But then, this weekend I had Monday and Wednesday off. I slipped bad. A smoke before morning lessons and a day lost to the haze of smoke. It felt good if I am honest. Real good. Like getting back into a warm bed in winter on a day on which you do not have to work. And that in and of itself is good, I guess.
The problem is comfort. I find comfort to be a distraction from all that needs doing. I am not ready to be comfortable yet. I don't think I deserve to be comfortable. I am not even sure if anyone ever deserves anything. We just get what we get and have to do the best with it. Or the worst. Or nothing even. There are no obligations to life. Apart from the obligations we make and the obligations we agree to.
Winter is a slow crawl here. The trees still cling on to their last few leaves. Those leaves are now a late autumn array of orange and brown, gradually they are falling to reveal bare finger tip branches. I walked across the river to my morning lesson. That 15 minute walk always gives me time to think. And my thoughts often end up going to the same destinations: loneliness and loss.
I am feeling very alone. I am used to being alone. I am quite comfortable with it. But right now I am torn between loneliness, the desire for companionship and the need to heal. I want a warm body to share my bed with, and an intellectual mind to challenge me. However, I also know that it would be a bad idea to have that, as it would just be reactionary.
So as I walk over the bridge from one side to the other, I let my thoughts wander freely. I let them wander into the fields of memory, where my dogs run and play, where the good times lie, luxuriating in golden shaded memories of an inaccurate past, that never really existed.
Memories are problematic once you've reached the Perma Baked Plateau. I've been mayor of the Plateau for 25 years. The Perma Bake was a good escape from the properly dangerous substances, but it too is a danger. Comfort without effort is incredibly dangerous. Free rewards absent effort. Green became North, South, East and West.
And then everything changed. With the collapse of my marriage, I could no longer justify comfort without effort. It was exactly that problem that caused me to take everything in my life for granted. I just assumed she would always be there and we would always be together, with our dogs and our home in the village.
Those are all yesterday's memories and they need to be processed. And so I joined the club. That wonderfully familiar green wall of atmosphere and tingle edged pixelated reality baked. I smoked in the club. The music was rock. There honestly should be a law prohibiting generic rock from a cannabis club. Should be dub or no dice motherfucker! For the last week or two (lost track, lol) I have been walking in a haze and glaze eyed dream through winter's descending grip over Seville. It's been OK. Not great. Underneath the haze, conscious thought questions: is this helping?
I don't know if it is or not, what I do know is that I forgot, for all of a week (or two). I forgot where I am and what I am doing. I forgot what has happened. I forgot how much I miss my dogs. I even forgot how much I still love her.
And it felt good to forget. It felt so damn fucking good to finally put all of that down.
So started Thursday, still dark morning walk to the other side, where the bridge takes me. The cold water separating here from there. Thoughts resurfaced from the depths to remind me of the brutal fact of reality: while I might have forgotten, it doesn't change the reality of the here and now.
That dark depth chest constricting emotion is back, squeezing my centre in a death grip, biting back the back of throat tear trigger. There is no bottling it in, there is no escaping it. It has become a part of me, that hopefully one day will take a different path and will fade to just another gold tinged memory of self constructed mythology.
From here, I have no future direction. Rather, life will continue as life has been: head down, work, write, workout.
To conclude, in amidst the haze and smoke, I sparked the seed of my next novel. A human story freed from bells and whistles of fantasy and scifi. So, if I write bit less regularly here, it is because I am focusing more on that. So there's that, which is not completely nothing, I guess.
That's me for now, the music for today has been Nick Drake, a place to be.
