There was a time where I lived with a raging panic inside of me. The panic was electric, however, and so it didn’t always feel bad, and so I didn’t always recognise it as panic. I thought that was just what it mean to be fully alive, and so if I was calm in the way I am feeling right now it would not be calm but would be a dulling – a tarnish on the shining, unbearable energy inside of me.
I used to wonder what would fill the panic’s space, should it leave my life, and now I am finding out. It drains out gradually, like water, drop by drop. It leaves a widening quiet, a room in which I can sit and think.
There was a very slim book I read and re-read, when I was in the depths of the panic (which at times was also an all-consuming love, or at least tangled up with it). In this book I felt every page acutely; I was there, in the city of love and of panic. When I re-read it, one day, I will be a tourist in this city. For now, I reference it like a guidebook to a place I used to know.
At the time of reading I thought You may not always feel like this, but it was incomprehensible to me then. And I didn’t actually always want to let go of the panic, which that summer felt mostly good, anyway, mellowed somewhat and so mixed up with love, still electric, belonging to the hot streets of a real city where I walked alone, belonging to sunlight and markets and a bed with nobody else in it, this bed of absence only pleasant because it was temporary. I could imagine up the absent body with such clarity that it was hardly an absence at all.
Those days of panic, I lived mainly within longing. I was storing up my life and my touch. I wanted the days to rush past me fast as light, to take me towards some indeterminate day where I no longer had to exist within longing.
How strange a thought: You don’t feel like that any more.
There are ways of feeling I may never experience again. There will be new ones. Sometimes a feeling must pass to make room for these, the way an emptied well refills.
I take a train back to London from Sheffield feeling the new calm, but with an edge of purpose to it, a shimmering, and write in my notebook Determination, not defeat. Off the train the air is grey but crisp, sharp drizzle and the wind blowing, and I get off and walk to a restaurant where I am meeting a dear friend, brisk and firmly in myself, determination, not defeat. Awake. The light slap of the rain pleasant, almost. The space, soaring inside me, an emptiness that doesn’t feel bad.
I still miss her sometimes, the panicked girl alone, in the strange city – half-drunk, exultant, all live wire and naked hope. Sometimes, despite everything, I can miss her very much.
I sometimes miss my own version of that girl as well. I wouldn't go back and be her again but I have a tenderness towards her.
Things I Don’t Want to Know?