There is a vase on my coffee table filled with flowers. They’re flowers that were bought and given to me in a moment of optimism, bought and given to signify the start of a new phase in a shared life, a milestone we would want to remember. But now something has shifted, and everything in my life is going to change, and the flowers are still there, indifferent. Their only acknowledgment of the passage of time is the browning of their leaves, the few petals that made the leap to freedom.
I can’t bring myself to throw these flowers away. They are dying, will soon begin to rot and turn black and mulchy, but the act of pushing them down into the trash, with the potato peelings and mouldy scrapings of leftovers, feels like the end of something, like the final nail in the coffin that is already very much closed, and won’t open again no matter how much I bang and scream at the door. I noticed yesterday that my roommate had removed some of the deadness, plucked off the brown leaves so the bouquet will last longer, because she knows why they were bought and why I can’t throw them away yet. My roommate is a very kind person. She also used to be a florist, so that helps. Who even knows if she tidied the arrangement for the reasons I think. Maybe she just couldn’t stand to see them die in such an undignified way, before their time.
I didn’t used to have friends. I had a terrible time in secondary school, latching onto a group of girls who were malicious at worst and indifferent at best. When I got to university and stopped being so much of a twat, I started to grow a group of people around me who knew and understood and liked me, who tolerated me, who gave up their time and energy for me. But I still didn’t trust it. When things in my family fell apart I wore my independence like a badge of honour, thinking to myself that the only way I could survive this was because I knew what it was to be alone, to have no-one to help me or do things for me or look after me. I used to think it was my greatest strength, and it was reinforced over the years by the things people said about me, about my bravery and steeliness and drive. But it’s not a strength. Not trusting the people who care about me to hold me and lift me up and put up with me at my worst, even though I had done the same to them when they were in dark, awful places. And I’d been happy to do it, honoured to do it, flattered that they trusted this part of themselves to me, believed that I could help them out of the abyss they had fallen into. I never thought it might be hurtful to them not to allow them to do the same for me.
But now here I am, so beaten down that I’m barely able to function, and I have no choice but to lean on them, to trust them, to let them in, because if I don’t then I will just disappear. Without them around me, to remind me that I must have done something right, at some point in my life, to have earned their friendship, I would just be gone.
It’s not in my nature to wallow. I love a big dramatic wailing session as much as the next person, and significantly more than most well-adjusted people. But I tend to limit it to an hour or two and then just get up, dry my eyes and go and do something else, rarely returning to that state or even thinking much about it. When my Mum died I went back to work two days later (me and Miranda from Sex and the City have that in common. I’ve realized Sex and the City is basically the stick by which I measure my life and for that reason it’s going to keep coming up. Hope you don’t mind.), even though my boss actually tried to forbid me from doing so. I just showed up anyway. Was it the right thing to do? I cried at my desk once, but that was about it. And I’ve cried at my desk multiple times in this job, usually for much smaller reasons having to do with deadlines or not being able to work out why putting a hard return between two words causes all the text on the page to disappear. I just didn’t see the point in staying at home and staring at a wall and crying. It wasn’t going to change anything. But this time it’s like my body actually won’t let me push through it. I was meant to meet a friend on Saturday afternoon but when I sat down to eat a bagel I couldn’t get up again. It’s like my body was filled with sand. I just kind of keeled over into a horizontal position and stayed there.
My roommate bustled around the kitchen quietly, chopping and sautéing as I stared into space. She gave me a bowl of food and then went into her room, but she left the door open, knowing when perhaps even I didn’t that what I needed most was to feel the presence of another person in the house.
It’s not for me to question what I did in my life to deserve these people. It’s enough to know that they’re there, whether I am worthy of them or not, and in this time when I can’t articulate to them what it means to me, this is my love letter to them.
I should probably rename this newsletter since I seem to be incapable of following the one structure I put in place for it, but yet again, I am dispensing with One Good Thing and One Bad Thing, in exchange for:
Things that brought me back to life when I thought I was going to die
- this meme
- this clip of Kevin Hart talking about trying to do comedy at a crab festival, even though I normally can’t stand him because I irrationally blame him for participating in a shit American remake of the greatest movie ever, Les Intouchables, even though it wasn’t his idea and he was probably just trying to get paid
- this drawing my roommate did for me when she came home and found me crying on the couch blasting the Harry Potter audiobook on the Bluetooth speaker
- my friend’s cat eating a treat out of my hand
- explaining to my roommate at length why each of Little Mix’s songs personally contributed to the feminist movement
- my friend telling me that when this happened to her, she too wanted to get hit by a bus and end it all
- smoking on the roof and staring melodramatically at the skyline like Marissa Cooper
- reminiscing about a particular presentation I gave in my first year of university about the importance of national identity, which I ended with a quote I found on the internet which turned out to be from a Serbian dictator who perpetrated genocide in the name of nationalism
- Season three of Sex Education
- my sister’s very existence
- and the fact that I called her for specifically practical advice and she told me to go to Mexico
- this podcast episode by Caroline O'Donoghue and Juno Dawson about America’s Next Top Model because at this point I thought I was the only person in the world who still thought about that show
Here’s to my continued resurrection.