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

[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!)