DANDEMONIUM

It can happen anywhere. It can rise up, grab you and pull you down into the stink, the muck and mur anytime. A split second is all it takes to separate contentment and despair. Happiness is not the antithesis of unhappiness. Happiness is a moment, a peak, a breath. It is the absence of unhappiness but not the opposite of it. How many real moments of utter and complete happiness can we have over a lifetime? I have had a handful and I count myself very lucky. Unhappiness is a dull ache. A drawn out nauseous throb. There is a strange satisfaction in remembered pain. It being now a memory, is proof that you survived. On remembering, you find that you’re stroking yourself with the soft, smug glove of pride.

I happened to drive home the same route that I took on that Spring day all those years ago. The day that he dumped me, over the phone as I sat in my car. I don’t have the same car, but I can still taste the pain I felt that day. The sick fear of not knowing how I would live with the words I was hearing. The need to get out of the car, as if I could get away from the pain. The need to get out of myself. To climb out of my skin, as I would climb out of a car. Stripped to the bone, to walk, far away into a different land, a different life, where the hurt could not find me. I would disguise myself and it would not recognise me and just sail on past to contaminate some other unfortunate soul.

I would escape, run away, devoid of my feelings, I would roam free, naked like a wood nymph. I would sacrifice reaching for the heights, those peaks of happiness and in return I would not have to feel at all. Nothingness would be bliss in comparison to what I was facing. I would not feel the chill of my nakedness, but I would not enjoy the warmth of the sun either. As I drove past the landmarks of my broken heart, I marvelled that the pain was now a memory. I did survive. It sounds so melodramatic now, but then I wondered.

I heard words from the radio as I drove and it reminded me of the early days of that fantasy relationship. The days I spent walking the dog and daydreaming. I indulged myself with those blissful dreams. Like an obese woman eating cream cakes. I had no real idea of how dangerous it was – how I would pay for those brief hours of pleasure. How addictive that indulgence would prove to be and just how much more I would need and then how I would crave for the reality. How far I would go to experience it and how damaging it would be. All the indications were there to tell me that he would never be the one to give me what I needed. I couldn’t or wouldn’t see it, I just immersed myself and covered all the blemishes with the tip-ex of fantasy. The expectation was always so much more thrilling than the final copulation.

He was a shell, a bad imitation. His longing to be the man he wanted me to see - over-arched his desire for me. He wanted me, but he wanted me to want him, more. He wanted to star in the drama of my life. But he only wanted the big dressing room and five star reviews, he didn’t want to learn the lines and do the eight shows a week... but the longer it went on the more addicted I got to the dream – I didn’t need to know it was all fake, all I needed was a dummy to hang the fantasy on.

Nostalgia was our common ground. It’s so potent. Novels galore wallow around in it. When I was young I was often griped by it. I have watched my sons reach out and poke it. The pain is almost delicious when you are young. When you are still nearly young it is safe to stick a toe in and paddle, but now I dare not. Mid fifties and each decade flies by with sickening speed, nostalgia is no longer a romantic past time. Then it could fuel a whole imaginary relationship. It could reach out and pull you in, it could drag you down into its scented, fictitious embrace, whisper lies into you ear and caress you to orgasm. All the while, reality drifts. That living fantasy, that re-enactment, the tangle of past and present, the seduction of nostalgia’s strange enchantment is just on the right side of the safety line, but only just. Emotional masturbation teases you into a frenzy of desperation. Lunacy bobs gently on the horizon. That is where all the novels and songs come from. That sensation brings the need to purge, to vomit it all up onto a page or to bore your friends or both. It can happen anywhere, to anyone. It could happen here.