Quick.
There is no way that I would want anyone randomly looking at this finding those last posts as me. That was just a moment.

So I must move on quickly. A month or so later. I have just drunk a lot and had supper with my husband and he was looking at me flickily as if to say 'Is that your third or fourth glass of whisky .. and are you about to be agonisingly boring and how will I deal with that?. And I have thought so much and am also very objective and unusually non-screamy for the average woman.... When I did one of Jo's tests for how masculine/feminine are you - I was exactly in the middle. And so I said 'I think we have a very happy future ahead as I don't mind what you do .. in fact I would really like it if you thought seriously about what YOU want. And I am probably one of the only women in the world who couldn't give a fuck if you spent the next six months travelling round India .. as you once said was your dream'. And he replied, 'Possibly, I don't know how well ... (our daughter who works for him).. could cope .. '. This would be actually doing nothing except forwarding occasional phone calls about building work as they are renovating bits of structural things.

I feel bored with writing now. .... It has been such an effort to drag out of depression and make myself happy at all. I have replaced old records with cds through Amazon and read only crime stories or cheerful novels and only watched comedies or news stuff that doesn't touch my heart and avoided all romance and sentimentality. Or especially anything true and sad ... And finally feel tough and normal. And I was looking at a photograph pf myself on my seventh birthday. I was wearing a bathing costume and holding one of my favourite presents, which was a 'Little Grey Rabbit' colouring book. (Which, bizzarely, I actually found last year in a box). And looking so happy and confident and when each of my children, separately, has seen this they have all said, 'Is that YOU?'. And, oddly, I was alone in this picture because I was in quarantine for chicken pox and had to spend my birthday by myself and my party was cancelled. But I had all my presents and the best one was a little tepee where I sat with a china doll's tea set and my colouring book and was thrilled. And now I feel almost like that person all over again and the reason is that not so long after that photograph was taken I fell in love for the first time.

And now I know that I will never fall in love again. And that falling in love has ruined my whole life and made me totally unhappy and unselfconfident and wasted god knows how many years. It was like some kind of hobby. I was serially in love .. and it seemed so important and deep and worth abandoning everything for. And the people I loved were, obviously random .. and meaningless .. and had no actual worth. They were a reflection of whatever I was lacking at that moment.

So now, I am older and this is another time, and I feel like the seven year old girl who was happy with practical things and immediate solid facts. And wasn't worrying about her hair or if the phone was about to ring and fuck her party because she is holding the one silly, transient object that she wanted above all at that tiny moment in the present.
- posted by Iris @ 6/04/2005 11:04:00 PM comment