Gratification
We drive a long way to Wales. I’m going to learn to drive, I insist, every time this drive is taken. I’m going to learn to drive and not tell any of my family, and then pull up in the car like – hey! Every time I take this journey I fall asleep almost immediately. On waking I examine a cluster of tiny blisters on my arm, a strange burn from a recent dinner party, which I long to scratch. I don’t let myself.
I take the ferry to Ireland from Wales, alone. I’m excited about the ferry until ten minutes into the voyage, when I get sea-sick. I remember a journey on the same ferry maybe twenty years ago where I insisted I wanted to drink a coffee, like a grown up!, and my mum, perhaps deciding to teach me a lesson, let me get a cappuccino from the canteen, which I promptly threw up. I didn’t really drink coffee until my early twenties, after that. This time I sit in a corner and breathe through my nausea, watching the stream of people carrying beers and wine from the bar.
I don’t drink at the welcome dinner, am asked are you pregnant? and I say, awkwardly, No, I’m just seeing how it lands, and watch everyone enjoying the wine over the meal, thinking about how most people actually drink quite slowly, even let their wine get warm. Not me; never me! At lunch the next day the subject of drinks comes up again and I say, even more awkwardly, I don’t drink, caveat immediately with at the moment!, and then I can’t stop thinking about those first three words, unsure if they’re the right ones yet, though the days accumulate behind me, more and more of them. Still, it’s not binding. I’m seeing how it lands.
It’s so good to sleep alone in a hotel bed! So good to feel the rain on my face, and see windswept coast. I’m alive, and I’m lucky. I feel it.
A friend tells me, when I am nervous and doubtful, there’s the same amount of joy, just spread out. The peaks and lows are both less intense.
On my last day in Ireland I see a pub that says CREAMY PINTS on the frontage and I long to sit in its soothing interior with a book and a Guinness, but soon I’m not even thinking of drinking because my arm feels wrapped in burning clingfilm and there are ants wriggling under the clingfilm, and the pain radiates from shoulder to fingertip, and I think the burn is infected, but when I google the blisters on my arm I realise it’s not a burn at all. Then I’m grateful I didn’t drink, or don’t drink, whatever, because that would make being alone and sick in another country much worse. The pain is within my nerves, intrusive and incredible. It loosens something in me, and because I’m in public and it’s raining I cry, simply, in a church for some time, the only appropriate place I can find to do so. Then I finally get back home and take 16 pills a day until I’m better.
I remember an autumn three years ago in Paris that felt so full of possibility, walking around an exhibition of the work of Anni and Josef Albers, tears in my eyes then too, because all I wanted my life to be was art and love, art and love over and over and mixed up and in every part of it. I’m not drinking at the moment because I felt that sense of possibility again, a feeling that something is coming, and I don’t know what, whether it is art or love or both or neither, but I want to be clear-headed to meet it.
The problem with the sense of a non-specific impending revelation is that it could apply to anything. I get sick and think: is this it? I receive good news, better than expected: is this it? I find out information I wish I did not know. Is this it? I continue to not drink throughout, and it isn’t a magic cure, but it helps. Is this it?
Knitting a jumper that I’ve been working on for honestly years now, in some iteration or another, I find myself exclaiming out loud in frustration at the sheer slowness of it. I find myself wishing I could skip to the end. Re-reading my novel I have a strong sense of starting it and finishing it, but the process of writing it in the middle is already hard to remember. I am a person who needs immediacy and yet I keep placing long, gradual projects at the centre of my life, and these are the things that give me the most satisfaction, even as they frustrate me.
I pick an argument just to feel something, give into the urge maybe. No, that’s not fair. Maybe it’s a little bit fair. It turns out I can argue better sober, as if I’ve been given debating lessons. Clarity in the details. During the argument we cook breakfast and at one point I make a cup of tea for the person I’m arguing with, without breaking my diatribe on the ways in which we have wronged each other, and I say things calmly with the caveats May I be blunt? May I be honest? and afterwards we feel cleansed and in love and better, somehow, and this is how the days go.
That good news comes, better than expected, and I don’t know what to do with it because normally I would drink, so instead I bake a lemon drizzle cake. Then one person returns home with flowers and a canelé for me, and another returns with a little almond cake, so I eat three kinds of dessert in the end, and go to sleep and wake up warm and safe with only mild dread in my heart, and this is how the days go too.