Useful Life

[rinue]

I bought my last oranges yesterday. The corner shop sells oranges five for a pound, and I only had five breakfasts left here. Four, now. I probably ate my last lamb donner; I'm about to buy my last half-dozen eggs.

Word is percolating through the student body that I will likely defer next term; throughout the day, my peers tell me that this is disastrous and I should fight it tooth and nail because they want to work with me, see me working, learn from what I do and say. I should be flattered or persuaded or indifferent, but I am none of these things. Instead of feeling wanted or loved I am angry and almost unbearably lonely. As I write this, I am hiding in the fire stairway because I can't hide how upset I am, and everyone would be so surprised. Which is the central problem, really. Nobody makes the connection that I have an existence extra-curricularly. Or rather, that I don't, and am unhappy about it. It's not as though I don't want to be here. I came in the first place, and I'm coming back. But I can't have what I want - I tried, and it wasn't allowed. It's one half or the other.

The physical links between things are breaking down; I'm at the end of my provisions. My clothes are frayed, pilled, and full of holes; the toe of my sneaker is preparing to fall off. I have to jury rig my left bra strap every morning. I've wrapped gaff tape around my puzzle ring to cover a break in the metal. I am out of moisturizer, dental floss, mouthwash. I could replace and repair, but it's expensive here - better to push on, this close to the finish. I can't pick up wireless internet at the flat anymore; I don't know why.

Whenever I picture my reunion with Ciro, I am livid. I don't want to be reunited with him. I want him to have been here all along. It occurs to me that I experience the five stages of grief in reverse order, which means I have denial to look forward to, and will accept the situation less and less as time passes. I pity the next person who tells me that everything happens for a reason [no] or that I could use the material in a film [no].

As for Ciro himself, I have trouble believing in him, or in me. Human beings are resilient; we can adjust to anything. Women especially are psychologically flexible. To survive, I have adapted into a plucky grad student; I have adopted a winsome customer persona. I dress differently, pronounce things differently, use a different range of my voice. I am stiff; I am charmingly bewildered. I do not want to seem this way, but I have to; I feel silly for doubting it. Ideas about what I was or what I wanted in the past seem ludicrous after a while - not like a lie exactly, but a delusion, a childish way of thinking that you feel embarrassed about. Letting your imagination run away with you. Then I see a photograph.

I read a book about holocaust survivors, and this is nothing like a concentration camp, but I feel the same disassociation with my existence external to England. I think it was a better existence, but I may be making that up. It seems to me that I was more than this - that my life was not so flat. That some of my ideas were important. That I was exciting and funny and charismatic. But that is easy to say without proof. The sun is just a brighter version of a gas lamp.

I don't know if Boston will fix this; I don't believe in Boston. I out of context go to meet Ciro out of context, each of us looking to the other to define a place where neither of us has ever made sense. In the meantime, I leave notes for myself: Kristina exists! And Chad! Scarlett! Sharon! I look at Assyrian temples in the British Museum, how out of place they are, silly like animals in a zoo, and I think: there you are.

Comments

[rinue.livejournal.com]

Yes exactly. Obviously, the world contains causality - if I catch a certain bus it's because I arrived at the bus stop at a particular time, and that time was determined by a long chain of events. But all of this post justifying - untestable and typically offensive.