Plot.
I read back over some recent posts after I wrote last night and kept feeling that a thought about this blog was just out of my grasp. Then today I realised. It reminded me of reading the parts of a book that are put in to pad out the plot. This is the 'R0sencrantz and Gu1ldenstern' of blogs. I am standing chatting in the passage while Real Life goes on behind a massive carved oak door.

And I don't care. I have had Real Life ... in its many forms .. and it was very, very exhausting and often upsetting and only occasionally full of wild rapture. When I first started writing this I felt sad that blogs hadn't existed when I was in my thirties because my life then was many-layered beyond belief. I could have had my commenters on the edge of their seats screaming 'Look behind you!' and 'Nooo ...can't you SEE that he is a complete bastard' or 'Don't cry. Hugs. Of course you aren't a bad mother it's just the hormones'. I even considered writing a parallel blog under another name retracing those years as if they were happening now .. but was too lazy, of course.

It is obviously because I used to love drama and 'stuff' swirling around me so much that no one can accept that I am so happy here where not only does NOTHING ever happen but I go for days on end without speaking to another person (in person). This may well not be good but the longer I am left alone .. even by my family .. the more cheerful I feel. If this is recovering from twenty years of the selflessness of being the heart of the family then that is quite extreme. Perhaps it is in proportion to how selfish a person you were at the start.

One of my daughters rang me today and said, suddenly, 'You are never going to go on holiday again, are you?' That was quite odd .. as this very morning I had found an e-mail from an old friend asking if I would like to go to V13nna with him for a few days. To which my mind had instantly supplied the answer, 'No'. Although this was partly to spite 'Life' .. who had arranged this invitation .. spitefully. About twenty years ago I had been so in love with this same person that I thought I would die of it. He had spent part of his childhood in V13nna and often talked about it in a nostalgic and romantic way .. and I would day dream constantly about the most perfect thing that could ever happen to me. That he would ask me to go to V13nna with him and we would sit in his favourite old cafes and wander through the wide streets in the snow in fur-lined hoods , holding hands. But he never did .. as he was actually in love with someone else .. who was in love with someone else .. And I eventually got over it and as we had masses in common and got on incredibly well ... we are still really close friends .. although he lives on the other side of the world now. Which is why he thought it would be fun for us to spend some time together on a little holiday .. as we only meet every couple of years.

And .. it all seems like such an effort .. to go abroad ... that I said 'No'. I wish I could have looked into a crystal ball for a second .. twenty or so years ago .. and seen this day. Perhaps I would have felt a teeny bit better about his not being in love with me. When, in its rainbow depths, I saw myself choosing to settle cosily in bed with a huge pile of new detective stories rather than skip through the V13nnese snowflakes with 'Him'.

AND ... he was really upset that I didn't want to go.

Ahh, the small and subtle pleasures of the anti-chamber.
- posted by Iris @ 2/16/2006 11:27:00 PM comment