybe attempts to appease. Simply knowing that they are there however, one is happily capable of dissuading attention ("I do remember, it was wonderful. But on with the present...", you say, vaudeville) and getting on with events as they are. Drinking copious amounts, not elegantly but with the same juvenile zeal which took you through your earlier teen years, when alcohol was a new novelty consumed at the beach which in turn, consumed the beach by midnight.
A great sustenance of admiration carries you to eleven thirty at some troublesome affair which took you to arrive early, like some guest of honour denied being fashionably late by Dalloways and Buckets who would have you make a splash. But here comes fun. You are whisked away, with little parting word to your fellow guests ("Goodbye, famous lady" you say to a transsexual with her self-appointed title, "See you" you say casually, to an old friend you'd like to have spoken to, "Be back in an hour" you lie plaintively to the host.) Roads turn you, drunk, in directions unintended, and you must loop your life around on a wonderful callory track get to your destination.
The nightclub! How wonderful. And in paraletic glory, you are as close to God as you care to be, just as you were told in less grandiose words by those boys who broke you. With deft hand movements, you change the song and will strangers across from podiums and flatforms to before you, to press against you, to caress you and share the smoke of their cigarettes with you by taste. And another, and another. Somehow, as if given great status by a night of speculative fame, a chance to relive your youth with the superiority amassed since those days of surface equality ("added value") you are able to carve yourself out in new flesh and new form and be whoever you want.
Delete, destroy? You could, with a mouse, and a keyboard. Cripple, corrupt? You could, with a pen and a paper and a student publication. What's a "bunny boiler"?
The night continues and you tire. No chemicals in your system, other than the one you predict will give you cirrhosis of the liver and may well be killing your brain cells; your creative zeal, your critical faculties, reduced. Kisses. Hugs. More friends, more strength. But as sobriety hits, you lose the power to manipulate others and so, Italian suitors and underdressed strangers are lost to a procession of Thoughts: reclaim power through action. Reclamation begins. But you allow it all to disappear, to bathrooms, the promise you always recall "to be right back", meaning never.
Somehow in an hour or so you're walking home, half to destruction but still on high. The iPod in your ear is playing French synthpop, Death Cab for Cutie, new Morrissey, and from shuffle god-knows-what: Halloween Alaska, All-American Rejects? Tears of power, held and pointedly cast aside. "Cosmic tears", some song reminds you.
In one hand you are holding sex, but it feels like a place to stay that night and nothing more. You are holding several similar orbs of sex in that palm. In the other, you hold a bus journey with tiresome conversations, half-read books and a bitter walk to aggravate a cold sore, in no specified form like an orb but rather a draping ribbon, one also stuck to the back of your shoe and coiled up your arm. But to hold both at once, in your control, to some extent, that is power.
Much like when you sat, deciding whether or not to exact revenge, and some forgiving soul in you (not by religion, not by moral concern, or fondness, you affirm) decides to spare. There will be no exposé. M.S. need not fall like H.H. just because you have spite. But it does not deserve to live, either.
Years of harnessing this power, the tension of the choice suppressed slowly stirring a creative electricity within you, will see you get a greater laugh one day. Those cells lost to alcohol will eventually be obsolete, under this new creative spirit you slowly wean into existence.
But for now, the walk from Portslade station back to Southwick is a bitter one.
No comments:
Post a Comment