Status: hiatus
Pear
Chapter One
It’s 8:30pm on a Wednesday night and I’m in my bed with this swelling sound around me and I’m grinning and crying and this heartbreak is so perfect I never want to lose it. It’s these sorts of moments where everything is just perfect and I just want to shake and expand and shatter until it’s done. To live in this second forever.
I’m not well acquainted with heartbreak. It’s never really happened because I’ve never really loved. And all the times I’ve come close I’ve faltered on the last hurdle. I don’t know… I guess you could psychoanalyse it, turn me in to some Freudian case study. I don’t really have a sob story. There was no abuse, no illness, no absence on the part of my parents. There was a divorce, sure, but they waited it out until I was long gone. It was all very quiet anyway. Quiet quiet quiet.
I think that really, only music can create this little solace.
*
Sleepy Thursday. Breakfast is toast and butter under the covers, roll in to the shower like a pill bug. If you listen close, you can just hear the sounds of the street over the rush of the water. Crescendo. Outside it’s eighteen degrees but under the water it’s thirty plus.
Out the door by nine, in a jumper and Doc Martens. One, two, three elevator stops. One, two, three steps down and out on to the street. I stop to get a hot drink for my cold hands, because I feel fidgety and uncomfortable today and I know I need to keep myself occupied. Left foot right foot left foot right foot college.
I’ve always liked routine, predictability. I’ve always liked the promise of a new diary, a schedule. It’s one of the reasons that I find other people too difficult to deal with. I don’t like the uncertainty. It’s difficult to be passionate when you’re concentrating on how to breathe. That’s why I do it.
In, out. In, out.
Left, right. In, out. Left, right. In, out.
Class today seems to go so slowly, and I just stare at the clock as the seconds count down. My music, my violin… the only thing I’ve ever really loved, I suppose. Today I feel very distant from it. I don’t like playing music when I’m not feeling it properly, because to me it is such a monumental, important thing that to disrespect it by playing badly is the worst sin of all, and I have to repent over and over with hours and hours of rehearsal. Bleeding fingers and sweaty hair. Scales and scales and scales until I am consumed inside out. I know from the minute I sit down that this is my plan for tonight; repent repent repent for the sins of the day. For now, I can commit them.
And so I sit, and I zone out and in to blank space. It’s getting cooler, I’ve noticed. The end of summer. All of that headiness that heat brings is washing away in the people around me, and they’re looking more and more tired with each passing day. Soon it will be autumn and it will be quiet and then it will be winter and everything will be dead.
*
We’re packing up. James has invited me to lunch with Vanessa and Romy.
“Ok, sure!”
I always feel as if the more autumn I am inside, the more summer I am outside. I’ve never been one of those taciturn people who stumble over the smallest of words. People fascinate me, and being away from them makes me incredibly lonely. I think I could probably charm my way out of most situations. My aim in life is to collect as many stories as I can, to sit down and listen and drink it in and question and consume myself with knowledge of the world. I think it must be the most wonderful thing, to be brimming with the joy of others - turn their human sadness and love and frailty and sexuality in to myself and come out the wisest man on Earth.
We walk to the pasta bar five blocks away, two abreast and laughing. The sky is clouding over, and the promise of rain settles in my bones and brings a spring to my step. There’s something about the rain and the smell of it as it washes dirt clean, and it spreads like butter across the cobblestones as if we were all made of clay, and this is our glaze. I love when the sound of it drums in to my ears as I lie, warm. I love when the clouds are grey. It’s as if the Earth has snowed in to the sky.
Lunch drags to coffee and then on in to the long shadows of the evening. Romy is jubilant.
“Let’s go out!”
And then it’s a club and a pulse and sweat and the face and the tongue of someone I’ve never met, and all the while I am aware that the rain hasn’t hit yet.
*
“Close your eyes” he says, guiding my hands to his collarbones and the planes of his chest, “what do you feel?”
I want to say
I don’t feel anything.
I am numb.
I’m not well acquainted with heartbreak. It’s never really happened because I’ve never really loved. And all the times I’ve come close I’ve faltered on the last hurdle. I don’t know… I guess you could psychoanalyse it, turn me in to some Freudian case study. I don’t really have a sob story. There was no abuse, no illness, no absence on the part of my parents. There was a divorce, sure, but they waited it out until I was long gone. It was all very quiet anyway. Quiet quiet quiet.
I think that really, only music can create this little solace.
*
Sleepy Thursday. Breakfast is toast and butter under the covers, roll in to the shower like a pill bug. If you listen close, you can just hear the sounds of the street over the rush of the water. Crescendo. Outside it’s eighteen degrees but under the water it’s thirty plus.
Out the door by nine, in a jumper and Doc Martens. One, two, three elevator stops. One, two, three steps down and out on to the street. I stop to get a hot drink for my cold hands, because I feel fidgety and uncomfortable today and I know I need to keep myself occupied. Left foot right foot left foot right foot college.
I’ve always liked routine, predictability. I’ve always liked the promise of a new diary, a schedule. It’s one of the reasons that I find other people too difficult to deal with. I don’t like the uncertainty. It’s difficult to be passionate when you’re concentrating on how to breathe. That’s why I do it.
In, out. In, out.
Left, right. In, out. Left, right. In, out.
Class today seems to go so slowly, and I just stare at the clock as the seconds count down. My music, my violin… the only thing I’ve ever really loved, I suppose. Today I feel very distant from it. I don’t like playing music when I’m not feeling it properly, because to me it is such a monumental, important thing that to disrespect it by playing badly is the worst sin of all, and I have to repent over and over with hours and hours of rehearsal. Bleeding fingers and sweaty hair. Scales and scales and scales until I am consumed inside out. I know from the minute I sit down that this is my plan for tonight; repent repent repent for the sins of the day. For now, I can commit them.
And so I sit, and I zone out and in to blank space. It’s getting cooler, I’ve noticed. The end of summer. All of that headiness that heat brings is washing away in the people around me, and they’re looking more and more tired with each passing day. Soon it will be autumn and it will be quiet and then it will be winter and everything will be dead.
*
We’re packing up. James has invited me to lunch with Vanessa and Romy.
“Ok, sure!”
I always feel as if the more autumn I am inside, the more summer I am outside. I’ve never been one of those taciturn people who stumble over the smallest of words. People fascinate me, and being away from them makes me incredibly lonely. I think I could probably charm my way out of most situations. My aim in life is to collect as many stories as I can, to sit down and listen and drink it in and question and consume myself with knowledge of the world. I think it must be the most wonderful thing, to be brimming with the joy of others - turn their human sadness and love and frailty and sexuality in to myself and come out the wisest man on Earth.
We walk to the pasta bar five blocks away, two abreast and laughing. The sky is clouding over, and the promise of rain settles in my bones and brings a spring to my step. There’s something about the rain and the smell of it as it washes dirt clean, and it spreads like butter across the cobblestones as if we were all made of clay, and this is our glaze. I love when the sound of it drums in to my ears as I lie, warm. I love when the clouds are grey. It’s as if the Earth has snowed in to the sky.
Lunch drags to coffee and then on in to the long shadows of the evening. Romy is jubilant.
“Let’s go out!”
And then it’s a club and a pulse and sweat and the face and the tongue of someone I’ve never met, and all the while I am aware that the rain hasn’t hit yet.
*
“Close your eyes” he says, guiding my hands to his collarbones and the planes of his chest, “what do you feel?”
I want to say
I don’t feel anything.
I am numb.