Sometimes I don’t write because I don’t want to think about things. I want to bury my head in a big vat of tangled old salty net and leave it there. It seems like a safe place to submerge everything I don’t want to acknowledge. Except when I pull my head out, as I have to do eventually, it’s all still swimming there at the back of my mind. An unspoken black hole of stress and memory, with a side of self-remonstration to go.
I wonder what would happen if I began to just try and untangle things a bit. Would I float while the carefully built walls and stairs of my lighthouse start crumbling down around me? Most times, I think I would. Other times, I know, through a reluctant admission that I’m too tired to keep treading water, that effort alone will sink me eventually, without the added quest of searching for the end of a rope in a pile of gnarled and knotted old net.
And then I arrive here.
The no-man’s land of the seven waves of the deepest lost ocean.
When I get here, things are still. Calm. I can breathe, and I am relieved. I’m never quite sure what about, being calm or just breathing, but it’s definitely one or the other. The water is surprisingly warm; it wraps itself around me like my favourite old blue smock, a much-lived, if not very shrunken, Aran sweater. I lie on my back, close my eyes and float. The sun is warm on my face, the sand is already between my toes, and even though I’m in the middle of nothing but water, I’m off the bus just for a while, and it is bliss.
The thing is, I’ve come to realise that there are things that I know. Things that I know I know, and yet I’m not ready to admit them, even to myself. The act of writing those things brings them not only into the open but to a place where I must stop and consider them, and I don’t want to do that. And yet there is this constant pull, a mismatch between a world that seems to insist I should know exactly who I am and what I want, and little old me who just wants to sail along with a good headwind and a pirate map.
My sailing leads to a search for things that make me happy, fulfilling distractions, like having conversations with people about interesting things. I want to drink beer at a bar where people talk about the times crossword, which I can never do, or who tell stories, and jokes without sardonic or characteristically blue language. I want to shuffle into the furore of a stand-up tapas counter and soak up the music of the Spanish tongue, loud and melodious. I want to get off whatever transatlantic liner I am on and embrace freedom. Then I realise that freedom doesn’t include anyone else. Perhaps that’s another thing I don’t want to know.
Often, people talk about the freedom women have as if it’s a surprise. As if because you’re female, you have to be defined by either a role, like being a mother, or by a man, because men are more important. I wonder sometimes if the decisions we make as women are always to counter that feeling. Perhaps that’s why some of the decisions I have made have been quite so questionable. But is what we have really freedom, or is it just that 100th wave, wearing the disguise of the others that have come before it?
I read an article the other day about dating. About how modern daters are just getting the big questions out of the way at the start. Because it saves time later down the road. Equally, they are not dressing to impress and typically swap a glass of wine for a coffee shop quickie. I couldn’t help but read it with the feeling of reading something written with a naivety not of youth but of practicality. There was a little leap of nostalgia from a place I had long forgotten, for the days when dating didn’t start from an app.
Maybe I should start every conversation with
“What are your views on the Labour Party?”
If I had, perhaps there wouldn’t be any mess now to untangle.
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