Josh Homme Gets It.

So… I’ve spent a year chasing Naoko around the globe, and finally have to admit defeat. It’s not going to work, as much as I want it to. After some mourning, and heartache -which continues – I’ve decide that no, it’s not all forlorn, and I may indeed meet someone again who I love like I love her. After all, like the man says: once you break a knuckle, you’ll always break it again.

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The blogger who fell from grace with the internet

I am thinking of coming back here. shall I? what do I have to talk about? In no particular order [note: this is a lie]:

fighting, I’ve been at it again.

books, so many books.

some things that I have been told by people who care about me.

depression, in small and uncertain ways.

happiness, in a few big ways, but no less uncertain.

how, by kings cross st pancras, I sat down and wept.

Naoko. who I still can’t let go of. Apparently distance does not diminish love. Who knew?

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How to be unhappy

‘They call it’, she said, ‘the desire-for-I-know-not-what. They will find it one day when we are dead and all things that live now are dead. They will find it when everything is dead except the dreams we have no words for. It is not chocolate, it is not cigarettes, it is not cocaine, nor opium, nor sex. It is not eating, drinking, flying, fighting, loving. It is not love’s delight, it is not bearing children, though in that there are moments like jewels. There is one taste in us that remains unsatisfied. I don’t know what that taste is, but I know it is there. Life’s best gift, hasn’t someone said, is the ability to dream of a better life…’

Iris Storm

She forgot that there can be something even worse: to have that taste, but only fleetingly.

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Road songs

I am going on a trip.

No, don’t worry, I’m not following Naoko to the Other Land that she’s gone to. It crossed my mind, because I have been a shell recently, not helped by not being able to train or fight – my injury is worse than expected, and I may be out for months, not weeks. The crucial week or rehab comes up now: if the injury responds, I may be fight-fit again within a month. If it doesn’t – not till next year. I don’t know how I’ll deal with that. I’m hoping I won’t have to.

Anyway, I’m on the move. I’m off to relax, rehab my leg, read constantly and hopefully take my mind of Naoko for a while. I shall be mainly reading Patrick Hamilton and listening to Dave Brubeck Quartet playing Blue Rondo a la Turk.

p.s. It’s National Poetry Day. I leave you with Wendy Cope.

Lonely Hearts
 
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Male biker seeks female for touring fun.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
 
Gay vegetarian whose friends are few,
I’m into music, Shakespeare and the sun.
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
 
Executive in search of something new –
Perhaps bisexual woman, arty, young.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
 
Successful, straight and solvent? I am too –
Attractive Jewish lady with a son.
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
 
I’m Libran, inexperienced and blue –
Need slim non-smoker, under twenty-one.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
 
Please write (with photo) to Box 152.
Who knows where it may lead once we’ve begun?
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
 
 
 
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Twenty thousand streets under the sky

So, Naoko’s gone. And contrary to every promise we made ourselves, we spent most of her last few days together. Saying goodbye was probably the most difficult and painful thing I’ve done in years. We spent thirty minutes holding on to each other, as trains went past in either direction, kissing and being stared at. Neither of us cared.

To make matters worse, I’ve got a training injury – it’s bad, and I may not be able to fight for a while, unless my body does something special in healing. This is robbing me of the only thing that can properly block out my sadness and spend my frustration.

It’s going to be a difficult month or two. I’m (re-)reading london books to remind me why I’m staying, why I didn’t just get on a plane with her and follow. I belong to London, and London belongs to me.

At least for now.

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Slows to a stop then starts again…

So, I’m thinking about going back on internet dating. How do they do this on Twitter? #Failure?

Naoko flies out in a couple of days. Not feeling so much up to blogging, and instead am still comfort reading at a furious pace. Up next: Lucky Jim, again.

 

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In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw

It is also possible that I never did any such thing, for I am fairly certain that in a snapshot album I have lost track of there was a picture of the house taken in the circumstances I have just described, and it is possible that I am remembering that rather than an actual experience. What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable , and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

So much of this blog is my recollections of past relationships (with people, with books). William Maxwell makes me question everything, as only great writers can do.

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Signs that this may be affecting me more than I’m willing to admit

1. A bloodbath in the morning

In sparring the other day, I gave one guy a black eye with a knee to the head, another a cut above the eye with an elbow and then got headbutted by a normally mild and lovely sparring partner. Admitting I had something on my mind, I took them all out for a slap-up full english afterwards, as none of us have a fight coming up, and apologised to them all – even the guy who nutted me. Let’s face it, he was provoked. The nice thing about the gym I spar at is that we’re all on good enough terms to let stuff like this slide – once in a while.

Of course, I didn’t mention Naoko.

2. Fuggedaboutit

Yesterday, I completely forgot about a meeting. I just worked straight through it and got a call from a colleague shortly after it finished, asking whether I was ok. This might not sound that unusual, but I have an astonishing memory. I remember conversations I had ten years ago, word for word. I remember phone numbers of childhood friends. I can read a document once and then quote paragraphs from memory. This, coupled with my interest in virtually every subject under the sun has led to my being dubbed ‘Google’ by colleagues. In my office, being told to ‘google it’ normally means asking me. I don’t forget meetings. So I told my colleague I was feeling under the weather and decided to stay in the office, reading, rather than travel across London to the meeting.

Of course, I didn’t mention Naoko.

3. The reading list

Right now I am reading or have just completed: Right Ho, Jeeves; The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett; The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler; Death on the Nile; and Gentlemen of the Road. Have you ever seen so blatant a collection of comfort reads?

So, I think it might be time to talk about Naoko. Is it completely mad that it’s crossed my mind to follow her? Probably. And I won’t do it. But it has crossed my mind. I don’t think anyone has done this to me before.

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A history of the world in 3 1/2 paragraphs

Today, I’m recovering from what might be a broken heart but might also just be one that is just a bit flattened. My last night with Naoko has left me with more unrest than any sense of closure. I feel that we left things incomplete, an unfinished sentence. I have no words and no grammar to express the feeling. Kazuo Ishiguro needed a whole book to evocate this feeling in The Unconsoled. So instead, I will remember happier moments, not all with Naoko – but memories that confirm that yes, love is sometimes something more than loss anticipated.

A human geography of love

We were lying in bed, awake but silent in the middle of the day, and facing each other. Suddenly she sat up, and as I got to raise myself, she pushed me back down. She started to run her open palms over my body stopping on every bruise and scar, and pressing down on them, hard, and giving me a questioning look: just a raised eyebrow.

‘Left kick, I was too slow to block it. It’s only a surface bruise.’

Her hands find another spot, and she shoves them down, and I wince.

‘Punches. Lots of punches. I used my arm and shoulder to block them while hitting back when I could. I won the round, but my shoulder and arm were bruised.’

And again, a smaller bruise. She jabs a finger into it.

‘Actually, I think you did that one to me just now.’

She kept doing that for about five minutes – a fighter has a whole history of scars and bruises. It was one of the most intimate tactile experiences of my life, and at the end I felt like I’d shared things with her that I wasn’t even aware were there to share. And then she just said: your turn, and lay back down. It’s such a small moment, but it’s things like that that give you the right to say you know someone in a way that no-one else can do.

A journey

We’d agreed to meet at certain time and place. I was running late, so suggested we change the time; she was already on the bus, but it got diverted, so she suggested we change the place. And so began a game of shifting-plan ping-pong, and it was eventually about 3 hours after we’d meant to meet, in an entirely different part of London that we wound up. And our plan of a lazy afternoon drinking wine and sleeping in the sun was gone. So instead we started walking. And we walked for miles, talking all the while. She took off her shoes because they were uncomfortable, and I did the same, in solidarity. Eventually we stopped, at a bench under a tree, and made out like a pair of teenagers. It was an amazing, uncomplicated evening in an otherwise fraught relationship. She wound up breaking my heart (or did she just break a piece of it off?), and that tends to dominate my recollection of the relationship, but you can’t have your heart broken by someone who didn’t have a good hold on it in the first place…

An education

Naoko has no facility for gadgets. One of the best days I had with her was just sitting in her flat, going through everything she had, and fixing them all. Changing the settings on her phone. Getting the reception on her TV working. Fixing her blender. Signing her up to iTunes. She just walked with me through every little mundane detail of her life and told me how I could help. I don’t think there are many things in life more satisfying than being practically useful for someone you love.

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50 Shades of Shut The Fuck Up

In a few days, I’m going to visit Naoko again, probably for the last time. My friends have been reading the texts and listening to me explain the context of how a couple of people who have decided not to see each other any more have wound up agreeing to spend a day and night together on an intimate occasion a few days before one of them leaves the country.

To a man, they are describing it as a booty call.

Is this a problem? I don’t know. All along, I’ve been saying that I’m getting hurt one way or another, and at least this way, I get to see her one last time before getting hurt (there may be other, more corporeal, benefits too). After all, I like that. And if I get to do that with her again, I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy it, even if I spend the rest of the night awake and thinking about her going and hoping somehow this last evening will change things, which it won’t.

But what if I’m wrong? And what if there are kinds of hurt you never fully recover from, kinds of hurt you don’t so much heal as heal around? Lily used to say that hearts don’t break, but rather they flatten, and they stay flat till someone pumps them up again. Another friend by contrast (let’s call him Chinaski for his unreconstructed language) described it differently: he said every breakup is a knife plunged into you and twisted: not fatal perhaps, but it will never stop bleeding.

I’m not sure who’s right. Lily is the eternal optimist. Chinaski once announced that he was breaking up with his girlfriend because ‘she looked at me wrong’. They might both be onto something, though.

Ultimately none of it really matters. I’m going, I know that. So I’ll just wait and see what kind of hurt accumulates. I keep wondering how I will think back on these days. I worry that I will one day look back and unwittingly repeat the last four sentences of  The Sense of an Ending.

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