Monday, June 11, 2007

Reasons

You're supposed to start at the beginning, but what exactly is the beginning? It's an old question, I know. Is it when I moved to this area? When I met Joe? Or is it further back than that? When I started school? When I was born? Maybe it's my first memory. Well, I have a lot of first memories, because I don't know what order they happened in, only that they were a long way back. I can remember trying to follow my brother, who was a few years older, through some woods, and him running away from me, shouting "Girls can't play!" Or another time I got in trouble for trying to get to a toy which was on a high shelf, because apparently I could have hurt myself. But they're bad things to talk about, because people will assume that they're somehow significant, and that they tie into everything else that's happened, and somehow explain it, when life really isn't like that. I don't trust people who think the answers lie in the past.

Or in dreams. I had a dream once where my friends, everyone I knew, were all crowding me in my own house, and I was confused because I hadn't invited any of them. There were people there from my past who shouldn't have even known where I lived. The whole thing made me so confused, and I was trying to hide in my room, because if I could just have some time to myself then I was sure I could figure everything out. But they wouldn't leave me alone. They kept hassling me, and my confusion gave way to anger, and I lashed out in a violent rage. That was when I woke up. Sounds quite telling, I'm sure, but that was one night out of several thousand in my entire life. Mostly if I dream at all, I just dream I'm back at my old job or something.

Joe always said that I looked peaceful when I slept, but then he always did come out with the most obvious statements. He was a nice enough guy, but clueless. I mean, that's not even nearly the stupidest thing he's ever said. He has this utter inability to detect when he's pissing me off, and whenever we argue, which was becoming more and more often, he'd always try to talk things round and explain that basically we agreed but looked at it in different ways, or something. It was pathetic, this mediator act, and it always had the exact opposite effect than he intended. If he'd simply backed down, or actually asserted himself for once, I might have at least had some more respect for him.

And he was always trying understand me when he never had a chance. It reminds me of Mrs Askins back at school, who I still bear an irrational grudge against because she was the one who had to teach us about puberty and all that, which I honestly hadn't pieced together by that point and which came as quite a shock. The thing is, you get used to things. People can get used to anything. I've finally got used to the fact that I have to go to work every single day, except weekends and so on, at least to the point where it's only every other week or so that I stop and think, "Why the hell am I doing this?" It's not that work's even that bad. I think any job would be okay if you didn't have to go in if you didn't feel like it.

That's all it was with Mrs Askins; it's just the fact that every so often I have a moment of clarity and see the world for what it really is, and realise that everything is unfair and nothing we do makes any sense, and I just associate that feeling with her. Not her fault at all. She tried her best to be nice to me. She asked me if everything was all right at home, which confused me at the time. I muttered something in the affirmative and that seemed to satisfy her. Of course now I know what it was all about, but honestly, she was being so naive. The thing is, everything really was fine at home. That was the wrong question to ask. She had completely missed the point, as would everyone else who followed in her footsteps.

One of the problems I have with work is the people. For starters there's this guy, Carl, in accounts, who I inevitably encounter at least once a day. We've ended up getting into this whole 'banter' thing which he finds endlessly entertaining but I find annoying to the extreme. Every day I have to endure some lame witticism which he's probably spent all morning thinking up. He probably imagines we're flirting or something. I certainly don't think he realises the insults I fire back at him are meant with utter sincerity. God, I hate him. In an ideal world I could put my fist right through his teeth and nobody would lift a finger to stop me. But sadly we don't live in an ideal world. I learned that early on.

In my own department you're lucky to get any work done for the gaggle of gossiping idiots. They're too stupid to realise that they're basically gossiping about themselves. That's why I've never participated in that sort of thing any more than I have to. If you're talking about people behind their back, then people are talking about you behind your back. I suppose maybe they are anyway, but I find that it makes me more intensely aware of the possibility. So when Sharon asks me if I've heard what happened to Helen at the Christmas dinner, I state that I haven't. And if they then tell me, I try to forget it.

I'm always saying things to people for no other reason than because I think that's what they want me to say to them. I don't just mean at work, but in the rest of my life too. Society, it's called. Being polite to everyone; pretending that you can get along with every single person you meet. I really can't stand most of the people I meet, but I find myself nodding my way through hellishly boring conversations, asking the questions that I think are expected of me and volunteering pointless trivia from my own life. But often I feel at the back of my mind like at any moment I could start screaming in their face, or push them in front of a car, or do anything like that. I hardly ever actually get that angry, and never in public, but it's happened a few times. And every time I apologise, and think, mortified, "What was I thinking? That isn't me at all." But afterwards I've realised, it WAS me. That was the real me. I've tried so hard to hide her.

Joe's seen her on more than one occasion, but he's always been nice about it, and invented excuses for me. That was one thing he was good for, I suppose. He'd do anything other than rock the boat. He really wasn't a bad guy, but I knew it wasn't going to work out. I knew almost from when we first moved in together that it was a mistake. Did you ever look at somebody's DVD collection in detail for the first time and realise that all this time you thought you knew them, you really didn't? I've also gradually realised that half the time he's talking he's actually quoting from various films and songs which I don't know. Not even for any good reason; he just does it compulsively. At first I just thought he had an unusual turn of phrase, but every so often I'd hear something from the TV that I could remember him saying. I asked, and it turned out he had no idea he was doing it. It made me wonder what irritating habits of my own I might be completely in the dark about. Even after I'd told Joe off he kept on doing it anyway. "It is better to regret something you've done than to regret something you haven't done," he once told me. Which struck me as a pretty stupid thing to think. I didn't agree with it then and I definitely don't now.

Life is strange. Sometimes I look out the window and the world suddenly seems alien to me - the trees in winter stick through the ground like nerve clusters. They don't look alive but they are. Is what makes them alive the same thing that makes me alive? I don't know, but sometimes I can't help thinking about things like that. Do you know why we say 'bless you' when someone sneezes, or why we say 'excuse me' when we cough, or hiccup? It's because they are physical processes over which we have little control, and they remind us that we are trapped by our bodies and going to die. This bothers us more than most people would ever care to admit. I don't know if you've ever seen a dead body, but the striking thing is just how different it is from a living one. The two may be physically identical, but life is conspicuous by its absence. The human form is suddenly turned into a joke, a mockery of our efforts to keep existing. Take away that spark, it says, and this is all that is left. And suddenly your day-to-day struggles seem pretty inconsequential. Sometimes I think of death, and I would never say that I wish for death, but it comforts me to know that in a hundred years, none of this will matter.

I remember little moments that will die with me. Like the cat I saw that had been hit by a van, dying on the pavement. Or that mad instant just before Ryan dumped me when I suddenly thought he was about to propose. The emails I've deleted without sending. There are things I've done and thought that nobody even knows about and never will. As long as I keep it that way it's as though they never happened, but I don't know. Occasionally I have hysterically self-destructive fantasies about blurting them out to friends. And they haunt me sometimes, these visions of how weak I have been. Standing on the sidelines of my own life, afraid to take part.

Actions speak louder than words, they say, which is almost true. What's true is that it never matters why you do something. All anyone could ever care about is the end result. The sad fact is that people don't judge you on who you are, but what you do. The two are separate things. And it's an unfair thing to judge people on, because we don't have nearly as much influence over our own actions as most people think we do. How many times have you had to make a snap decision, and even as you stand there wondering what to choose, you realise it's over and you're already regretting your choice? It needn't be something important. But sometimes it is, and when you make that decision, that wrong, important decision, that's all that people will ever remember about you. That's what I'm afraid of.

"It's not your fault," Joe told me. The last things he said to me were all about how he understood, and that I shouldn't blame myself. It was meant to be comforting, which was surreal under the circumstances, and in any case I took no comfort from it. If I'm not to be held responsible for my own actions, then who is? They tell you that everything you do just comes from an argument between your natural instincts and what society tells you to do, but where does that leave you? When every moment of individuality is put down to some sort of mental condition? That's the most frightening thing I can imagine. "You did it," he should have said. "You have to live with it. End of story."

It's funny what we'll forgive in people we like. Someone can have the most outrageous opinion, or confess the worst deed, but if they're a friend, you just ignore it. I say this even though sometimes I'm not even sure what a friend is. There are people I spend more time with than other people. I think the reason we have friends is so we have some idea of where we're supposed to have got to in life. So as long as nobody's doing too much better than you, you can feel okay. And the people who aren't doing so well, you can give them advice. I've got a friend, Lauren, who's between jobs, and she was complaining about her applications. They kept making her take psychometric tests and fill in personality quizzes. Well of course they did, I told her. That's how life is. Welcome to the human race. It gets worse.

I'll never understand people. I can't connect their words and actions with the thought processes that drive them. What sequence of impulses was it that led Joe to buy me a set of kitchen knives for Valentines day? I couldn't even begin to speculate. Maybe it's the same for everyone, but sometimes I doubt it. I don't think I'll ever really get the hang of life. I don't think anyone ever noticed, but it was always a source of stress for me. I almost told someone once. It was back at my last job, which was so boring that my mind had time to wander long-distance. Anyway, I thought of saying to a colleague, "Olivia, I can't cope with this any more. I'm stumbling through life like a blind person, and it makes me scared. I'm scared of what I might end up doing." I went through this whole conversation with her in my head, but of course I didn't actually say anything. How could you possibly have that conversation for real?

I lost that job, in the end. I've never known why exactly, but I suspect it arose from a vague perception that I didn't fit in, or wasn't suited to the work, or something. Throughout the exit interview they were at pains to stress that they were not unhappy with the work I'd done. It felt a bit like school; I had flashbacks of the headmaster calmly explaining that I wasn't in trouble as he asked for my version of events. On the one hand, I suppose that makes sense. It's not your fault if you're the kind of person who gets in trouble. But then that kind of softly-softly approach seems in retrospect to be an attempt to actually get to the bottom of it, to figure out why someone is that kind of person and work out a way to switch it off, as if it were that simple. I say all this, but it's not that I got into trouble a lot at school. It just took me a while to figure out how you were supposed to behave.

Whenever I do find myself in trouble, or when something goes wrong, I get that same unpleasant feeling in my abdomen as anyone else does. What I've noticed is that in the wake of a catastrophe, people always become obsessed with the sequence of events that led to it. They'll say, if only this person had waited a few moments before doing this, then everything would still be fine. Even if the critical moment they refer to happened days or weeks earlier and had nothing to do with anything. Oh, if only I'd walked around the corner a few seconds later, I'd never have been hit by that bus. But it was the buses fault for driving too fast, or your own fault for not looking. Even when it was nobody's fault, that doesn't make the infinity of choices leading to that intersection any more relevant. The trouble is, people always assume everything happens for a reason.

There is no cosmic plan behind the minutiae of our lives. I mean, I'd just been waiting for an excuse to break up. It was something I had been planning to do just as soon as I got round to it. I had just reached the point where I wanted Joe out of my life, for better or for worse. Well, he's gone now, hasn't he? He's gone where I can't follow him. And now I suppose I'll be going too. Sometimes I get the feeling that everywhere I go people will always be asking me questions, trying to get to understand me. I know none of them will ever see the bigger picture. They'll just focus on the most obvious stuff, just like everyone before them. Maybe if they hadn't spent all their time trying to categorise me, and actually made some sort of effort to help, then it wouldn't have come to this point. But there I go, you see? Falling into the same old trap. What's happened is what's happened, and there's no point in agonising over the whys and wherefores. Though I know already that that won't stop anybody.

I have to live with it. End of story.

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