I put my glasses in the washing machine and left my AirPod case on the desk and went out for breakfast listening to the last chapter of Permission by Elissa Altman as I walked the few minutes to Electric House. Only the third thing was meant. I suppose as usual I am tired and also being forgetful or maybe just overwrought with the silence that has descended my world since last October. Without that everyday conversation with another there is peace and there is loneliness and there is a writer’s paradise in the hours I work and a human hell in remembering the times when I would have chewed the fat and passed the time with someone I trusted to be there. He is not there. I shouldn’t have trusted him. Yes, having experienced the rage quietening and life getting on with itself it has risen up again as it’s likely to do when his name comes up, when I am reminded. I am still angry. M and I talked about the responsibility of boundaries, one’s own lying with oneself and no one else, and I thought about what makes me let him into hurt me and realised it comes from want. I want an apology. I want him to stand accountable. I may never get it.
Yoga this morning, early, having got up to write. By mistake and inadvertently I’ve begun the 7th draft of the novel I’m working on; by mistake and inadvertently because I meant to start in August after a holiday but then I started looking at notes, and then I opened the document, and then. So an hour this morning rewriting what I see now was a wrong turn in tone and character, and a walk to the Life Centre (forgetting my mat) and an hour sweating and slipping on one of their mats in a room packed to the jowls with women like me except with dyed hair and some younger and one man; there’s always one man. He tends to put his mat in the middle. This guy was intimate in his detail of debugging from whoever had used his yoga mat before him. Spray, wipe, spray until he’d made it clear the world was disgusting and infection was not his thing. In Savasana I cried.
Over breakfast, Permission finished - and I have so much to say about this I don’t know where to start but luckily she and I will be in conversation on Wednesday, so I guess I’ll start there - I read Quartet in Autumn, the most exquisite tragic-comedy I’ve ever read. So little happens. So much is said. Pym is unparalleled. At the table beside me a young couple touched hands, their fingers interlacing, his stretching further than hers across the space between them. So often lately when I see this I think, you wait (to the girl) one day the curl of his hair will be the thing you despise, his nose will enrage you, you will wonder how you ever found his laugh appealing. It happens to me all the time; on the escalator descending into the tube, passing a couple snogging, his thin sandy hair already receding, her hands upon it, You wait. The girl staring up adoringly at the big baby of a man who thinks elasticated waists are acceptable and which she thinks are sweet, You wait. Perhaps I will fall in love again. Perhaps I will find again the generosity of heart to not want to burst their bubble. This is what being alone does to a person. The internal monologue is rarely tested. We become unreasonable. Barbara Pym knew it. It is this she sets out exquisitely. I see myself in those pages and think, come on now. Soften. Be nice.
On Friday I met with my friends as usual at our place on Portobello and J showed us the photograph of the Peruvian women who gathered in a circle in the sea, naked, to scream and kick in visceral response to a spike in femicides. This, I want to do. This encapsulates my rage. A silence has descended on my world and I want to know, where do I put it? Where can I speak it, this fuel that is anger that is words that desire to be action? It is cellular. It is in my bones. I put it here.
Eleanor
