some people have real problems

[raven]

I was complaining, you see, about how it never snows here. (Well, it doesn't. Places a mere quarter-mile from the sea do not get snow, unless the apocalpyse is coming or you're in Montauk.) It is snowing in London. It is snowing a little in Oxford and Liverpool. And then it started to snow here as though someone somewhere had turned a handle, all in loops and whorls, and I went out for a while. It didn't stick, but came down prettily against vistas of bare trees and slate grey.

I am bored, and seized with a feeling of you-can't-go-home-again. I am going back to Oxford tomorrow, and I don't really feel... anything about it, really. It occurs to me that up here, where my parents are, is not home for me, and Oxford isn't home either. It's transient, it's uncertain, and I'm a little tired of living a life in between places. I don't know what I want: stability, or the complete reverse of it. Whether I want to find a place to live and a job and something to ground myself on, or whether I want to go running out into the snow and out towards the water and keep on going out into all those muted-colour horizons and just not stop. Wanderlust, it's called. I love travel, and journeys, and distance. That's not news to me or anyone else - but I haven't felt it quite so strongly for a long time. I want to pack up and get up and go.

(Is this a displaced-person thing, I have always wondered. If you have the lifetime of being between places, and in my case two such different places - England, quiet and grey and peaceful, and India, noisy and high-coloured and full of family passions - then do you always have the nagging feeling that where you are is fine for the moment, but it'll be time to move on soon? Because you weren't of one place to begin with, you don't have the roots to hold you? It was something I meant to raise during the latest race and cultural appropriation debacles - that the concept of "home", also, comes laden with privileges and losses.)

I wonder if I'm bored of what I'm doing, and I don't think I am. I'm just... not driven. In a time when I should be working and writing and applying and preparing, I'm... not. I'm reading fiction and going for very long walks and escapistly scanning the adverts for bookshop and library jobs. I don't want to go out, I don't want to go home, I don't want to be a lawyer, I really don't want to not be one, I don't want to run away and I don't want to stay. It's just, the next six months of my life seem to be there to be endured, and I'm not sure I can do it. I'm tired. I had so much ambition and I'm not feeling it. An old friend of mine keeps telling me that self-worth is not in any way correlated with academic and professional achievement, and she's right, and I don't think I'm doing that again. I just... I need something in my life that is not there already, and I don't know what it is.

edited to add: fuck this shit, have a poem.

Life Story

After you've been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do

sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.

You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course

there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all along,

and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?

Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

Tennessee Williams

Comments

[hathy-col.livejournal.com]

I'm oddly glad to hear it's not snowing in Liverpool either, I'd feel cheated then.

I think now is a bad time of year for everyone; when you're working towards the end of a course - or anything, really - with nothing concrete to look forward to afterwards, you get that sort of confused feeling that I'm referring to as 'the cruise-shaped hole in my heart' which is a translation for wanting to run away and do something glamourous. With no definite plans it's easy to feel as though there aren't any roots anywhere; you've pulled up the 'place where I grew up' roots and instead you're sort of... all of over the place, you know, without any future to anchor you down?

Um, that all makes no sense, but basically I think it's the desperate sense of wanting a direction and not being given one. It'll come along eventually for all of us, though.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

It's now snowing in Oxford! My feet are very, very wet. :)

"Cruise-shaped hold in my heart" - yes. Yes, that. You say sensible things, as usual.

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

(Is this a displaced-person thing, I have always wondered. If you have the lifetime of being between places, and in my case two such different places - England, quiet and grey and peaceful, and India, noisy and high-coloured and full of family passions - then do you always have the nagging feeling that where you are is fine for the moment, but it'll be time to move on soon? Because you weren't of one place to begin with, you don't have the roots to hold you? It was something I meant to raise during the latest race and cultural appropriation debacles - that the concept of "home", also, comes laden with privileges and losses.)

This. Or rather, I think what I feel is almost the opposite of this - that both places are me and mine and I want them both, all the time. White sand beaches and 35 degree days and fresh fruit salad and mulled wine and ivy and snow, the 2ndfloorkorner crew and the ou3fs, bottlebrush and roses, possums and lorikeets and squirrels and deer. On any given day, I'm a battleground fought over by a dirty-nailed no-culture little colonial whose voice makes people cringe when she speaks, and a snooty England-educated wanker who thinks she's a bloody Pom now (and I'm often not sure which one's winning). Helpful solutions for this I do not have, but it's an idea that's worth talking about and developing further.

Also, I think that you are tired, and that this is a very normal thing. Law school hard, dude, especially coming hard on the heels of Oxford finals. It's OK to take a little bit of time out, and not to feel any kind of steely determined laser-like focus while you're doing it. *hugs*.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I heart you, you know? I was going to make a post at some point this week trying to explain how living in a "home" culture constitutes a kind of privilege distinct from race privileges, and you come along and put it much better.

Speaking of being tired: today, I am taking a snow day. :)

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

I heart you, also.

It's very confusing in the context of the privilege debate - I really want a word that ends in -ism to describe 'English people sometimes being unspeakably rude and discriminatory towards people from other countries', but (at least in my case), 'racism' isn't exactly it, and I wouldn't dream of appropriating that term ('cause apart from anything else, it isn't racism), but don't know what to call it.

I am glad you are having a snow day :) Did Harriet like the snow?

[liminereid.livejournal.com]

This might not be entirely fair but in some small degree I think that feeling of being between homes is a product of the stage of our lives, doing or finishing comparatively short things, moving around, being uncertain of the future and where one belongs/wants to belong/ should belong/can realistically and achievably belong.
Or maybe that's just my attempt to explain why it resonated with me when i don't really have a multiplicity of homes, just Sussex and Swansea and Oxford and London. No big difference. I hope I don't belittle by saying that, the bits that are yours that I really don't get.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's definitely part of it, I think. I won't feel so between places once I get to live somewhere for more than a year, I entirely agree.

[sunlightdances.livejournal.com]

That poem. *nods*

And some cuddles. *squish* And a beautiful and amazing Freema icon, because she is gorgeous.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

It's a fabulous poem, isn't it? He's going for the emotional crescendo, and the last line is just such a great punchline. It cheers me.

[clubhopper15.livejournal.com]

I love love love Tennessee Williams. Have you read The Glass Menagerie? Life goals and doing what you truly want is a major theme. I hope you find something that inspires you soon, we all lose our drive once in a while.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*smiles* I have read it, but a long time ago. Perhaps I ought to read it again.

[soupytwist.livejournal.com]

Dude, MANCHESTER has snow too! this is so weird!

And I think it's absolutely a displaced person thing... that sort of restless definitely seems, at least in my experience of it, to be about the pull between wanting to settle and choose somewhere and BELONG 100%, and the knowledge that that choice would involve not belonging somewhere else. I think it's also a kind of yearning for the possibilities of the world... I know that my feeling very, very much like that while living in Toronto was at least partly also just a sense that I'd woken up to the wonderful potential of things the world had, millions and millions and millions of experiences and tastes and sounds and feelings, and that I would in my life probably only get to experience a tiny percentage of them. It's a weird feeling.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Manchester? But... okay, I shall not now say rude things about Manchester's weather. But Manchester!

It's a very weird feeling, isn't it? How did you come to be living in Toronto? (I mean, I think I knew you did, but I don't know the story!)

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I don't know what I want: stability, or the complete reverse of it. Whether I want to find a place to live and a job and something to ground myself on, or whether I want to go running out into the snow and out towards the water and keep on going out into all those muted-colour horizons and just not stop.

...Wow, thank you for articulating with really eerie precision exactly what I've also been feeling lately. I mean, I think I'm feeling it for some different reasons--and probably with less intensity than you are, because I do have a very concrete sense of where home was, even though as Wolfe knew I'll never get back there--but yes.

*hugs* Let's run away from not-home. I am experienced in these matters. My sister and I did a lot of "running away" as kids. But I promise I'm better at it now, and will not, e.g., convince you to drink from a creek with a dead possum lying upstream. Uhhhhh not that I've ever done that before, OF COURSE NOT.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I am all for running away from home, yes! It seems much the most sensible and grown-up thing to do.

(Okay, I have to ask. What happened to her after she'd drunk the dead-possum water?)

(Also! This is why I am always vaguely jealous of Americans. They talk breezily about creeks and dead possums - whereas the English landscape is, you know, English. Full of blackbirds and rabbits. And snow just brings everything to a crashing halt. We have no concept of nature in this country.)

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

(Also! This is why I am always vaguely jealous of Americans. They talk breezily about creeks and dead possums - whereas the English landscape is, you know, English. Full of blackbirds and rabbits. And snow just brings everything to a crashing halt. We have no concept of nature in this country.)

sebastienne feels the same way about me when I talk about my cat catching lizards in the backyard. You do know, though, don't you, that it's exactly the way my friends at home now feel about me when I talk about snow and ice-skating and drop terms like 'the Tube' and 'Eighth Week' and 'BBC Radio Four'. Part of it is just the charm of novelty, and part of it isn't - and it's always interesting to see who envies what...

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

Let's do it. I'll start running east and you start running west, and we'll meet in the middle. (Terrifyingly, I think the midpoint is probably on the East Coast of the US somewhere; how is this country so big?)

(Okay, I have to ask. What happened to her after she'd drunk the dead-possum water?)

...You say this like I made her the guinea pig! Actually we both drank it. And nothing happened. WE HAVE TOUGH YANK CONSTITUTIONS.

We have no concept of nature in this country.

Huh. You guys sure have written a lot of nature poetry for yourselves, though. :)

[tau_sigma]

Oh, snow. *g* It is so pretty. I don't really get snow at home, either; I live the wrong side of the hills, which get all the snow dumped on them so that there's barely any left by the time the clouds come to us. And if it does snow, it's rarely cold enough to settle. And I came to Durham, expecting lots more snow, and this year it has finally come, but only this year. The last three years, nothing.

*hugs* to the rest, about which I can say nothing eloquent nor helpful. *hugs*

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Durham must be very very lovely in the snow. I have still not been there! Been through it many times on trains, and that's it. Thank you for hugs.

[tau_sigma]

It is, it is. If you ever want to get off the train here and say hello, you are always more than welcome. :) I can even offer you a floor and a sleeping bag if you want to stay at some point.