Gratification

Instant and otherwise

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.